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Podcast Summary: The Rest Is Politics - Episode 67: A Tale of Two Spies
Podcast Overview Title: The Rest Is Politics: Leading Hosts: Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart Description: The podcast features in-depth interviews with politicians, leaders, and intellectuals, discussing their insights on life, leadership, and global affairs.
Episode Details Episode Title: A Tale of Two Spies: The former heads of MI5 and MI6 on the Iraq War, double agents, and the IRA Guests: Eliza Manningham-Buller (Former Director General of MI5) & John Sawers (Former Chief of MI6) Recording Note: Recorded before the IS-Khorasan attack in Moscow.
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Key Themes and Discussions
Introduction of Guests
- Eliza Manningham-Buller: Joined MI5 by chance in 1974 and became its Director General from 2002 to 2007.
- John Sawers: Head of MI6 from 2009 to 2014, previously worked as a diplomat and foreign policy advisor.
Recruitment and Early Careers
- Eliza's Path: Joined MI5 with limited knowledge about the organization; initially faced discrimination but worked to change the culture.
- John's Background: Joined the Foreign Office, transitioned to MI6, and later returned to the Foreign Office due to a preference for policy over operations.
Operational Challenges
- Differences between MI5 and MI6:
- MI5 focuses on domestic security; MI6 on foreign intelligence operations.
- The nature of intelligence work: MI5 deals with day-to-day threats while MI6 handles strategic issues.
Characteristics of Effective Intelligence Officers
- Key traits include being team-oriented, intelligent, and discreet.
- Importance of experience and a range of personality types to avoid a rigid template.
Reflections on Intelligence Operations
- The discussion emphasized the moral implications of intelligence work; agents should not engage in criminal activities.
- Steakknife Case: A controversial operation involving an agent within the IRA and discussions about the balance between intelligence gathering and ethical considerations.
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Analysis of the Iraq War Intelligence
- Manningham-Buller and Sawers discussed the flawed intelligence leading to the Iraq War:
- The emphasis on Saddam Hussein’s WMD capabilities was based on incomplete assessments.
- Criticism of the practices that led to the misuse of intelligence in public and parliamentary contexts.
Consequences of the Iraq War
- Manningham-Buller highlighted that the war had nothing to do with 9/11 and pointed out the misused intelligence that led to increased terrorism in the UK.
- Both guests expressed regret over the implications of the war, noting it fostered further radicalization.
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Current Global Threats Discussion on Intelligence and Security
- Russia and China: Both discussed the current state and capabilities of Russian and Chinese intelligence services.
- Terrorism: The evolution of terrorist threats compared to historical ones, and the difficulty of addressing decentralized threats.
Future Considerations
- Concerns Over Democracy: The impact of misinformation and the manipulation of democratic processes.
- Impending Global Challenges: Climate change and geopolitical instability were noted as significant issues facing the future.
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Personal Insights and Perspectives
- Manningham-Buller and Sawers shared views on the importance of teamwork in intelligence work.
- Emphasis on the need for a moral framework in intelligence operations and the dangers of abandoning ethics.
- Optimism for the Future: Discussions on scientific advancements as a beacon of hope amidst chaos were shared, along with admiration for the younger generation’s commitment to public service.
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Conclusion This episode of *The Rest Is Politics* provides a unique insight into the inner workings of British intelligence, the moral complexities faced in intelligence operations, and critical reflections on historical and contemporary geopolitical issues. With personal anecdotes from both former leaders of MI5 and MI6, the discussion underscores the importance of ethics, teamwork, and adaptability in the ever-evolving landscape of national security.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. Sign up to The Rest is Politics. Plus, to enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chatroom and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com.
0:19Welcome to The Rest Is Politics Leading with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Right, well, we have our second doubleheader because you may remember we had Andy Burnham and Andy Street, two mayors. And today is a tale of two spies, people who have been at the very, very top of the British intelligence community. Eliza Manningham Buller, who started professional life as a teacher before being recruited by MI5, the Domestic Security Service, and then rising to be its Director General from 2002 to 2007. So I fear we will have to touch upon the Iraq War because she was around then.
0:54And then Sir John Soares, who was head of MI6 from 2009 to 2014, having the shortest job title in the country. C, the one letter title given to the head of MI6, stands for chief. And that focuses much more on abroad. Now, John is somebody who was a career spy and diplomat. He was also for a period a colleague of mine in Downing Street when he was Tony Blair's foreign policy advisor. And he was also part of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which handled the post-Saddam transition in Iraq. So both have massive experience of issues and themes that we talk about a lot on the podcast. We'll cover Russia, we'll cover Ukraine and Gaza and China and Taiwan and terrorism and technology and lots more.
1:42But maybe we can just start by asking you both briefly to set out how you entered the world in which you become very, very senior figures. eliza start with you well i fell into mi5 really by chance this is not the way you join it today i saw somebody at a drinks party when i was unemployed and he said what are you thinking of doing and i was rather sort of vague and the next thing i knew i was going to room 055 in the old war office building where i was interviewed by a fairly anonymous man i appeared to be able to read and write. And the next thing I joined an organisation, and I'm ashamed to say I hardly knew what it was.
2:24I think it was an independent wing of the MOD, of course, which it wasn't. And that was in 1974. What did this anonymous man see in you? I can't tell you, Alistair. I don't know. But certainly the view of the service then was that it wanted compliant women to transcribe, i.e. listen to the intercept of English language intercepts to be secretaries. And after I joined, the so-called lady superintendent said, the role of women here is to support the men. I very nearly resigned at that stage, but I decided to stay and found plenty of other women who were rather cross about the subservient roles they had and worked to change it, which gradually it did change.
3:13There's a paradox, isn't there? Because you're coming in in 74. By that stage, Daphne Park in SIS had already been head of station in the Congo. She'd been head of station in Vietnam. She was on her way to being a controller. Was there a difference between the culture of the two services? I'm not sure I was aware at the beginning. There was one or two senior women, but they were very sparse on the ground. And they were usually there because they had a particular expertise. I think John might agree that within SIS, Daphne Park was not followed immediately by lots of other senior women doing operations.
3:47And it took some time for that to become standard. John? Well, I was at Nottingham University and running the students union there for a year after I completed my degree, wondering what to do. And I applied for the Foreign Office and slightly to my surprise, I was accepted. I think then it sounds odd for a middle class white man to be talking about diversity. but right back then I went to a comprehensive school and a red brick university I was diversity when it came to applications to to the senior civil service and to the foreign office so that probably helped me a little bit especially as I had studied science and I wasn't particularly good at the civil service exams but I managed to get through all that you know I was finally accepted by the foreign office and then I was invited to have coffee with a professor at university and rather similar to Eliza she said to me this professor John congratulations on being accepted the Foreign Office.
4:36But would you like to do something even more exciting? And this, of course, turned out to be MI6. And I went through a similar sort of process that Eliza went to and ended up in MI6. And I spent a number of years in the organization, but actually it wasn't what I really wanted to do. I wasn't really into operations and operational security and detection surveillance routes and all these sorts of things. I was much more interested in ideas and policy and diplomacy. So after a few years, I switched back to what I originally wanted to do, which was the Foreign Office. I crossed the river, as they say, from MI6 to the Foreign Office and spent most of my career in the Foreign Office.
5:12So I was very happy at the United Nations, enjoying being ambassador there and doing all the things you do as ambassador at the UN. When I got a second tap on the shoulder, and this time from Gus O'Donnell, the cabinet secretary, saying, John, we actually need someone from outside MI6 to run the organization. Which is quite controversial. It was quite controversial. I was the first person for 40 years who had most of their career outside the organization. It was controversial inside the service. Some of my predecessors didn't like it. But actually, I think I decided there was plenty enough experience running intelligence operations inside the organization.
5:46My job was not that. My job was to be outward facing, rebuild some of the trusts that had been damaged in the post 9-11 period, the Iraq issue that you referred to, Alistair, the mistreatment of detainees. Trust in the organization had gone down. And my job was to help rebuild that and refocus the organization on what it really needed to do. So just before we come back to that fascinating issue, John set up a sort of contrast between being someone who enjoys operation and surveillance and somebody who does policy. Were you ever tempted to move sideways into the Home Office and do more sort of ministerial policy stuff?
6:21No, not the Home Office. I was tempted to leave completely for various reasons. One, the discrimination against women was quite profound at the beginning. There were encounters I had where I felt quite hostile to the leadership. I wasn't alone in that. But no, I wouldn't have gone to another bit of government. And so you actually quite, I mean, John was saying, you know, he was less interested in day to day operations, more interested in kind of big policy suits. You actually quite enjoyed operations. Yes, but it's also, I did, but it's also a difference between the two organisations. You know, MI6 is acting to get intelligence on what the government wants, you know, against the requirements of the JIC.
7:01MI5 is not generally doing big policy strategic issues. It's doing day-to-day work to prevent people here and overseas doing things which are going to harm us or our allies. So it's by its very nature more micro and therefore the sort of intelligence that John's organization is producing is generally more strategic than the sort of stuff that MI5 is working on, which is, you know, what's happening here in the UK. And I'm sure there are many answers to this question, but give us a sense of some of the things that make a good officer in the security service. What sort of personality might be helpful?
7:40What types of personality do you think like that kind of work? I think the sort of personality that many employers would want, people who are not motivated by vanity, ambition and public recognition, who want to do a good job in actually an area that is rewarding, if not financially rewarding. It's rewarding if you stop something and you've saved lives or whatever. You want people who very much prepare to be part of a team. You want people who are intelligent, articulate, who can get on with other people, who can talk to a foreign intelligence officer, a terrorist, who so on, and who understand they can't talk about it.
8:20They can talk in the most general terms to their husband, partner, whatever. But if you're not prepared for that degree of invisibility throughout most of your career, you need to go somewhere else and be an ambassador like John was. I'm not suggesting that was John's motivation. So final one for me and then back to Alistair. What would be an example of somebody who actually is an impressive woman or man who could have a great career in another place but might not be suited to the security service? How would you describe somebody who could be very talented, very admirable somewhere else but might not be the kind of person that would work in the security service?
8:56I think I want to resist the kind of person. Because intelligence is very often imprecise, incomplete, open to varying interpretations and analysis, and because you often need to take decisions on completely inadequate information, you don't want a type. You want a range of experience, attitudes. I mean, some people would not fit in by being arrogant, indiscreet, vain. That's too sort of macho. You want people who are sensible. But I don't think there's a template. I think you want a good variety of experience and qualities. If I could add to that, I agree with all the qualities that Eliza mentioned.
9:45And someone who could be sort of a hard charging banker, a deal seeker, you don't really want that sort of person in the security services. You've got to have someone who's willing to work quietly behind the scenes, build relationships, build trust, because you're asking people to do dangerous things, especially in MI6. I think the officers of MI6, male and female, probably take on more risk than any other public servants not in uniform. and they're operating in dangerous places and the agents they recruit and run are taking even greater risk. And you've got to be able to manage that in a very thoughtful, considered, balanced way.
10:24I mean, James Bond is great fun, but James Bond is not a model for a modern intelligence officer. And above all, the quality that you need is teamwork. You need to work with the people who are setting the requirements, the people who are planning the operations, the technology experts, which have become more and more part of devising intelligence operations. You very often work closely with MI5 and GCHQ and with foreign partners as well. And the last thing you want is someone who is a big thrusting dealmaker. There's another point picking up from what John was saying, which is that on the danger side, certainly staff of the security service encountered some pretty dangerous experiences in Northern Ireland.
11:08You headed up the Irish counterterrorism for a while, didn't you? Yes. And, you know, when I was kind of a journalist, that was what we perceived as the biggest threat to the UK and then into the time in Downing Street when John and I worked together. But how different is the threat that you were dealing with then to the kind of threats that, when we talk about terrorism today, what's the difference? What's the scale of difference? Well, we were always dealing with both. I mean, when I joined the service, I was dealing with international terrorism, things like Carlos the Jackal, the Abnernidal group, various manifestations of Sikh terrorism, Croatian terrorism, and Palestinian.
11:47I think the difference was that the Irish issue had been incredibly long term. The Metropolitan Police Special Branch founded in the 1880s to deal with Fenian bomb attacks in Ireland. and for quite a long time this was neglected. It was on the island to the west of us, people in London and there was a little effort to address it and I think Mrs Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair all deserve credit for the peace process. I was in Ireland the other day and I have to pinch myself but Northern Ireland because it's so different. Those terrorists, they were ideologically motivated from either side.
12:36They were not suicide bombers. They became increasingly sophisticated from pub bombings to trying to destroy the economic base of the City of London. Now, that's quite a different model, a structure. I mean, if you could draw on a canogram of the provisional IRA, you could understand that. But the more recent, from the early 90s, al-Qaeda-related terrorism and then ISIS, you've got a much more distributed threat. You've got it emerging all over the world. It's not directed centrally. It's often inspired. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's inspired. So to that degree, it's a more challenging intelligence target, including for SIS.
13:22Yes, whereas you knew with Ireland, with Northern Ireland, you knew where your targets were and you knew where they were going to travel. So we were very slow, I think, generally to work well with the police and the army. But by the end, towards the end of the troubles, the intelligence response was pretty sophisticated. John, you mentioned that part of your job when you took over was to sort of restore the sort of lost trust. and I know Eliza you've been pretty critical about aspects of the Iraq war what just give me your take you've been on both sides you've been in Downing Street and you've been head of SIS what was the actual take in relation to Iraq of what happened over Tony Blair deciding based upon the intelligence that we were being given the whole time from Richard Dearlove and his colleagues about the whole the dossier thing putting some of this stuff into the public domain because we heard a lot.
14:19I never heard it to my face, but we heard a lot of mumblings through the media and grumblings that this was just sort of fundamentally changing what SIS was for. So what's your sense having been on both sides? Well, I think after the Iraq dossier goes back to the 1980s and the 1991 Gulf War. And after that, there was a shock everywhere at how far Saddam Hussein had gone in developing chemical and biological weapons and developing a nuclear program. Had he not invaded Kuwait in 1990, he might well have had nuclear weapons a few years later. And the fundamental mistake that was made in the 1990s was a presumption everywhere that Saddam Hussein still had these programs.
15:02And the challenge posed to MI6 at the time and to other intelligence agencies wasn't, has Saddam Hussein got these weapons? It's, where are these weapons? Would you please find them? And that remained the case up until the summer of 2003 after Saddam was overthrown. Now, mistakes were made. I mean, Eliza was in office at the time. I was ambassador in Egypt in the run-up to the war. I think mistakes were made in the organization of the intelligence services at the time, especially in SIS. I think there was too much weight put on individual reports and there wasn't enough proper cold-eyed assessment of individual reports.
15:42And I think it was also a mistake, frankly, in hindsight, to put it all together in a dossier which was designed to persuade the public of the validity of this war. And there are occasions when intelligence can be helpfully used in public. We saw it around the time of the launch of the Ukraine war by the Russians. I think that was a different circumstance that was using intelligence to gain operational advantage against the enemy, in this case, the Russians. I'm much more reserved about using intelligence to persuade parliament or persuade the public of what we're doing. I think we made that mistake in 2002.
16:16And frankly, David Cameron came placed to making the same mistake over Libya in 2011. And yet you had a reputation for opening up SIS. I think you were the first head to be outed, speak publicly about the role that you did. Are you saying we got too close to your predecessors and that they got too close to us and maybe the roles got confused? Eliza's nodding. Eliza's nodding. And she was there at the time. I think there were some personality issues. Certainly, when I was Chief MI6, I saw my job as being to provide intelligence and take part in collective assessments and collective judgments. I didn't see it as my job to rush to the Prime Minister's side and show him the latest bit of intelligence that we got from the field.
16:59Which Taylor was doing. Which, well, you were there. I wasn't. And I think that was a mistake that came out in the Butler report in 2004 in the aftermath of the Iraq mistakes about the failure to follow proper process in assessing this intelligence. But the reality is, I mean, I'm not excusing anybody here, but the French and the Germans and even the Russians also were convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The argument wasn't over the intelligence. The argument was over what to do about it. Eliza, you were nodding. I think that it's, and it comes out in Robin Butler's excellent report, that it's dangerous to give raw intelligence to senior ministers without a proper assessment from the JIC.
17:44It was the Joint Intelligence Committee. I mean, you were very much behind the dossier, Alistair. And my organisation, number one, didn't have much relevant intelligence for obvious reasons. But number two, such as we had, we resisted pressure to put it in because we didn't think it was solid. And I think it's worth pointing out that John Scarlett, when he moved from being chair of the JIC to running MI6, he looked with great detail at the intelligence that had gone into the dossier. And most of it was withdrawn because a quite high proportion came from opponents to Saddam Hussein who had a vested interest in a particular outcome.
18:25So it was unsound. I mean, I agree with John, there will be occasions when intelligence needs to be used openly for good reasons, but we need to be cautious about it. And too much of it, and we'll stop having intelligence. Eliza, give us a sense of how you now view the way we handled Iraq today and what it's meant for Britain and the world. If I may, I'll start by saying that Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with 9-11. Al-Qaeda in Iraq were inside Saddam Hussein's prisons, and the distortions that the Americans went to try and make a connection were disgraceful. I was the deput head of MI5, and the head of GCHQ and the head of SIS went to America 24 hours after 9-11 to discuss with the Americans the significance of all of this and what we were going to do together.
19:23and Americans hadn't been asleep. Robert Mueller had become, who I'd known from Lockerbie when he was in the Department of Justice, had just become head of the FBI. And I don't remember any mention of Iraq. We knew this was al-Qaeda from prior intelligence. They were going to launch a major attack that autumn. And then subsequently we went back to the British Embassy and again there was no suggestion that Iraq was in any way relevant to what had just happened. The CIA assessment was that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. So Donald Rumsfeld started a special unit in the Department of Defence to try and prove it did.
20:01Before we went into Iraq, the JIC, the Joint Intelligence Committee's judgment, this would increase terrorism in the UK. Of course, it doesn't follow that an action should be stopped because of a fear of increased terrorism. The two have a connection, but they don't necessarily follow. But that came to pass. and the rush of terrorism we had to deal with after 9-11 in this country, it's absolutely clear from the video wills and others of the people who were arrested, was it was motivated by Iraq. So looking back on it, as I think I said in the Rees lectures, in a sense we gave Bin Laden his jihad in Iraq.
20:42And I think that, I mean, you, John and Rory have much more understanding of the Middle East than I do, But I think it was a mistake. What terrorists look for from spectacular attacks is an overreaction. And I think Bin Laden would have been well satisfied with the US overreaction to 9-11, not necessarily in Afghanistan, but certainly in Iraq. And I think in some ways Hamas will be belatedly satisfied now at the Israeli overreaction in Gaza. And this is something we have to be careful about. But you take as an example, maybe the way the Indians reacted to the Mumbai attack in 2007, I think it was.
21:22You were in office then, I think, Eliza. And the Indian first reaction was to smash the Pakistanis for having launched this attack against their biggest city. But in the end, calm prevailed and the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack, perhaps they got away with multiple murders, but they didn't get the political satisfaction of the Indians overreacting. John you you were always pretty calm and unflappable when you were working for TB in number 10 but I do remember visiting you when you were working with Paul Bremer in Iraq and it did feel like there was a lot of panic going on well you get plucked out of um of Cairo and sent to work under slightly false pretenses I was told I'd only be there for a few weeks and I could probably do it for two or three days a week um and you end up working 17 hours a day seven days a week in a complete chaos with the Americans being directed by Rumsfeld and the Department of Defense about the big mistakes they made on the Iraqi army, on debathification going far too far.
22:24It was about trying to do what you could to ameliorate the situation. And it was a lot of pressure. I think if I achieve one thing in Iraq in those months after the fall of Saddam, it was putting together a governing council, which for the first time in Iraq's history reflected the people, the makeup of the people of a very complicated country. And that's been the basis and the starting point for steadily, gradually improving governance in Iraq, despite the terrible violence that we've witnessed there and putting some sense of order back into that country. Nonetheless, it's still pretty grim. I mean, as in Iraq last year, it's pretty depressing, driving through Baghdad, driving Baghdad to Mosul at the moment.
23:06You get Shia militia posters every 200 yards. You get into Mosul itself, you have pictures of Sadar Ghassam Soleimani. You have monuments against the US and the UK on the way from the airport. What you're saying, Rory, and I agree with you, is that after you dismantle an autocratic regime, if you leave chaos behind, it takes 20 years or more to put things back together again. We may have to face the same in Iran at some point when the theocratic regime there collapses, which it will. North Korea is a nightmare of how that comes to an end, especially for the neighboring South Koreans. And usually when autocracy collapses, it's not replaced by nice liberal democracy.
23:45It's replaced by a vicious battle for power between the armed units inside the organization. So we have to be quite careful what we wish for when we're dealing with these autocratic countries. Can I bring you back to Ireland for a second and just take this very, very current case, which people are talking about a lot at the moment, which is this agent run by the military called Steakknife, who, according to the recent reports, essentially the accusation is that they didn't think carefully enough about working with this person. and the allegation effectively is that in order to get the access to this very specialist unit of the IRA, they allowed this man to be complicit in various crimes.
24:30I'd love you to reflect on what must have been at the time a very difficult balance between the risk and the return that they thought they could get from that kind of penetration. That balance was not one apparent to myself at the time because we weren't aware of steak knife until after we had responsibility, as we did many other cases for resettling him as an agent. It's a disgraceful case. I think to some degree I have sympathy with the NCOs who are running those sort of cases. They were not properly trained. They didn't have rules and discipline. Now I heard your comments on this operation in an earlier podcast and I dissent from a couple of things you said where you said the police had systems and requirements from the 60s.
25:14They didn't. You know, the RUC was held up for sleep deprivation. Lots of mistakes were made. But my organisation had very strict rules on this from the early 80s onwards, late 70s onwards. And what are the rules, broadly speaking? Well, the rules are, there's now legislation which went through, I think two years ago, on the involvement of covert human intelligence sources in crime. And if that's to happen now, supposing to have credibility, an agent needed to steal a car, it has to be authorised in advance. It has to be reported to the Office of the Investigatory Powers Commissioner who does an annual report on the proportionality and necessity of this.
26:01But murder, rape, GPH, if any source of the security service engaged in that sort of criminality, they would be handed to the police. If I could just add that we did learn a lot from the lessons of Northern Ireland when we were running counterterrorism operations overseas. My first exposure to this when I was chief, I became chief in November 2009. and six weeks later on Christmas Day, I was phoned by the emergency team in the office to say that a terrorist had just landed at Chicago airport with his pants on fire, literally. This was Abdel Muttalab, who'd been supplied with a bomb by al-Qaeda in Yemen.
26:46And this shot al-Qaeda in Yemen up our target list. And even more so when the following year, a year or so later in 2010, I think it was, when we were told by our Saudi counterparts that a bomb was aboard a plane about to land at East Midlands Airport at four o 'clock in the morning. Woken at sort of half past three to be told this welcome news. And we had to galvanize everybody in the East Midlands, which isn't the center of MI6 operations, as you can imagine. So MI5, Special Branch and so on, were closely involved. a special branch took the designated package off which was a photocopier and said we we can't find the bomb where is it um we'll drive it down the m1 so you can have a look at it we said no no no don't do that don't do that leave it where it is and we went back to the saudis at sort of five o 'clock in the morning saying where's the effing bomb um they said it's in the printer cartridge and so uh we managed to dismantle this photocopier and there it was a very sophisticated bomb that would have exploded and brought down this aircraft as it was coming into JFK, so seven or eight hours later.
27:51And then again, a year or two later, we did a much more sophisticated operation than steak knife. We got one of our own agents inside this bomb factory in Yemen and extracted from it the most sophisticated terrorist bomb, which would have evaded metal detectors at UK airports at the time, which again, and our agent was actually asked to be suicide bomber on board the plane. Yeah, it was a Yemeni national who was living in the UK and a special branch, an MI5, had helped bring him along as an agent. And we deployed him overseas after a lot of training. And he, with extraordinary bravery, went and was kitted out with this bomb and was told to get on a plane at a specific UK airport because they cased the joint.
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28:38They knew which UK airport, which flew direct to the US, had the weakest security checks. And it was an example where they saved hundreds of lives in the air, probably thousands of lives on the ground. We had to do it in a very sophisticated and careful way. Can I just sort of, just to return to this, because presumably the closer you get to the top of a terrorist organization, in the case of Steakknife, he's the deputy head of the counterintelligence operations, the IRA. So he's the deputy head of the organization whose job is to go around eliminating people who they think are traitors. presumably and the same would be true in al-Qaeda if you actually had an agent at a very very senior level of these organizations it must be presumably very difficult to avoid them being involved in killing people does that basically mean that you can't recruit them if if they have a motivation to work for you they don't want to be killing people generally and i'm not pretending this is easy but i don't think i think the the judgment that the steak knife was a bad operation is absolutely right and i think i hope that had it been our operation we would have aborted it very early on you have to have some moral parameters to intelligence work if you if you abandon ethics and say anything goes you become like the people that you were trying to penetrate and you have to have to maintain that sense of proportion necessity the law etc i mean when i I joined the service.
30:11There was no law governing us. It took us until 1989 to get any. It's one of the most important things for the organisation to have a proper legal framework to enable the work to go on and to have clarity about where the boundaries were. It was enabling, it wasn't restricting. But both of you, when you described your recruitment, you give a sense today of very professional, properly run organisations, but back then maybe a little bit amateur. You can certainly say that. The way in which MI6 now recruits is through the website. Anybody interested? You can't afford to be at you two. I mean, it's not, if you join these organisations, it's because you're motivated by the work.
30:54It's not by the paycheck. I mean, there's no question of Aston Martins. You're on a Santander bicycle if you're lucky. But what about the guy in Yemen? Yeah. Or the guy, the Yemeni national? How worried do you have to be through that process that actually he's batting for both sides? Constantly. I mean, this is the danger. And he himself admitted to having doubts and uncertainties as to whether he was doing something which was in line with his religion. The reason he was able to get as far as he did was because he had the right tribal and religious qualities to get inside a terrorist organization.
31:30And so they're bound to be conflicted. And this is where training, this is where validation of sources. And I had one or two occasions when I was chief where a case officer came with a really exciting report on a sensitive subject. And you ask people to check it out, just to absolutely check that this is valid. And it turns out that the agent in question wasn't actually where he claimed he was. And you could tell by other data that he was, for example, still in Dubai and hadn't actually traveled to Tehran like he claimed he had. And that is that sort of validation of sources and taking a really sceptical look at your asset.
32:06And one of the rules in MI6 is don't fall in love with your assets. You have to be constantly challenging their validity, their access, their continued value and their honesty. But we should also be tremendously grateful that there are many men and women. And this is your professional expertise to run human sources and to protect them, but also to scrutinise them. But we should all be very grateful there are brave men and women who are prepared to give information at risk of their lives. A few years ago, I guest edited the Today programme at Christmas, which is great fun because you can choose your bishop for thought for the day.
32:41You can't influence the weather and the news and the sport, but otherwise you can fill it with your prejudices. And I asked my former colleagues to produce a source who was reporting on ISIS. And he was a good Muslim. He was interviewed by the BBC and then his part was played by an actor. And he was asked why he was cooperating with the authorities in providing information on ISIS. And he said, I look in the mirror in the morning when I'm in the bathroom and I believe I'm doing Allah's work. May his name be praised. and I think against a background of some Islamophobia, we need to remember that there are many men and women of that background who have saved countless lives and they're not alone.
33:33You know, other sources in other organisations who risk quite a lot, not for great financial reward. You know, government intelligence agencies, you don't pay by results, you support people and you support them forever. But I think it's important to remember those sort of people and their willingness to work with the authorities because of their dislike and violence or whatever. John, Eliza, Alistair, let's take a quick break.
34:07John, you mentioned James Bond. The whole sort of fiction around your world, is it helpful? Is it unhelpful? You've got James Bond. You've had Spooks. You've now got Slow Horses, which I've got to say is one of the best things on TV at the moment. I can see why Eliza was gribbising, but it is absolutely brilliant television. Does that stuff, you mentioned recruitment, does it help? Does it hinder? Does the sense that these James Bond type spies can do whatever the hell they want, does that help? Does that hinder? I mean, if people apply to MI6 because they want to be James Bond, they're not going to be accepted.
34:46But I do think that in this country, we've had a favorable experience of intelligence generally. It played a massive role in the Second World War, the Enigma, running SOE in Europe, and the intelligence we had on German intentions and plans and the deceptions we were able to deliver. There's a play on it. What's it called? Operation, not Mousetrap. Mincemeat. Mincemeat. Thank you. Operation Mincemeat. And the whole double cross system. The whole double cross system was extraordinary. and that gave us a positive push. Obviously, there were problems during the Cold War, especially the early Cold War, Philby and Co.
35:21But also - That was quite a big problem. It was. At the end of a Cold War, the quality of intelligence we had from Soviet and deep penetration of Soviet agents actually saved us and the West generally. Everyone talks about 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis as the most dangerous moment in the Cold War. I'm going to preempt you, 1983? Exactly. The 1983 was probably the most dangerous moment. Yeah, I agree with that. Because President Andropov, the former head of the KGB, was temporarily president of the Soviet Union. And he was convinced that the West were about to launch a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union.
35:58And then when we had the Abel Archer exercise in 1983, with some new sort of additional twists produced by the NATO command, the Russians interpreted this as really dangerous. And it was only our agent inside the KGB who was able to tell us this is what they're planning to do. This is what they really believe that we were able to get Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and I think it was Mishron at the time to say, no, no, no, no, let's cancel this exercise. Let's just reassure the Soviets that we're not about to invade because we weren't. And I think that gives us a standing both inside the system and generally, which allows fiction to build on that.
36:35How do we get the balance right in your world? And one of the things that I observed is when I first joined the government in the mid 90s or 95, the idea was that terrorism was less of an immediate threat to the United Kingdom. In fact, from the point of view of SIS, that section was being run down. Of course, he was continuing to do work. Then flip forward after 9-11. SIS goes from doing almost nothing on this issue to eventually doing kind of 80, 90 % of its work on this issue. No, no, no. 30%, 35%. 80, 90 % was a security service. Just to correct you, I mean, we flipped pre-9-11. You know, the buildup of al-Qaeda from Black Hawk Down, First World Trade Center, the Saudi attack at al-Khobab and an operation we had in 2000 in Birmingham, which was al-Qaeda related.
37:26We were building up that work throughout the early 90s. Okay, but from the point of view, okay, let me back out of exaggeration. But 95, 96, 97, SIS has a section working on counterterrorism. That section is then closed and integrated into other work. After 9-11, or maybe it's after 2000, it becomes a much larger part of the organization's work. And at the same time, the number of stations internationally, particularly in the developing world, begins to reduce quite dramatically. So there is a shift in balance and resources. And it can feel from the outside as though the way in which requirements are set by whoever the Joint Intelligence Committee or ministers can lead to the pendulum swinging quite hard in one direction and then quite hard back.
38:14And particularly for you guys, you then find a situation where because you're short of resources, you've put quite a lot of eggs in this basket. Other eggs have been diminished. And then suddenly, 10 years later, everybody panics. And oh my goodness, we've lost all this stuff here. I'm going to have to move the resources back. Can I just answer that? Because Amy is, I think, at MI6 more than MI5. Yes, there was a surge of effort on counterterrorism after 9-11, as you'd expect. And the mistake the service made at that stage is they didn't properly train people in the legal parameters and legal limits of what they could do, which is why some of them got into difficulty, including with the law in this country over that.
38:52and we got too close to the CIA, frankly, without really thinking through the risks. But we still preserved a very capable Russia unit. We were building up the China unit because China was clearly becoming more of a challenge. We did a lot of work in the Middle East. And I found that I'd worked for several decades in the Foreign Office, but the best experts on China, for example, were in MI6. They weren't in the Foreign Office or in the Cabinet Office. and so that that quality of expertise was maintained even if the operational intensity on those targets did diminish a bit in order to allow space for the counter-terrorism target i'd just like to add two points to that there are never enough resources to do everything you want to do you have to make choices and those choices may be wrong with hindsight they were honestly made at the time.
39:47And I think you're right, it's a little bit more difficult for SIS because they are subject to these requirements set by government. MI5 is not set requirements. MI5's role is according to the law. And therefore, this is a very important constitutional difference between the two organisations because the government can appoint you, in my case, they can sack you. They can deny you warrants for operations. They can remove your money. What they can't do is tell you what to do. And in my career in the service, there have been a couple of occasions I can explicitly remember where governments have said to us, both the Labour government and the Conservative government, why aren't you doing more on this?
40:30This is a national security issue. And we have said, it's an awkward political issue. We don't judge it to be a national security issue, and we have the right not to do it. And to be fair, each of those governments accepted that judgment. And that's important. It's like ministers not being able to tell the police who to arrest. Ministers should not be telling the security service who to investigate. That said, the head of the security service will make a strong effort to ensure that ministers understand how the priorities are judged. But ultimately, the decision on operations in the service This is ultimately the decision of the Director General on their understanding of national security.
41:10John, you mentioned a situation where we had somebody kind of pretty high up inside the Russian system. Today, 2024, are China and Russia far better at penetrating our systems than we are penetrating theirs? I don't think that's the case. The Russians have got a first-class intelligence service, which has been compromised to some extent because they have to please their masters, and they've made big mistakes over Ukraine, for example, in advance of the Russian invasion there. Why, by telling Putin what he wanted to hear? Yeah, exactly. But don't underestimate the Russians. They are a very sophisticated intelligence operation.
41:49But don't overestimate them either. Well, they're not 10 feet tall. They're not 4 feet tall. The Chinese are developing more and more sophisticated intelligence techniques. Some of them technical, a lot of them human. We had a case in Parliament just recently, which remarkable work to uncover that. That was a human being getting close to MPs. Exactly. And we used to think that the Chinese focused on the Chinese diaspora and were focused on Chinese dissidents overseas. The Chinese reach has got much wider. They are now looking for a much broader set of intelligence targets, and they've become much more sophisticated in doing so.
42:25And so China has joined the SVR, the FSB in Russia, the Mossad in Israel, ourselves here, obviously the American agencies and one or two others in the top rank of intellectual services around the world. And what will they be doing? Let's just take Russia. So I still don't think that we've really got to the bottom of Russia's role in the Brexit referendum or the Trump first election. What will they be trying to do now vis-a-vis some of the big elections that are happening this year, particularly the United States? Well, Eliza might have more to say about interference in our electoral processes.
43:00Certainly the Russians have sought to interfere in elections in Europe over the last 50 or 60 years. They would manipulate the communist parties in France and Italy and Spain. They would have access inside the trade union movement inside this country. They will manipulate the German peace movement and try and influence the outcome of domestic politics, not necessary elections. I think in terms of what we saw in 2016 in the US elections was a step up in Russian interference. Whether it actually tipped the balance, I don't know. The assessment in the US is it didn't tip the balance. And I think the assessment in the UK is whatever the Russians were doing on the Brexit referendum, it wasn't enough to tip the balance.
43:41We made that mistake ourselves without Russian help. But I do think that the Russians will be looking for ways to disrupt Western democracy, to weaken the confidence of ordinary people in their democratic processes. And they will be looking to finance and support disruptive parties so that they can manipulate things in a way which is favorable to Russian policy. I have nothing to add to that except to say this is a longstanding behavior by the Russians. They have a term for it called active measures. Years ago, I was working on what Russians were doing to influence political life in the UK, in the trade unions, in CND and organisations like that, insofar as they could.
44:26And they were completely focused on what they called active measures to try and disrupt the UK and bring their influence to bear. So they have tens of many, many years of doing this. This isn't a new phenomenon. No, but what is new is the scale of technological change. Exactly so. And now with AI coming as well. Ability to detect it also. And fake news and distorting images. I think, I mean, I have no current knowledge. I left MI5 in 2007. But it's clear from speeches of my successors and others that people are very alert to the concern about our forthcoming elections and the degree to which the Russians and probably others seek to distort the information available to the British public.
45:12And when you talked earlier about having to have a moral framework, are they doing things to us that we feel unable to do to them? And does that give them a kind of asymmetric advantage? I don't think if we interfered in the Russian elections, it would have changed the results. No, but I'm talking about interfering in their processes, in their public opinion, in their lives. That's not our approach, really. We're not looking to overthrow the Russian system. We're not looking to determine who's going to be the next leader of Russia, partly because we have a realistic assessment. We just don't have the capacity to do that.
45:46And who leads Russia is a matter for the Russian elite. They will ultimately decide who emerges and when Putin is moved on. But we do need to protect our own system. I mean, there was a surge in democracy through the 1980s in Latin America and Africa, Southeast Asia, then the end of the Cold War brought a surge of democracy in Europe. Countries like Indonesia becoming, you know, huge countries becoming democratic. For the last 10 or 15 years, we've been a bit on the back foot. The space of democracy has been shrinking. The quality of democracy is being diminished in certain countries, including in Europe and America.
46:21And part of the purpose of our services is to uphold the values and uphold the freedoms and the way of life that we have in the West. It's not to overthrow and determine ways of life in other countries. We've made that mistake occasionally in the past. Iran in 1953 was an example where we got over our skis, frankly, by trying to do too much, by trying to determine who was going to lead a foreign country. And it doesn't work. I guess many listeners will think that this isn't an accurate reflection of the way that the U.S. behaves. In fact, they will often think it's pretty hypocritical that it's very, very clear that the CIA has been very involved in toppling regimes.
47:01This idea that you've elected your president, we don't have a view on who your regime is, continued throughout the Cold War. And of course, we actually toppled Saddam Hussein through a full military intervention. We do do regime change. And presumably in Russia, in North Korea, in Iran, and all these places, there is a strong US national security interest in trying to replace these regimes, even if they're not doing it in the same way as they did in the past. So one of the problems is we often sound absolutely outraged at people doing things to us. And a lot of the world looking at us says, wait a second, certainly from the US point of view, this is pretty hypocritical because you've been doing a lot of this in the other direction.
47:38Well, you say a lot of it. I mean, you've picked out a few examples. You could add Chile to the list. You could add Grenada to the list and one or two others. But they by and large are exceptions. And I think what we've learned, if we've learned anything over the last 20 years, is if you have an unpleasant regime, a vicious regime controlling a territory, it's sometimes better to leave them in place and be able to hold them to account than it is to overthrow them and leave chaos behind. And that's been really the lesson of Iraq, where we painfully put an Iraqi system back together over 10 or 15 years.
48:12You and I were both part of that, Rory. We learned in Afghanistan, where things have gone back to, if anything, even worse than before 2001. We've learned it in Libya where there's still chaos and learned it in Somalia. And the Israelis are learning it today in Gaza. They hate Hamas, although they facilitated Hamas being in power in Gaza by channeling money to them and helping them run services inside Gaza. But they've now got chaos in Gaza, and it's going to be much, much harder to manage and control events in Gaza because there's total chaos rather than when they had an administration that was in charge.
48:46I think there's some very important points here. I think, Rory, you're onto something about double standards and hypocrisy. And I think we have to be aware and cautious about how our actions are taken when this is OK and that isn't when they're actually very similar. Just on the democracy point, which John graphically described, it's in the law for my service, our Security Service Act, that we're, among other things, here to protect parliamentary democracy. This is a pretty expansive responsibility in quite how you do it. I don't know. But I think it's really important to think critically about what is appropriate to do.
49:26and I think the Americans' preference to the sort of dictator who they know to the possibility of a more democratic regime in a country is a tricky one. I gave a talk to a little school the other day and was bowled over by a child aged about 11 saying, why do you have anything to do with the CIA when they killed Patrice Lumumba? I don't think anybody else in the whole auditorium had a clue what this boy was talking about But I thought, my goodness, you're going to go far. But I mean, that's the problem. You mentioned Gaza there. This is very unfair to do this as we get towards the end of the interview.
50:06But if you just go through some of the really big, difficult hotspots at the moment, take them in any order. China, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, return of Trump. Take all those four. Eliza is shuddering. She shuddered most at number four, I have to say. But first of all, I think it's to the creditors of the Biden administration that they have managed the relationship with China as well as they have over the last two years. You've got a dialogue on deep security and political issues between Jake Sullivan and Wang Yi of the like that you've not seen since Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai 50 years ago.
50:40And that is helping manage the single most important relationship in the world between China and the United States. Whether that survives next year's election, I don't know. But the Chinese have responded favorably to it. I think the handling of the Taiwanese elections in January last month was a reflection of the fact that both sides want to make this a managed relationship and not one which leads to conflicts. You're really impressed by the Chinese diplomacy, aren't you? Well, I work with the Chinese at the UN. They are a very sophisticated diplomatic service. They've got sophisticated intelligence services and they know how to accumulate state power and project state power.
51:15You compare that, say, with India, which is a country I greatly admire, greatly like, work closely with the Indians, but they are not good at accumulating state power and projecting state power. They're rather clumsy and ineffective at it, which perhaps is to their credit, but it does make the Chinese a more formidable foe, but they do also respond to management of relationship and management of expectations. Now, elsewhere, Ukraine is obviously a difficult situation at the moment. The Russians have got on the front foot again. The failure of the U.S. House of Representatives to approve further support could force the Ukrainians onto their knees during the course of this year.
51:51And that would be a really serious outcome brought about by Trump Republicans. I think in the Middle East, we're on a glide path to a ceasefire. I think it's going to be very difficult for both sides. but I suspect the RAFA offensive will go ahead at some point. But the sense and the scale and the ruthlessness of the Israeli response has rather obscured the initial trigger for this, which was the atrocities by Hamas on the 7th of October. I think the situation will calm down there over the coming months, thanks to very good diplomacy by the Americans, the Egyptians, the Qataris and others. And as for Trump, well, we do face a realistic possibility that we have a change of government here in the UK and a change of government in the United States at the same time.
52:34It's going to be a real challenge. Whoever wins the British election this autumn, it looks likely it's going to be Keir Starmer and Labour, but we don't know. But whoever wins that election will may have to deal for the next four years with the Trump administration in Washington. And that is going to be a huge, huge challenge for those politicians. I live in hope that Trump won't win. He lost the midterms. He lost the last election. I just hope that the American voting public don't choose him because I think he's a threat to democracy. I think he's a threat to NATO. And I think he's a very serious threat to the future of Ukraine.
53:09I think on the NATO point, I don't see the United States withdrawing from NATO. But I do see the Article 5 guarantee as losing credibility. And the people who will suffer most from a second Trump term will be, apart from America itself, will be America's closest allies. Yes, us. In general, Japan, Korea, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, friends around the world. Can I just make a comment on Gaza? Any Israeli government would have needed to react to those atrocities and horrors perpetuated by Hamas. But in my view, it's not in Israel's interest to continue what is now a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
53:53Famine, loss of civilian life and so on. you cannot eliminate terrorist groups whose roots are in nationalism, militarily, as we know from Ireland, but from many, many other cases. You can only resolve that through a wider peace process, through economic and political roots. So I hope very much that John's right, that we're going to get some sort of ceasefire and peace process. But for the long term, one of the things that is going to happen from this is a whole new generation of young people in Gaza and related areas wishing to turn to terrorism. And I think that understanding Israel, I'm sure understands this, but it's not necessarily determining its own self-interest here.
54:50It is confusing, isn't it? Because, of course, the Israeli intelligence security services are very good. Israel has a real interest in understanding its neighbors well. And yet, the establishment view and the view of most of the public in Israel continues apparently to be that they need to eliminate Hamas and by implication that they can eliminate Hamas through these operations. How have they got themselves in the mindset of thinking that despite the fact, as you say, our experience in North Carolina or indeed our experience recently in Afghanistan, you know, 4 ,000 Taliban. We then launched operations, killed, I think, 50 ,000 people.
55:30And next thing we know, there are 15 ,000 Taliban. I wouldn't presume to put myself into Israeli shoes. I think, you know, having been there more than once, it's much smaller than you think. I think they're a single democracy in the Middle East. We've been talking about democracy earlier in this talk. And they feel embattled. If you look back over the history since the founding of Israel, They have a right to feel embattled. You know, they've been serially attacked, serially having to defend themselves. And so I think to that extent, it's understandable. I hope and expect there are voices in the Israeli government who are presenting slightly different views on where they might go from here.
56:11I think part of the problem here is Israeli public opinion has lost trust in their government. They've lost trust in the Israeli defense forces to protect them. Because of what happened on October 7th. Because of what happened, well, cumulatively over the last several years, but with the 7th of October being the climax, if you like, of that loss of trust. And Netanyahu, as a politician, has got very low approval ratings in Israel, but the war has got very high approval ratings. And there needs to be an effort to try to calm and influence and steady Israeli public opinion for a much more mature and thoughtful process, because I agree with you entirely.
56:53I heard one estimate from an Israeli recently that 60 % of Hamas fighters are the orphans from previous wars. There's going to be a whole lot more orphans after this war. My last question brings it a bit closer to home. Your Reith lectures, Eliza, they were interesting in that they weren't just about your world. They were about politics or economics or about culture. And I noticed that you're, I bang on the whole time about the Nolan principles, honesty, openness, objectivity, selfless, integrity, accountability and leadership. And you want to have two more. How many selflessness politicians do we see these days?
57:25Well, we've never seen that many, but I think we see some. I think we see some. We're better off in 2024 than we were in 2019. That's for sure. I think so. And I hope we'll be better off after the next election than now. That is a surprise that you think that, Alison. Indeed, indeed. And I suspect, I hope the country thinks that as well. But you wanted to add sustainability and diversity, which I just thought from your background. I didn't say that in the Reith lectures. No, I know that. But I just wonder whether they're quite adequate. They're 20 years old. They're a bit duplicative. I don't quite understand the difference between honesty and integrity.
58:00There's nothing in them about how you treat other people. Yeah. And actually, I think we're more tuned in to how we treat other people and how we try to work. I mean, we've talked in this interview a bit about teams. You know, both John and I have experience of working with countries who we don't like, whose systems we don't like, with colleagues in other organizations who we don't necessarily like. We try to find common ground. We try to work together. And I think the Nolan principles for all their value doesn't have anything about sort of working with others and in a sustainable way. Modernized Nolan principles in the Labour Manifesto.
58:36That's what we need. Are you writing the Labour Manifesto? He keeps denying it. Keeps denying it. My final question. I guess we all understand how incredibly difficult it is to predict the future and how one of the problems that we often suffer from is optimism bias. And I wondered whether I could ask both of you to think about what a worst case scenario for the world would be over the next five, 10 years. Let's have a bit of optimism to end with. Well, no, no, no. That's part of the problem. This is the optimism bias. Everybody wants to be optimistic. Everybody wants to end on an upbeat thing.
59:12So let's imagine I'm talking about a 5 % unlikely worst case scenario. What would that look like? Well, Rory, when I was a diplomat, I used to look at the positives. I was a glass half full merchant. When I was an intelligence chief, I'd look at the risks. I was a glass half empty merchant. And David Cameron at the National Security Council used to get really fed up with me when I pointed at the downsides of some of his potential policy choices that he wanted to explore. But it is right that intelligence chiefs should look at the downside. I think what we face here in the UK, the biggest challenge undoubtedly is a resurgent Russia in Europe.
59:51And that's why the outcome of the Ukraine war is so important to us. Not because Ukraine as a people, as an example, that's important, but it's that the whole of the European security is dependent upon being able to stand up and deter the Russians. And the arrival of a Trump administration will make that even more difficult for the UK and for our NATO allies in Europe than it is already. Clearly, there are other challenges around the world. China's rise has to be managed primarily by the United States. You could see turmoil in North Africa. I was ambassador in Egypt. When I was in Egypt, there were 70 million Egyptians.
1:00:27Now there are 105 million Egyptians. And if that country goes pop, then a lot of those people will come over the Mediterranean and look to base themselves in Europe, Ditto Algeria. So there are big problems around the periphery of Europe, but none so big as the Russian. I agree. But of course, the big issue is climate, which we are not sufficiently addressing. And the implications of it, again, if we had a Trump president, we're not putting our money where our mouth is. It has implications for the future of our grandchildren. It has implications for food security, for water security, for wars over both.
1:01:05and migration on a scale which would say we've seen nothing yet. John just mentioned Egyptians moving. But if large parts of the world become unlivable in, those who can move will do so. So I think, yes, Russia, China, but the planet is the big question for me. Well, I guess that was a bit gloomy on the way to add. Anything nice and warm and cuddly? John, shall we talk about how much you loved working for Tony Blair? What I was going to say was Tony Blair was an inspiring leader. He wasn't a great manager, but he was an inspiring leader. I would say that you asked me about fiction. People want to read a good book about what life in intelligence is like.
1:01:49Don't read John le Carré or Ian Fleming. There's a book called Damascus Station by David McCloskey, which is the most accurate rendition of life in a tough war zone. and I would recommend it to you and to your listeners. Excellent. The thing I'm optimistic about, and this comes from the 12 years I did at the Wellcome Trust, which is the UK's biggest charity, funding medical research primarily, was how clever science can be and how it can offer solutions, not complete, but help on climate, help on health, help on technology. and I have met some astounding scientists who I think I understand, but it's clear I don't.
1:02:36They don't offer all the solutions, but I think there's grounds to be optimism. The fact that we now, for example, have a vaccine for malaria is world-changing. So when I'm trying to be optimistic, I think of science. And I think of young people as well. I can go straight from here to King's College to part of my role as an honorary professor there. I was at Nottingham University last month where I've got a position there. I'm always inspired by talking to 20, 22 year olds in this country because they have high ideals, high ambitions and fantastic commitment. And I say to them, if you want to fulfill that commitment, then a life in public service is the very best thing you can do.
1:03:14Still recruiting for MI6. John Soares. Thank you, Eliza. Thanks. That was really, really enjoyable. I could talk to you all day. Thank you very much, both of you. Thank you so much. so i think the first thing is for those of you who are listening rather than watching on youtube there's a remarkable contrast between the two characters which will have come across a bit in their voices but it's more dramatic visually um eliza manning and buller is uh dressed in purple she's a she she doesn't like talking about this but she's a baroness she's a dame she's a knight of the garter she's the daughter of a former attorney general and her father's a viscount to the Lord Chancellor.
1:03:54And John's sources, he says, Comprehensive Educated, Redbrook University. What was it? And you worked with him very closely. What was your sense of his dress sense before we came up? Oh, I used to take the mickey out of John's clothes all the time. I think it was a bit of a clint that he was wearing this sort of Martin Bell type suit, you know, the white suit. It might have been beige. Now, I think John's a good... What I like about him is that he's pretty irrepressible. I will definitely make sure Tony Blair listens to him He was an inspiring leader, but not a great manager. What do you think he meant by that?
1:04:25I think what he meant by that was that Tony sometimes would expect the processes to be taken care of and wouldn't necessarily always worry himself too much about them. But he was a very good colleague. But interesting that he admitted he sort of started life as a spy and then was much more interested in the policy side. I thought they were both very, very frank. Incredibly. I was astonished. I mean, if you go back to the days of the kind of characters that John Soares was talking about, Morris Oldfield, who was the head of my six-year-old. Yeah, we never comment. We never confirm. We never deny.
1:04:59Yeah, exactly. The idea, I mean, it's a sign of how much Britain's changed. I mean, firstly, of course, laws were passed. An Intelligence Security Committee was set up. National Security Council has been set up. So there's been some constitutional changes in Britain. but also their willingness to talk in detail about agents and operations and it's absolutely fascinating i wonder if there'll be any post podcast slap wrist yeah i don't know anyway i thought that was fascinating um and um and i think um eliza manning and buller i found i mean she's she's you know very beady-eyed very discreet she ran the welcome trust which she says is this incredible science foundation initiative in britain but you got a sense of her values so you know strongly on obviously the use of intelligence and her anger about the iraq war but also her interest in gender the sense that she felt she was in a massively chauvinistic organization when she joined security service and what that meant as a woman to come i i did a bit of crowdsourcing amongst their community.
1:06:05I sent a message out to a few people in their world saying we're interviewing John Eliza. What do you think? And actually, two of the women who work in the security services said that both of them were very, very good at promoting women. And also, it is interesting how people, we should probably put her wreath lectures in the newsletter because they're pretty deep and they're not just about her world. They go very, very broad. We didn't want to get into the super geekiness of this, but they both will be remembered as part of a generation that really were about establishing these organizations with more of a basis of law and publicity.
1:06:44So John Sawes would have liked, I think if we'd given him the chance to talk about how in some ways his tenure was about challenging the James Bond culture. He would say that being legal, compliance, following process makes you a better intelligence organisation. Now, there will be other people, right, who were part of the generation at the top when he came in, who slightly disagree and who feel one of the problems is that British intelligence has become a little bit more risk averse and you'll hear grumbles from the special forces. You know, the SAS still very, very, you know, very out there, very risk taking, very macho will grumble sometimes that they feel that SAS is held back by the law, held back by processes.
1:07:27But he would push back on that and say, there's literally, there's no alternative in the modern world other than to have a proper legal basis. The other reason why people should watch on YouTube as as well as just listen, is to see Eliza's face when we mentioned two things. One was slow horses. I don't think she's a fan of Gary Oldman's portrayal of the spooks. And the other was when we posed those four big issues at the end. And the one that really got her wincing was the return of Trump. Yeah. I suspect that's the view of most intelligent services around the world, apart from those in the dictatorships.
1:07:59Well, thank you very much. And I think if we can, we'll have an open invitation to the current heads of MI5 and MI6 to come on the show. Absolutely.
From the publisher
Should spies be allowed to break the law while undercover? What should the relationship between government and intelligence look like? Do we overestimate or underestimate the power and reach of Russia’s FSB and China’s intelligence service?
On today’s special episode of Leading, Rory and Alastair are joined by Eliza Manningham-Buller and John Sawers to discuss what it’s really like to lead MI5 and MI6, respectively.
This episode was recorded before the IS-Khorasan attack in Moscow.
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