Art of Betrayal (68 page)

Two weeks before he left MI6 in the summer of 2004, Dearlove addressed staff in the Vauxhall Cross auditorium. Those who expected a fulsome apology would be disappointed. He gave a robust, even militant, defence of his approach. Don't think you can keep away from Whitehall, he warned. Just because we were caught up in a controversial war does not mean the whole modernising approach was wrong. A couple of weeks before that address, he had been in Washington for a farewell dinner at the CIA on a hot summer's evening. People who judge us have not done what we have done, he told the assembled spies with a nod to George Tenet, who would resign soon after. One CIA officer at the party thought the two spymasters looked ‘defeated'.
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His supporters believe Dearlove had been taking MI6 in the right direction and had been the right man
for the moment in the period after 9/11. It was only Iraq which blew the exercise off course. Others believed the direction itself was wrong, drawing the service too near to power.

On taking over, Scarlett knew he had to convince the sceptics and adopted a strategy of holding meetings and sandwich lunches with staff to listen to their concerns. Egged on by colleagues, a veteran asked at one of these whether Scarlett had any regrets over Iraq. Neither then, nor when asked publicly, would he explicitly say that he did.
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‘It was a difficult time for the service obviously,' he admitted in an interview. ‘The worry clearly at the time was that the reliability of our reporting had been brought into question … We had to carry on doing a good job, responding to the criticisms where you have to, put things right where it has been pointed out they've been wrong and over the passage of time the quality of your work will ensure that those questions move away.'
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Scarlett was told by some staff that they wanted to keep their distance from policy, their fingers having been burnt by Iraq. A few who had been close to Dearlove worried that their careers were finished, but most of them stayed and adapted. They believed that, as time went on, Scarlett realised how much the service's work had changed since his departure for the JIC before 9/11 and he began to restore the shift towards a more integrated approach with other services and other parts of Whitehall to cope with the challenges of terrorism and nuclear proliferation. The old Cold War world of gathering intelligence on static targets had largely but not totally passed away.

Scarlett also began edging the service once again into the public eye. The process had begun in the 1990s with avowal, and Dearlove had pushed the pace harder until the whole process was subsumed beneath the tidal wave of Iraq. With MI6's reputation battered by Iraq and British intelligence as a whole deeply worried by allegations of complicity in torture, it was time to put aside a concern for maintaining the air of mystery. For its centenary in 2009, Scarlett went so far as being interviewed in his office, a Union Jack fluttering outside the window and a clock built by the founder of the service, Mansfield Cumming, tick-tocking steadily in the corner. A degree of openness was now necessary, but it had its limits, he explained. ‘What we brought out of the shadows rightly in my view is the fact that we
exist when for the majority of my career we didn't even admit the fact that Britain has a secret intelligence service … The role which we play in government … is also there for discussion; the kinds of people that we employ, the way in which we recruit our staff … But what we actually do, the operations we conduct, the particular intelligence we produce, the sources with whom we work, the people with whom we work, that remains secret. And those are the key secrets, the operational secrets, which have always remained secret and must remain secret.' Scarlett's traditionalism still shone through in some areas, particularly a deep-seated belief in old-fashioned patriotism. ‘If you wish to serve your country, and many people do, then this is a pretty good way of doing it,' he said. Along with the armed services, the intelligence service was one of the few places where patriotism was still talked about openly in contrast to the more modern vogue for ‘shared values' and the like. Spies, like soldiers it seems, are asked to do difficult things for the country that others might shy away from and so still need that deep-seated emotional sense of national interest and working for the Crown.
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At other times, the failure over Iraq might have raised questions about what the service was really for, but the continued threat from international terrorism provided an answer. A third of MI6's work focused on the new world of terrorism. But there would have been offices in Vauxhall Cross whose work would have been familiar to Shergy as well as to Scarlett. Russians talk about a ‘third round' in the duel between the two countries (the first being MI6's ‘war' against the Bolsheviks from 1917, the second being the Cold War) and continue to see MI6 as bent on subverting their country. The Russians for their part continue to try and penetrate Britain, never with quite the success of Lyubimov's time, but still with plenty of vigour. ‘Since the end of the Cold War we have seen no decrease in the numbers of undeclared Russian intelligence officers in the UK at the Russian Embassy and associated organisations conducting covert activity in this country,' Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, announced in November 2007. Between a third and a half of staff at the Russian Embassy in London are thought to have some kind of intelligence role.

The Russians' prime target remains government and military secrets but also energy, bio-tech and high-tech industries. Their intelligence officers continue to look for individuals with access and some
frailty or vulnerability. None will share Philby's motivation. ‘Ideology doesn't wash any more. It's the far more human motivations,' a present-day spy-hunter explains – usually money, sometimes ego, occasionally blackmail. Targets will be patiently cultivated and first asked to pass something innocuous like a trade magazine before the pressure is increased. Meetings will be arranged in person and not by phone, all straight off the pages of the 1960s warning booklet ‘Their Trade is Treachery'. Sensitive agents will not be run by diplomats but met abroad or by visiting officers using the old le Carré era techniques of brush contacts and dead-letter drops. The illegals still ply their trade, travelling the world on a stack of false passports with no diplomatic cover to protect them. In 2010, a large network of illegals run by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, was rolled up in the United States including one member, Anna Chapman, who had previously lived in London. MI5's concentration on its new core mission of counter-terrorism meant it had fewer resources than it used to have to find out what exactly she had been doing. By 2008, it was spending only a paltry 3.5 per cent of its budget on trying to catch all the Russian (and other) spies running around Britain, many of whom target dissidents who have made London their home.
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The murder, using polonium-210, of a former officer of the FSB (Russia's domestic security service) Alexander Litvinenko, who had been on the MI6 payroll at one point, was a reminder of old methods, but the investigation into his death also revealed how far the KGB's successor had become intertwined with business and criminality, making it hard to know who exactly it was working for at times.

The ‘compromising situations' of old were still in play, with some new twists. In the summer of 2009, the US Ambassador in Moscow lodged a formal protest about a covertly filmed video showing one of his diplomats on a darkened Moscow street, then alone in his underwear in a hotel room. The video then cuts to the same room with the lights dimmed and with two people apparently having sex in the near-dark. The individual concerned was adamant it was a fake and experts in Washington agreed. A month earlier, another video had surfaced showing a British diplomat caught
in flagrante
with two blonde women while drinking champagne. That diplomat failed to deny anything and promptly resigned. The speculation was that he had turned down an approach from the Russians.

It would be naive to think the traffic was all one way. The Russians cite the 2006 discovery of an MI6 ‘spy rock' in a Moscow park containing a secret transmitter. An agent would walk past and press a button on a hand-held electronic device to transfer information. A British intelligence officer could later walk past with his own device and upload data. The Russians said that this was a sign that the old enemy had not lost its appetite. And so, alongside all the talk about collective security and globalisation, the old national games of power politics and spying persist. ‘The Cold War is long over,' Scarlett said in 2009 with a hint of exasperation. ‘And it is important for everybody to take a realistic view of what the other side is doing.'
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In Moscow, George Blake, living in his four-bedroom flat, still lectured to new recruits of Russia's intelligence services. He had finally developed a taste for vodka but conceded that life in the Soviet Union had ‘little to do with the idealised Communist society that I had dreamed of'. There were no regrets though. ‘I am 87 years old and to tell you the truth, it is no longer of particular importance to me whether my motivations are generally understood or not,' he said defiantly when asked to reflect on how it had all begun.
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At the end of 2009, Scarlett passed his green-inked pen to John Sawers. Sawers had joined MI6 at the start of his career but opted early to switch to the regular Foreign Office; he rose fast through senior positions there and in Number 10 and as ambassador to the United Nations. In MI6 terms he was an outsider. For decades, one of the prime responsibilities of a chief during his tenure was ‘succession planning' to prevent an outsider being brought in to take over the club. Past chiefs had even delayed retirement in order to make sure a crown prince could be groomed. MI6 has a strong sense of its own culture and traditions and of being somehow different. It was felt that outsiders did not understand the rules and that their appointment sent the wrong signal. But Sawers's arrival was a sign that the rest of government wanted to continue to draw MI6 into the mainstream. Sawers is smooth, in the Foreign Office manner, and is skilled in the ways of Whitehall and relaxed in the public eye. Given the choice between being a Moscow Man and a Camel Driver, he may opt for the latter description, perhaps reflecting a career spent in part in the Middle East, including Cairo and Baghdad, but also
exhibiting a desire to do things rather than just to collect intelligence quietly and build up the files.

Sawers's vision, befitting his background, was for a service more closely aligned with Whitehall. In the old days, it is said, the spies were like labradors dropping their bones of intelligence at the master's feet and asking what they should do next. Now ‘customers' in Whitehall want more than just intelligence and to be informed of a problem. They want to know what can be done to deal with it. It is about having impact, not just offering intelligence. It is not just about saying ‘Yemen is a risk' but offering help to build up the capacity of the Yemeni government to deal with the problem. It is not just about saying ‘Iran is this close to a nuclear weapon' but offering a way of slowing it down, perhaps by sabotaging some of its centrifuges which spin to enrich uranium (strangely, about half of them were breaking down in 2009, although a number of intelligence agencies might privately like to take the credit). Secret intelligence, Sawers explained, is ‘information that gives us new opportunities for action'.
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Sawers also believed that restoring reputation and public confidence as well as internal morale was a first-order priority. He found a climate of doubt among the public, unsure of the service's efficacy and ethics, which in turn risked putting a brake on its work. Inside, he found staff still nursing their wounds. ‘Put two officers in a room together and the conversation quickly turns to Iraq,' says one of his officers, although those two people will rarely agree on exactly what went wrong. An undercurrent of anger still flowed beneath the calm surface.

‘The most draining aspect of my job is reading, every day, intelligence reports describing the plotting of terrorists who are bent on maiming and murdering people in this country,' Sawers said in his debut speech (and the first by a chief to be televised).
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Terrorism and proliferation may top the agenda but the notion of national security has now moved beyond the old ideas of preserving and protecting the state to encompass broader notions of cyber security and human security. Should an intelligence service be looking at banking crises or whether another country is trying secretly to evade its responsibilities under some future treaty to prevent climate change? In an era in which the post-9/11 year-on-year budget
increases were becoming a memory, showing that intelligence had concrete value became a priority again, as it had done in the early 1990s. The threats were unpredictable and corrosive, Sawers warned. Economic intelligence returned to the agenda. If the taxpayer could be shown to have saved money through the service providing intelligence on threats to the financial system, then that would keep Treasury wolves at bay.

Afghanistan had also become a dominant focus for MI6, one which some feared risked tilting the balance of its culture too far. MI6 was criticised in some quarters for giving insufficient warning of what lay in store for the pitifully small force Britain sent to Helmand in 2006. The province had been quiet only because there had been no foreigners there before and it was quickly evident that narcotics, corruption and the insurgency offered a potent witches' brew. In the 1980s, the covert war that Gerry Warner had initiated in Peshawar had been a sideshow to the bigger war against the Soviet Union; by Sawers's time, support for military operations had become a dominant strain of work in which enormous resources were invested. This was not the world of long-term, patient agent handling but of quickly providing real-time tactical intelligence to the troops out in the muddy fields and dirt compounds. Human sources still needed to be recruited, but the security situation was so tight that different forms of tradecraft had to be used. There were also clandestine, back-channel talks with Taliban commanders to try and bribe or persuade those considered vulnerable to leave the fight, a move exposed when President Karzai angrily expelled two European officials for working with MI6 on a deal that he disliked and when it was claimed that MI6 had managed to facilitate the travel to Kabul for talks of a top Taliban leader who turned out to be a grocer from Quetta. There would be worry in some quarters that it would be harder later to switch away from such a large, static target and focus on new, emerging threats which could suddenly crop up elsewhere, as well as on more traditional targets like Russia and China which would require less rough-and-ready fieldwork and more of the old Moscow Rules.