Art of Betrayal (56 page)

There was one final innovation, an intrusion of the modern world, welcome to some but disorienting, even terrifying to others. The Secret Service was not going to be secret any more. The timing, coming at the end of the Cold War, was largely coincidental. MI5 had already been avowed in 1989. The staff there had foisted the move on a reluctant government. They had been unhappy with having no real legal basis for their work tapping people's phones and bugging their houses in the UK, other than a minister's sign-off. They wanted to feel that they were working within the law, not around it. ‘It was not comfortable to be engaged in operations for which there was no proper legal cover,' recalled Eliza Manningham-Buller. There was also the European factor. Individuals had tried to sue security services in Europe for their actions. The European Court of Human Rights had decreed that any security or intelligence service had to be on a legal footing and have a proper system of complaints. Britain had neither. MI6 would have to become ‘legal'.

There was also the rather expensive new office that MI6 was having constructed at growing expense in Vauxhall Cross. Like Century House, the building was on the south side of the river physically separating MI6 from the rest of government. But that was about the only thing the new place had in common with the old. It was flashy and very unsubtle. Gerry Warner pointed out that it would be hard to move to something that looked like an Odeon cinema and expect people not to ask what it was. The problem with Century House had been security. Not the location, which was widely known to everyone including bus conductors (‘spies alight here' they would say as they reached the stop outside), nor even access, with its security guards who would wave people in without asking for any ID unless they did not recognise them. It was the fabric of the building itself that kept those concerned with its safety awake at night. The largely glass headquarters of the British Secret Service was housed on top of a petrol station. ‘God, we were really living on borrowed time,' says McColl. The station was owned by Q8, the Kuwaiti petrol company. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 there was a joke doing the rounds that all the Iraqis would have to do was light a fuse to destroy the entire British Secret Service. The new architect-designed home in Vauxhall, known as Legoland by some, was secure but also a touch sterile, befitting the new era. Staff attitudes towards it were perhaps
best illustrated during a special premiere for the new James Bond film
The World is Not Enough
in 1999, hosted inside the new headquarters. The previous year Dame Judi Dench who played M had been invited to Christmas lunch by the real C to help her gain some insight into her role. The actress who played Miss Moneypenny introduced the viewing. When the scene arrived in which a large explosion rocked the new MI6 headquarters, the assembled staff issued a loud cheer.
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The legislation which placed MI6 on a statutory footing was piloted through the House of Commons by Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, a former diplomat who had turned down an invitation to join the service in the 1950s. Serving as a diplomat out in China, he had occasionally counted railways wagons for MI6 and gazed askance at his Embassy colleagues. ‘They were odd folk by definition,' he later recalled. ‘You found yourself maybe sitting alongside somebody who had a rather peculiar job description and you understood gradually what he or she was up to.'
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The act was passed in 1994. It answered a profound insecurity in the service. Before then, since it did not actually exist, MI6 could have been wound up or merged by the stroke of a pen and by the whim of any minister. It now had a secure foundation and at last there were fewer pretences and ums and ahs from ministers and officials when explaining exactly what bit of government they were talking about. But was there also a cost to coming out of the shadows?

There was ‘a little sorrow' from those who had lived beneath the shroud of secrecy for so long, according to McColl. A generational divide marked attitudes within MI6 to its emergence, blinking, into the light. ‘The old people were used to the old system and they weren't anti-avowal but they simply weren't terribly interested in it really,' remembers McColl, a product of Shergy's Sov Bloc master race where secrecy was prized and something of a reluctant lifter of the veil. ‘It was always the slippery slide that we were worried about. That once you got on to the slope and you started opening things up you would run into problems over secrecy. And secrecy was and is absolutely central to the whole of our work because our work is about trust. It is about trust between the government and people running the service. It is the trust between the service and the people all over the world who are working for it, and many of them are taking great
risks … they do that in the faith that we are really a secret service which means to say we are not talking and we're not going out into the public and declaring ourselves. And I've always felt that that was one of our advantages. We were – and have been always – a secret service.' The cautionary tale, McColl and others believed, was the American experience. They had watched the very public undressing of the CIA by Congress in the mid-1970s. ‘There was a sort of shudder that went through the intelligence world and it went through many of the people who were working for the Americans or working for us, because they were coming to us and saying “For God's sake, look what's happening in America” and “Is it going to happen to us?”'
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As MI6 stepped out, some of the older generation went around muttering to each other. ‘It will all end in tears,' they said.

The fear was that avowal would strip the service of its mystique, a sheen of glamour and power built up largely by fiction. This had been sustained through secrecy since no one had any way of judging whether the fictional portrayal was on the mark or not. McColl traces its origins back to the late nineteenth century when Kipling and others wrote of brave British spies fighting the dastardly Russians in the Great Game over India, a tradition continued in John Buchan's stories about the plucky Brits now defending the realm against the cunning Krauts. And then came Bond. ‘It keeps the name going doesn't it,' reckons McColl, who speaks freely about MI6 as a ‘brand'. ‘I mean, everybody watched Bond. And so why shouldn't a little Bond rub off on our reputation?' The brand, it is argued, does more than just make the service feel good about itself, it also helps with the recruitment of agents who are convinced they are dealing with an all-knowing and all-powerful organisation. If people in the Middle East want to believe that MI6 is pulling the strings behind the most unlikely events, is that really a problem if it means they will come to it when they need help (and do so in preference to another country)? Some believed that the myths of popular culture carried with them dangers. One former Foreign Secretary argued that the image of a service that always did exciting things, always won and was always right, created an exaggerated view of MI6's potential which in turn fed into government and skewed views, particularly of inexperienced ministers, of what was possible and what was not.

The bleaker world of le Carré divided the service. ‘There were those
who were furious with John le Carré because he depicts everybody as such disagreeable characters and they are always plotting against each other,' recalls McColl, perhaps thinking of Daphne Park and her distaste for him. ‘We know we weren't always as disagreeable as that and we certainly weren't plotting against each other. So people got rather cross about it. But actually I thought it was terrific because, again, it carried the name that had been provided by Bond and John Buchan and everybody else. It gave us another couple of generations of being in some way special.' But with the end of the Cold War, even the old-fashioned spy thriller suddenly looked like a museum piece and the authors were having to search for new plotlines. Who were the bad guys now?

While MI6 did not mind the mythologising of its work in fictional literature, it was firmly determined that its own secrets should remain under lock and key. There was a strict rule that staff could not write memoirs. ‘We have always put quite a big effort into discouraging our retired people from writing books,' explains McColl. ‘I have a lot of sympathy for them, because if you have been banging round the world for most of your life, unless you have got a very big family or a lot of old friends in the UK you come back here, you retire to some little village somewhere and it is a lonely life. You haven't got many roots and it's very tempting to write up some of the adventures you were involved in.' There was one spectacular case where MI6 failed to discourage one of its own disaffected officers from talking. Richard Tomlinson had joined as a high-flyer (although those who recruited him would later rue failing to take up his references). He was eager and enthusiastic. Perhaps a bit too eager and enthusiastic, thought some of his superiors, who wondered if his notions of how to behave might display a little too much influence from the Bond films. He was also seen as something of a loner. Tomlinson himself believed he was badly treated and not given any due process before being turfed out, which is also more than plausible given the way MI6 operated. Both sides would have cause to regret the breakdown in relations, though, as Tomlinson wrote a book exposing the ins and outs of his time in the service.

The death of Princess Diana in 1997 in a car accident in a tunnel in Paris led to the surfacing of one of Tomlinson's most awkward allegations. He said he remembered a not dissimilar plan being discussed
to get rid of Slobodan Milo
Å¡
evi
ć
, the Serb leader, earlier in the decade, involving a bright light being flashed at the driver of a car to induce a crash. Could there have been a plot? Eventually an inquiry would be launched which would find no evidence for the claim that the crash was anything other than an accident. It did raise the question of whether there had been a plan for a murder in the Balkans. The inquiry found there had been only the flimsiest notion. A ‘creative' officer had been worried about a particularly violent Serb (but not Milo
Å¡
evi
ć
) being on the verge of riding an extreme nationalist agenda to power in elections and accelerating the genocide. The officer compared the situation to Adolf Hitler the year before he came to power, where many lives would have been saved had he been assassinated. ‘It seemed to me that we might be in the months running up to this extreme radical nationalist politician taking power. It seemed to me there might be an analogy with 1932 in Germany. So the question I was posing is whether we should have a plan to take action before the Hitler option actually took place,' he later testified.
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A few ideas were put down in messy handwriting in the form of a contingency plan, including using special forces and internal Serbian elements to do the deed. ‘It is true that the ethos of the service was against assassination,' the creative officer would later testify, amid evidence that new entrants to MI6 were told in their initial training that assassination was not countenanced and the subject was not up for debate. ‘Suddenly here I am confronted by a situation where we are dealing with a bloody civil war in the centre of Europe, where tens of thousands of innocent people are being killed. So it seemed to me appropriate that we should at least revisit the dictum of the services and see if we felt obliged to revise it in an exceptional case.' When he handed the notes to his secretary, she typed them up with some surprise into a page and a half of A4. ‘I had never read or seen anything like it before,' she later said. He decided to go round his immediate boss, whom he thought might be cold on the idea, and send it direct to the Controller for Eastern and Central Europe. His superiors stamped on the idea, hard. They told him MI6 was not in that business – it was unethical, they said, a view with which he disagreed – and instructed him to destroy all copies of the memo he had written. A senior officer stood over the secretary as she deleted
it from the antiquated computer system and shredded paper copies. The days of Anthony Eden and George Kennedy Young planning to bump off Nasser were long gone. ‘We do not have a licence to kill,' a Chief would later explain, although he hesitated when asked whether the service had ever had one.
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With a secure footing and a shiny new headquarters, MI6 just needed something to do. The shape of an intelligence service, in theory, should be dictated by the threats a country faces and by its concept of national security. But this is rarely the reality. Institutional inertia often means old structures persist even when the threats they were created for have long since passed. This was the case in the 1990s when it took a while for the contour of new threats to be discerned. The old world in which an intelligence service purely and aggressively served the ‘national' interest by helping secure advantage against other states had not entirely passed away but was being complemented by more amorphous, less state-centric threats to security like international terrorism and groups smuggling and selling nuclear weapons technology.

The new agenda for the spies was in parts familiar and unfamiliar. The Balkans conflict caught MI6 off guard, but the service began to adapt, establishing small teams in the region and working more closely with the military and other partners. Secretly obtaining the negotiating positions of other countries was traditional territory, even if now the targets might be the Serbs in the Balkans or even European allies. Former MI6 officers claim that secret intelligence had a major impact in Britain's negotiations for the important treaties negotiated that decade. Unsurprisingly politicians refuse to comment on that rather awkward possibility.
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Economic intelligence was a staple of the Cold War, trying to divine the reality of Soviet economic performance, but now it shaded into the greyer terrain of business and commercial secrets. What were the Germans planning when it came to interest rates and who was bribing whom for arms contracts in the Middle East? More time was spent on dealing with drug barons, working with Customs, and looking for those laundering money in the Caribbean. All of this meant dealing with other government departments and agencies and not just with the Foreign Office. In the old days, officers from MI6 would not even declare themselves within Whitehall, and the intelligence community sat at one side in
its own clearly designated compartment. Now its officers were being seconded to other departments and MI6 was increasingly drawn away from pure intelligence gathering. The threats looked global, but MI6 had shrunk in size with the end of the Cold War so it was having to choose more carefully and work more closely with other countries and institutions and not just with the US. There were some Cold Warriors who simply could not make the transition, who could not see the point of it all and who could not operate without the old familiar bearings. In late 1993, McColl instituted what became known as the ‘Christmas Massacre' in which a raft of older, senior directors were pushed out to be replaced with a younger generation. The following year a youngish new chief, David Spedding, who tellingly had risen through Middle East work rather than Sov Bloc, was appointed.