WHEN I GOT back from Moscow in the middle of December 1991, there was still no news about who was to succeed as Director-General. Speculation was growing, as everyone knew that the then Director-General’s sixtieth birthday was in February and that was when he would retire. But one day, shortly before Christmas, after a meeting, I was asked to stay behind and he said, ‘Congratulations. You are to be the next Director-General.’ By then, it did not come as a great surprise to me, but thinking about it now, it is, to say the least, rather strange that no-one had thought to ask me if I wanted the job. Whatever process had brought us to the point of my being told that I’d got it, this certainly was not open competition. No applications had been asked for and I had neither applied nor been interviewed, or not knowingly at any rate. What would have happened if at that late stage I had said I did not want it, I don’t know. But I did not say that, though it soon became clear that what I was being offered was something of a poisoned chalice.
At the same time as I was told that I had got the job, I was also told, almost by the way, that the appointment and my name were to be publicly announced, and the announcement would be in the next few days. It did not take me a moment’s thought to realise that there was likely to be a sensation. It was the first time the appointment of a Director-General of MI5 had ever been formally announced. What’s more, I was a woman and the first woman to hold the post, and that alone was bound to cause a stir. When I had recovered from the shock, I said, ‘I’m not sure this is a very good idea.’ I rang up the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, Clive Whitmore, to tell him so. But he seemed to think I was making a lot of fuss about nothing and anyway, ‘The Prime Minister has agreed,’ he said. It was clear that the powers-that-be in Whitehall had taken all the decisions and had signed up the ministers and trying to unscramble anything at that stage would not be a good way to start my period in office.
Unfortunately for me, they had been so focused on taking the decision that they seemed to have given no thought to the impact it would have, or how the inevitable furore should be handled. I asked what arrangements had been made to brief the press. Apart from the announcement, which was not to be accompanied by a photograph, for security reasons – the Provisional IRA were active in Great Britain at the time – nothing was laid on. It was not envisaged that I would give interviews and comment from me was to be restricted to a two-line statement of pleasure as part of the press statement.
Even I, inexperienced in the ways of the media as I was in those days, thought that was rather asking for trouble. The principle behind making the announcement was one I approved of. It was the logical outcome of the Act of Parliament which had been passed in 1989 to put the work of MI5 on a fully legal basis. The post of Director-General had thus become a statutory one and so, the thinking went, the public had a right to know who was holding the appointment. Truth to tell, there was also a good ‘equality’ angle to the story, which the government’s advisers had not missed. But the way the announcement was handled was a disaster, though as it turned out not a PR disaster, but a personal disaster for the girls and for me. Though I think we managed to turn it later to an advantage for MI5, its effect on our personal lives was permanent.
I decided that Harriet and I would go away from home the day of the announcement and stay away for a couple of days to let the furore die down, as I rather naïvely thought. Sophie was away at university. So we parked the dog with the security staff at the office and went to stay in a hotel in Half Moon Street, just round the corner from our Curzon Street office. We watched the TV news that evening, as they tried with difficulty to cope with the government’s announcement. They had no photograph, nobody knew anything about me and they didn’t know who to ask for a comment. In the end John, who as Director-General of the Health and Safety Executive occasionally appeared on TV when there was a disaster of some kind, agreed to comment. He told an astonished nation that they were lucky to have someone like me to look after them.
It was an extraordinary experience. Having spent all my career being anonymous and trying to keep in the shadows, saying as little as possible about myself or my work, I suddenly saw myself plastered all over the TV and the newspapers. The appointment became an international story and our contacts all over the world were sending us articles from newspapers from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires.
Unfortunately, I had not managed to contact Sophie to tell her what was going to happen, and she later told me that she was sitting in her digs that evening with the TV on in the corner of the room when she suddenly realised that they were talking about her mother. She said, ‘I thought you must have done something wrong, because I knew you were not supposed to talk about your work.’
After a couple of days, during which the story continued to run, Harriet and I got fed up with cowering in a hotel. It was too uncomfortable and we were worried about the dog, so we packed up, collected him from the office and went home.
The trouble was that Ian Fleming and John le Carré, depending on your taste in reading, had done their jobs too well. They had convinced us all that the world of intelligence was full of intrigue and excitement involving men like Alec Guinness or Sean Connery. When a middle-aged woman popped up as the only representative they had ever been told about, looking as someone said to me ‘as if you could have been a teacher’, no-one knew how to react. Their readers thought MI5 was just like the spy stories; that it had not changed since the days of Vernon Kell before the First World War. Not surprisingly, they did not know things had moved on. By saying nothing at all about ourselves and what we did, we had allowed the myths to continue. The semi-covert handling of the announcement of my appointment had merely made things worse.
But there’s no doubt at all that most of the excitement was caused because I was a woman, not at all what the spy story writers had told them the head of MI5 was like. The press was all over the place on this angle. At first, the headline writers tried to get me back where women belonged, in front of the kitchen sink. ‘Housewife Superspy’, said one. ‘Mother of Two Gets Tough with Terrorists’ and ‘Queen of All Our Secrets’ were some other efforts. Then we had the love interest. ‘MI5 Wife in Secret Love Split’, proclaimed the Sun. When the girls heard this on the Today Programme, they rushed out to buy the Sun, behaving just as the headline writers intended, thinking they were about to learn something amazing and scandalous about my private life. How disappointed they were when they found that all it said was that John and I were living separately.
Then I became ‘Woman of Mystery’, and people were invited to phone in if they knew anything about me. Later on I became a hard-eyed manipulator of Whitehall. Even later still, I was repackaged as ‘M’, Ian Fleming’s Head of MI6, and played by Judi Dench in several James Bond films. The Oxford Union asked whether Judi Dench and I would appear together to address them, I can’t remember on what subject, but, as ever, the substance would have mattered less than the appearance.
That was the beginning of one of the most uncomfortable periods of my life. The press inevitably found out very quickly where we lived. Lots of people in Islington knew us. The children had lived there most of their lives and had many friends and we had lived in the same street for nearly ten years by then though the neighbours had no idea what I did for a living. They were very surprised indeed to find that the quiet lady who lived in the house up the road had turned out to be someone famous.
Photographers camped outside the house, determined to be the first to get a photograph. In the absence of anything better, the New Statesman’s blurry picture of me walking up the street in the black-and-white coat got lots of outings. The coat itself had long ago gone to a jumble sale but at that point it could probably have been sold for a large sum, the hype was so great. Before long the photographers succeeded, as inevitably they would, and several desperately unflattering pictures appeared of me unloading my shopping from the boot of the car on a Saturday morning, wearing tatty old jeans and a Barbour and looking as dishevelled as most people do in those circumstances. Some of the newspapers, entering into the spirit of things, printed their snatched photographs with a black band across my eyes, which made me look a lot worse. One of those pictures appeared in one newspaper to illustrate an article about British women in public life, asking why they always looked so much worse than the French. The French were represented by a photograph of Elizabeth Gigou, then the French Minister for Europe, leaning nonchalantly on her office desk, beautifully coiffured and wearing Dior, Yves St Laurent or something similar. That taught me what all women in public life have to learn fast, that you’d better look as good as you can, whatever you are doing, in case there is a telephoto lens about. Otherwise you risk looking ridiculous, and whatever institution or organisation you represent looking ridiculous with you. When I see Cherie Blair, slimmed down by remorseless exercise, stoically wearing her designer clothes on holiday, I know how she’s feeling.
After that, it was open house for the press and in due course the Sunday Times, fresh from its triumphs over the revelations about the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, chose to do an in-depth enquiry into my private life. Using a private investigator, they obtained details of my bank account – they even put some small sum of money into it under a spoof Russian name which they claimed was that of the head of the KGB – a list of the numbers which had been called from my home phone, which branch of Marks & Spencer I bought my Saturday shopping from, and various other things. I was rung up on a Saturday morning by a Sunday Times reporter, who told me proudly that they had obtained the information by covertly following me around and that they were going to publish it, on the grounds that it was in the public interest to know how vulnerable I was to terrorists. He added that if they wanted to they could get details of my medical records too. I was not sure what the public interest angle in that would have been but at the time it did not seem worth complaining, though I did later make a complaint to the Data Protection Commissioner, without any noticeable result.
The situation became even more heated when a small conference centre at the top of our street took a booking for a conference with a security theme. It had nothing to do with us or with any part of government, but the Islington police judged that security protection was needed, and closed the road with barriers and police cars. Not surprisingly, the neighbours and the local paper, the Islington Gazette, connected this with my presence in the road, and everyone began to regard me as a thoroughly undesirable neighbour. People with whom I had been on nodding terms for several years, suddenly started to say things like: ‘I wish you wouldn’t go to work just as I’m taking my daughter to school,’ with the clear implication that if someone tried to shoot me and missed, they might hit them. Another neighbour wrote to the Islington Gazette to complain that my helicopters, ceaselessly circling overhead were keeping his family awake. The helicopters were part of the policing of the Arsenal football matches and had nothing at all to do with me. I went to a meeting of the neighbours, to try to calm all this down, but I did not have much success, in fact I think I made matters worse. When one of the neighbours on the other side of the road let in a press photographer and a large picture of our house appeared prominently in the Independent, there seemed no option but to pack up and go. With the level of Provisional IRA activity at the time, it was clearly not safe for us to stay.
Having decided we had to move, the question became where to? Though it had long been the custom for certain ministers and military Chiefs of Staff to have secure accommodation provided for them, no such arrangement had previously been necessary for the heads of the intelligence agencies, who had until then been protected by anonymity and lived the life of ordinary private citizens. This was a new situation, and it took many discussions in Whitehall and some time to sort out. But though it was uncomfortable for us, it was a bit of a joke for others that the Director-General was wandering around the town, living out of a suitcase, with nowhere to lay her head. In an article in the Spectator about my brush with the Sunday Times, Auberon Waugh told the probably apocryphal story of Roger Hollis, the Director-General under Macmillan, who lived in an unguarded house in Campden Hill Square in West London. At one point, according to Waugh, the Prime Minister’s private secretary took to telephoning him at home and saying, ‘Aha, villain! I know your secret,’ then hanging up. The calls were eventually traced to the Prime Minister’s office and there was a great stink.
After the Independent photograph, my security advisers wanted me to go quickly while they assessed the situation, so we – Harriet, dog and I – moved into a flat at the top of some offices we had in those days in Grosvenor Street. It was the most uncomfortable and unsuitable place to be for any length of time. To take the dog for a walk, you had to descend several floors in a lift and walk through miles of corridors, past the guards to the street. It was practically impossible for Harriet to invite her friends in to see her. We felt as though we were in prison. In the daytime, the dog had to come into my office, where the security guards looked after him. After a bit they made him an honorary member of their team, as Alpha 7, with a pass on his collar showing a photograph of a dog, which they had cut out from a magazine. He went on the regular security patrols with them and was rather proud of his new status, but he was the only member of the family who was enjoying himself.
As part of the process, we went to look at a Whitehall building, where some of the ministers who need particular security protection live. There was one vacant flat, which it was thought for a time we might have. But when Harriet saw that cavernous place, with its immense, high rooms filled with the most decrepit, albeit antique, furniture, and realised that all her friends would have to pass the scrutiny of armed policemen to visit her, she burst into tears and said that whatever happened she was not going to live there. Even though I pointed out what a splendid view we would have of the Trooping of the Colour, she was not to be persuaded. For her it had all become just too much. I began to worry that if this went on much longer, I was going to lose all my family. That was a sacrifice I was not prepared to make, for my career or the country. So we went back home to consider what to do next.
It was tough for the girls. Harriet was just starting work for her A Levels. She was often alone in the evenings during that period when I was working late or away and she was scared stiff. She told me later that she did not know what she was more afraid of, the press at the front door or creakings on the stairs in the evenings, which might be the IRA creeping in at the back. It was not Harriet the journalists were after, so though she had to run the gauntlet of the photographers, she could go in and out of the front door with impunity. But while we were sticking to the ‘no photograph’ policy, I had to slink out through the gate at the back, into someone else’s garden, and reappear out of the side door of a house in the next street. It was all very disruptive to my daily schedule.
Sophie had a rough time too, even though she was away. A flat in north London where she sometimes stayed with friends was raided by the anti-terrorist squad who were looking for a group of IRA suspects in connection with the bomb at Harrods. She was not there when the police broke in, but her friends were spread-eagled on the floor and taken in for questioning. Not surprisingly, they all thought she was to blame and no-one believed the truth which was that the police had raided the wrong address. That story, which featured under prominent headlines in most newspapers (typically in the Daily Star as ‘Spy Chief Girl in IRA Cop Gaffe’) convinced some journalists that there was no smoke without fire and that if she was not a terrorist she must belong to an extreme left wing student group. They demanded interviews on the grounds that it was in the public interest. Some turned up unannounced at the door of a remote cottage where she was living at the time, when she was there alone, and without saying who they were, thrust cameras and a microphone into her face, confusing and terrifying her.
The advice continued to be that we should move, and that advice became more urgent when some men who were arrested in connection with one of the bombing raids in London proved to have a newspaper cutting which made it clear where we lived. So we put the house on the market. Clearly we were never going to be able to live there again. We went underground, an ironic outcome of greater openness. Our new covert life was not easy, particularly for the girls. It is difficult to lead a normal young life if you have to be careful all the time whom you invite to the house, and give your telephone number to. Their particular worry centred on their car. It was registered and insured in another name, and they were always worried in case they were stopped by the police or had an accident. They used to say before they went out, ‘Now just tell me again, Mum, who am I?’
The whole of my time as Director-General was dogged by our unsettled living arrangements, because even when it was agreed where we should live, it was a place that needed a lot of work to make it habitable. Harriet and I camped there surrounded by builders for more than a year. Our first Christmas dinner there, nearly two years after I took up the job, was held in a room furnished with garden chairs and lit only by candles in bottles.
I bought another house for my retirement, but unfortunately I was just beginning to move myself in, during the winter before I retired, when something froze in the roof over a long weekend when I was away, and the next thing I knew was that all the ceilings had collapsed and the place was a total wreck. The massive damage was only discovered when a neighbour rang the estate agent who had sold me the property, and through a circuitous route the news came into my office that water could be heard running in my house. I was in a meeting with the Prime Minister at the time, introducing my successor, so a colleague went to investigate. When he opened the door, water was pouring down the stairs and out of every door frame and light fitting, there was about a foot of water in the basement and all the carpets were squelching. They hardly dared tell me what had happened, and I was forbidden to go and look, until pumping and debris-clearing operations had finished. All that took more than a year to sort out. So my last few months as Director-General, just like my first years, were overshadowed by living problems.
The initial excitement of the announcement of my appointment took a long time to die down. More than a year after I was appointed things were still quite hysterical. I was invited to one of HM The Queen’s regular lunches for people in public life. There were a number of famous people there, including the then manager of the England football team, Graham Taylor, and Linford Christie. However, the press got wind that I was there, and assembled at the gates of Buckingham Palace to take my photograph as I left. At the time, on the advice of my security advisers, we were still pursuing the ‘no photograph’ policy, so with the connivance of the Royal Household, I slunk out ignominiously through the Royal Mews after lunch was over. But that did not put the reporters off, and we had, ‘Oh to be a Fly with the Spy at the Palace’, covering an article about what I might have said to my fellow guests.
For the first few years I was bombarded with requests to make public appearances of various kinds, all of which were most unsuitable for a public servant and a successor of Vernon Kell. By every post came invitations – would I appear on Wogan or the Clive Anderson Show or Have I Got News for You? Would I be interviewed by Vogue, or be a guest on Masterchef or sit on the sofa with Richard and Judy? I had no illusions that most of it was because I was a woman, and the press still liked to play to what it perceived as the sexism of its readers. None of the male Permanent Secretaries in Whitehall was asked to do any of it and nor did I take up the invitations.
There is no doubt that our first steps into openness could easily have been better handled. But there’s also no doubt that there would have been far less fuss had I been a man. When later on the names of the heads of the other two intelligence agencies, MI6 and GCHQ, were publicly announced, there was hardly a ripple, though by then some of the lessons of handling such announcements had been learned. When I retired and my successor was named, we had become much more adept at these things and as he was a man and the announcement was expected, thankfully he had none of the same furore to put up with.
In spite of the media reaction, to my colleagues and the intelligence community, in this country and abroad, my appointment came as no particular surprise. Nearly half the staff of MI5 was female by that time and although many of them still worked as clerks and secretaries, there was also a fair percentage of women in the intelligence officer and other professional grades, though they were not as well represented at the top as they will be in the near future. I have made fun of some of my male colleagues of the ’70s, describing them as old-fashioned and traditional in their attitudes, but whatever criticisms can be laid at the door of some of them, I had been allowed to progress up the hierarchy without ever feeling that to get on I had to pretend to be or to think exactly like them. Whatever popular fiction would have us believe, there is no typical MI5 officer, no overpowering ‘house style’, to which everyone is required to conform. On the contrary, diversity, individuality and even eccentricity have always been tolerated, provided that there was a clear willingness to work within the operational and legal rules.
By the time I became Director-General, MI5 had been through a series of huge institutional shocks, bringing about big changes in its culture, the type of people it employed and the way it managed its resources, both human and financial. Even our task was changing. As we moved away from the priorities of the Cold War and with legislation and oversight, we began to emerge uneasily from behind the veil of secrecy which had hidden us for most of my working life. We had coped with all this change with what I think in retrospect was quite surprising sang-froid, calmly getting on with the task in hand. But there was a strong sense that though we had moved on a long way, we had not yet arrived anywhere. As Director-General I had been turned into a public figure; we were about to move to a new high-profile building and to take on, quite publicly, major new terrorism responsibilities. In marketing jargon, where should we position ourselves in this new world order? Who were we now? My role would be to find an answer to that question. The chaotic start to my period as Director-General made this urgent both professionally and privately.
As Director-General my approach was collegiate, a style which I found worked well, although, as I have learned in the last few years, it is scorned by many of our business leaders. It is a style which comes more naturally to women, who tend on the whole to feel more able than many successful men to look for and create consensus, and more inclined to ask for and listen to advice. The Board of Directors became a group of equals where our strategies and policies were discussed, a far cry from the Directors’ meetings I had attended some years before. I encouraged my Directors to behave corporately and not as barons each representing their own fiefdoms, though they needed little encouragement on this as they all had views on the issues and were anxious to air them. We also listened to the advice and experience of people from various walks of life outside the public service; I was determined not to fall into the mistake of earlier days in allowing ourselves to be cut off from the outside world.
We went off to the country for the first ever Board ‘Awayday’, and over a weekend we did our SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) and sang songs round the piano in the evenings. The management gurus would have been proud of us. Many things emerged from that occasion and its successors, which produced a strategic agenda. But the one thing that emerged most clearly, not least as a result of the intense interest of the press in my appointment and the nonsense that many of them wrote, was the huge gap between the perception of MI5 and the reality.
As long as I could remember, we had suffered from ill-informed and often hostile comments on our affairs. It was in large part our own fault because we had never commented and never sought to put the record straight, though some of us had long thought that we should, and there’s no doubt that silence had harmed our reputation and with it, to some extent, our effectiveness. External perceptions mattered more than they had in the days of the Cold War. Then secrecy was more important than public understanding. Now the balance had changed. As MI5 moved more and more into work against terrorism, it was inevitable that more of its activities and investigations would come to public attention, whether we liked it or not, if only through trials in the courts. It was important that juries and judges believed the evidence our officers would give. If their entire knowledge of MI5 was based on James Bond films or John le Carré novels, or even on the sort of reporting which was at that time common in the press, they might think not a word we said could be trusted.
In any case it was undermining for the morale of the staff, who were being called on to work hard in sometimes dangerous circumstances, to see misleading and silly stories about what they were supposedly doing continually appearing in the newspapers. I had got fed up with the ‘MI5 Blunders’ headline, which seemed to be permanently made up and ready for use above any story in which the intelligence services figured. So the task was to get rid of that headline once and for all and to raise the level of debate about security matters. It was a mission to inform, using my high public profile as a way of doing it.
Clearly, an effective intelligence service cannot be entirely open about itself. Details of specific operations, techniques, the names of agents must always remain secret. But there is much that can and should be aired about the need for secret organisations in a democracy and how they should be controlled. There were risks, and many people ready to warn of them, not least some members of the Service who feared that greater openness would raise the profile and therefore the risks of terrorist attack. And they had a valid point. It was a question of balancing the risks and the rewards. ‘It will be a slippery slope,’ they said. ‘You may think you can set boundaries on what you will say, but the press will push remorselessly and you’ll find yourselves saying more and more.’ ‘A wise virgin keeps her veils,’ Simon Jenkins warned us in The Times.
I felt entirely confident about the story we had to tell and reasonably confident that we could stick to the boundaries we had set ourselves. We were an effective, well run, legally based and overseen organisation, of which the country could and should be proud. Like any organisation, we would not always get everything right, but when we did not, we were prepared to explain ourselves. We listened to the warnings, but decided that an even wiser virgin knows exactly how many veils she can cast off while remaining safe.
So an openness programme was drawn up in the hope of getting us off the back foot and into the lead. We did not take advice from PR consultants, but worked it out for ourselves. The various steps were obvious, though they were not achieved without a considerable amount of angst elsewhere in the system. A first step was to publish a booklet about MI5, putting some facts into the public domain for the first time. It is now in its third edition. The process of getting the first edition off the stocks would have made a good episode of Yes Minister. After much debate about the principle and the content – every word of the draft text was scrutinised in case it said something that somebody might regret at some time in the future – Whitehall reluctantly acquiesced and the Home Office even agreed that when it was published, I should present it to the media at a launch conference at the Home Office.
The project had been kept a close secret. The journalists were summoned to the Home Office for an undisclosed announcement. When they found out, they seemed both amazed at what was happening and bemused by it. Though the launch looked like a press conference, and I answered all the questions, the assembled journalists were told by the Home Office that they must not say in their newspapers who had briefed them. The journalists all knew who I was and telling them that they could not say so introduced an unnecessarily farcical element into the proceedings. It was not a very auspicious beginning to our openness programme, though the booklet was well received.
That extraordinary ruling resulted from the nightmare in Whitehall at the time that if they did not keep a very close rein on me, I would end up answering questions about security policy and usurping the Home Secretary’s role. Despite the anxiety about any public appearances I made, I was perfectly clear where my role ended and the Home Secretary’s began. If any proposal for a public appearance was put to the Home Office for clearance, a major lecture for example, the answer would come back, usually after much correspondence had been exchanged and weeks had gone by, ‘The Home Secretary agrees, provided that you don’t answer questions.’ What terrible faux pas they expected me to commit in the course of answering questions I never discovered, and of course I gave many talks on less formal occasions, which were not cleared, when I always answered questions. It was illogical and a pity because it gave the impression that I was only prepared to talk to a prepared text.
The afternoon of the booklet launch I took a photocall at the Home Office with Michael Howard, then Home Secretary, and for the first time authorised pictures appeared in the newspapers. The photographs were accompanied by much comment about my personal appearance and what I was wearing, but the comment I enjoyed most was a letter in the Spectator from someone who wrote to say that as a result of disclosures made in the name of ‘openness’, he found himself fancying the head of MI5.
From then on my life became an open secret. Though for security we still lived under cover and I used a false name in many everyday situations, I began to be recognised in the street and, like many women in public life, I also acquired my quota of telephone and letter stalkers, some of whom are still with me. Casual social contact and even transactions in shops required a snap decision about whether I should give my real name or an alias. If one or other of the girls was with me that decision obviously covered them too, something they found uncomfortable and annoying. They hated the level of intrusion of work into our private lives, caused by the security requirement.
After the booklet launch, I began to accept invitations to lunch with the media, and I realised that often on those occasions the hosts were just as apprehensive as I was. An early occasion was at ITN and prominent among the guests was Jon Snow. He proceeded to interview me over the lunch table as if I had been on Channel 4 News; he seemed amazed that I was a normal person and even said that he had expected me to be more like Rosa Kleb, the KGB officer in From Russia With Love who attacks James Bond with the knives in her boots. I went again to ITN later to do an off-the-record question and answer session over lunch and when I finally retired, they presented me with a game they had created, based on Monopoly, which was called ‘MI7 – The Game for MI5 Chiefs’. The Angel Islington, Mayfair and the other properties around the board had been replaced with ‘Bugging Kit’, ‘False Passport’, ‘Spy Satellite’ and other tools of the trade. You lost £40 if you left your unlocked briefcase on ITN’s newsdesk, though you won £100 when Channel 4 News alleged that a certain MP was a KGB agent. I played ‘MI7’ with some colleagues just before I retired and we imagined the headlines, ‘MI5 Board of Directors Plays ITN’s Game’.
When at the end of 1993 I was asked to do the next Dimbleby Lecture on BBC TV, it seemed to fit perfectly into the strategy we had adopted. It would be a high-profile, dignified opportunity to put some basic facts on the record and to raise some issues which might generate a decent debate, for example how security services should be controlled in a democracy and how far it is appropriate for the state to intrude on the privacy of the few to protect the safety of the many. These were issues about which many people had opinions, but so far because of our own secrecy the debate had not been well informed. The title ‘Security and Democracy. Is there a conflict?’ seemed appropriate. People would be able to see me, hear me speak and they could form their own judgement of what I said. What’s more, I would not be offending against the Home Office restriction on my answering questions.
But when I asked for agreement to do the lecture, all the same anxieties that had surrounded the booklet were raised again. After a prolonged period of gestation and much consultation, the answer came from Whitehall that ministers had agreed. But when we had drafted the text, everyone with any angle on anything I wanted to say had to be consulted and every word was picked over and brooded on. At one stage I feared that I would end up by merely opening and shutting my mouth and saying nothing at all. I had a meeting with the then head of the Foreign Office, David Gillmore, who appeared to have been briefed by his officials to object to practically everything about any foreign country, presumably in case someone should be upset. In the end, Robin Butler, the Cabinet Secretary, managed to ensure that I could say everything I wanted to say.
Appearing on TV to talk about MI5 was quite a dramatic thing to do, and I was extremely nervous. But I felt that it was a seminal occasion in terms of our relationship with the British public. On the whole I was pleased with the reaction. It was not all favourable of course, but some of it, at least, was serious. The Times published the text of the lecture in full and other papers and magazines printed articles discussing the issues. However, inevitably, one or two journalists wrote about my clothes and one wrote that I had very big ears, and that these must be useful for covert communications.
Our greater openness with the press and the public eventually attracted the attention of Parliament. Under the 1989 Security Service Act, which provided legal oversight of the Service’s work, no provision had been made for any form of direct parliamentary scrutiny. It was the Home Secretary who answered to Parliament for our activities. This was always seen as likely to change in time, but ministers of the day were not enthusiasts for a parliamentary committee, which would inevitably require their attendance as well as ours to answer questions. However, certain members of the Home Affairs Select Committee were eager to add the Security Service to the scope of their scrutiny. Barbara Roche, at the time a member at the Home Affairs Select Committee, hearing that I had been to lunch with various newspapers, invited me to have lunch with her at the House of Commons. This invitation somehow got into the public domain, and had I accepted, which I was rather keen to do, the occasion would have risked becoming a political statement about parliamentary oversight. Instead, it was decided that the Home Affairs Select Committee could come to our office in Gower Street for a briefing and lunch. However, it was made clear that this did not imply an acceptance on the part of the government of any jurisdiction by the Committee over the Service.
Members of the Committee accepted the invitation in that spirit, and agreed among themselves that they would keep the details of the briefing confidential. However, the press soon got wind that they were coming, and a Keystone Cops situation developed, as the cars we had sent to the House of Commons to bring the Committee to our offices in Gower Street were pursued by photographers and reporters on motor bikes. Apparently, we had not told the Committee members where they were going, not through any wish to keep it a secret, but merely because it had not occurred to us as they were being driven there, which made it seem all the more mysterious.
Meanwhile, in the calm of my office I knew nothing of the excitement down at the House of Commons, until a rather breathless and shaken Committee arrived. Entering into the spirit of the occasion, our dining-room cook had put ‘Reform cutlets’ on the menu. The menu card was purloined by one of our guests, Chris Mullin I think, and in the absence of hard information about the content of the meeting, the menu became news and was reported in various newspapers and a satirical version of it later appeared in Private Eye. Kenneth Clarke complained to me later that Reform cutlets were very old-fashioned – the joke had apparently passed him by.
At the time, I had on the wall of my office a framed quotation from Edmund Burke, which I had inherited from one of my predecessors. It read: ‘Those who would carry on great public schemes must be proof against the most fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults and worst of all the presumptuous judgement of the ignorant upon their designs.’ I was rather embarrassed about this and hoped no one would notice it, but as luck would have it, Chris Mullin did, and later sent a message asking for the wording. I did not give it to him, as I suspected it would only turn up later in some sardonic article. Instead, I removed it.
Though in many ways that was a bizarre occasion, it was also a historic one, in that it marked the first formal direct contact MI5 had with Parliament, other than with ministers or shadow ministers. The Home Affairs Select Committee did not in the end acquire oversight responsibility for MI5. In 1994, the Intelligence Services Act, which provided a legal status for our two sister services, SIS and GCHQ, brought in a new parliamentary oversight committee, the Intelligence and Security Committee, to take on the parliamentary oversight function for all three services.
I became Director-General in February 1992. On 9 April the general election was called. In the period before a general election, the heads of departments customarily offer a briefing to shadow ministers. The odds were on Labour winning the 1992 election and it seemed likely that Roy Hattersley would become Home Secretary and my boss, so I invited him to visit us. I prepared carefully for his visit, conscious that it was he who had said of us in parliament during the debate on the 1989 Security Service Bill, that we were the worst security service in the world. I was determined that we should present the friendly, open and relaxed face, which was actually us and not appear defensive in the face of his criticism. I had the office specially polished up and acquired some potted plants to make it look, I hoped, warm and welcoming. I even removed a sword which had been presented to my predecessor by one of the East European security services at the end of the Cold War, because I thought it looked too militaristic. After all the trouble I took to create the right impression, I was mortified to hear him talking about the occasion in a quiz show on the BBC recently; the best he could do was to describe my office as gloomy. But that relationship was not to be. Labour did not win the election and Kenneth Clarke became Home Secretary.
Dealing with the politics at home and relationships abroad took a good deal of my time. I have mentioned the group of European Heads of Service but there was another group to which we belonged which met much less frequently but was altogether more exotic. That was the Heads of Commonwealth Security Services. The year in which I became Director-General it met in Kampala. The Ugandans looked after us superbly, but a detectable tremor went through the assembled company on the first night when at the welcoming cocktail party in the hotel grounds, we were told that the pleasant grassy hollow where we were taking our drinks was the former killing field where Idi Amin’s men had slaughtered their opponents before throwing them into the river. The long-legged Maribou Storks, which perched precariously on all the trees around, watching us in a menacing way, had apparently first arrived in the centre of town in those days, attracted by the rotting corpses. The delegates were housed in two separate hotels and I was pleased to be told that it was the other one, not the one I was staying in, that was Idi Amin’s HQ. However, one of our fellow delegates was effectively deprived of a sound night’s sleep for the duration of the conference, when he realised that the room we were being told of, where opponents of the regime had been tortured before being killed, was the very same room he had been allocated.
The Commonwealth Security Conferences – I attended two during my time as Director-General – were characterised by the very different security concerns of the delegates. At that first one, there was earnest discussion of a topic close to the hearts of some of our African colleagues, how to convince governments that there should be continuity of the security service when the government changed – in other words how to prevent the service becoming the tool of the party in power – an issue which mercifully I had never had to contend with. At the second such conference I attended, the gap was even wider. When each country was asked to say what was their top priority security concern, I said, ‘Terrorism’, and the Namibian delegate said, ‘Cattle rustling’.
Alongside all the political activity and foreign liaison, we had to get on with what we were there to do – the security intelligence work. The major task during my first year as Director-General was to implement the decision that had by then been taken that we should take over lead responsibility for intelligence work against Irish republican terrorism on the mainland of Great Britain from the Metropolitan Police Special Branch. As soon as we had finalised the details with the Metropolitan Police, which took some time, we needed to move quickly and start to try to make a difference to the level of intelligence available, so that any terrorist attacks might be thwarted. Thanks to the Treasury’s attentions, and our own analysis over the preceding few years, we had a very good idea of where our resources and costs lay, which was a great help when almost overnight we had to redirect about 25% of our effort away from the targets of the Cold War and into supplementing our existing counter-terrorist effort. Making such a change is not as radical as it may sound. The fundamentals of intelligence work are the same whether you are working against terrorists or spies. The intelligence tools are the same, the assessment skills are the same, but clearly, there is much to be learned about any new intelligence target, although we already had considerable experience working against this one in both Northern Ireland and continental Europe.
Working extremely closely with the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, in circumstances where not all of them were pleased with the change of responsibilities, was not always easy. At the beginning, we sent some of our staff down to Scotland Yard to sit in with some police teams. They were mostly female, not because of any desire to make a sexist point, but because they were the people who had been doing similar work in the Service and had the best background to make a good contribution. They got some first-hand experience of how women were treated in the police. There were small harassments of various kinds and one report came back that one of our officers found a pile of dirty washing on her desk one day, with the instruction that she was to wash it. I heard that she threw it out of the window, and was not harassed again.
The middle of a bombing campaign in Great Britain was not the best time to take on this new work and inevitably it put us in a very high-profile position. By its nature, intelligence, especially on such a well-trained, well-equipped and secure organisation as the Provisional IRA is hard to come by. In his Autobiography John Major has set out in detail the complex policy he was pursuing during these years to try to bring peace to Northern Ireland. Our job, with our other intelligence and police colleagues, was to try to ensure that he and his advisers had the best possible supply of intelligence to help them weave their way through the complexities. This meant that from time to time I brought him very unwelcome news about operations being planned or imminent, which sometimes we did not have enough intelligence to be sure of preventing. On such occasions he would look grave and say, ‘I’m relying on you, Stella,’ and I would go back to my colleagues and say, ‘The Prime Minister is relying on us,’ to which they would reply, ‘Gosh, thanks,’ as they went off to do their job.
During all that period I never felt that the political agenda in any way affected what I could or could not report. No-one ever tried to put any pressure on me to report only what they wanted to hear, or to slant intelligence briefings to fit the political agenda. In fact the only time in my whole career when I ever felt that sort of pressure was in my dealings with the Americans over Northern Ireland, though the FBI were always immensely cooperative and helpful, and responded magnificently to our many requests for operational assistance. But just before I retired, I was given a very hostile grilling in Washington by the then President’s national security team, who clearly had their own view of the rights and wrongs of the situation in the island of Ireland, their own sources of information, and their own political agenda. They did not wish to hear anything from me which did not fit with it and I had no confidence in what they would do with anything I told them. It was a novel, unwelcome and scary experience for me.
In all my dealings with John Major I never felt that there was any chance that he would blame us if we were unable to prevent a terrorist attack. He understood that there is no such thing as 100% intelligence or security and provided we showed professionalism, the right skills, the right strategies, and had not made some stupid mistake, he would back us up. This support was very important. When intelligence operations are successful and prevent a terrorist incident, no-one knows anything about it. It is very rare in those circumstances for anything to be said in public. The priority is to preserve the sources of intelligence. However, when intelligence fails to prevent an incident and a bomb does go off, there is a very high-profile disaster for all to see. That will inevitably happen from time to time and during those first few years we failed to prevent an attack on the City of London, the bombing in Docklands with which the ProvisionaI IRA signalled the end of its ceasefire in 1996, and the bombing of the centre of Manchester later in that year. I was in New Zealand, attending a conference, when the Provisional IRA detonated its Docklands bomb. I was at Auckland airport in February 1996, just setting off for a weekend break in the Bay of Islands to which I was greatly looking forward, when news of the Docklands bomb and the IRA’s announcement that its ceasefire was over, came over the mobile phone. I went straight from Auckland airport to the local office of the New Zealand Security Service and sat there with my New Zealand colleagues in a state of shock watching the destruction and chaos in London on CNN, waiting to hear when I could catch a plane back to London. I set off home that evening, on one of the gloomiest journeys of my life, a journey that seemed to go on for ever. I went straight to a meeting in Michael Howard’s office to review the situation, not that there was much for us to say at that point.
Staff morale can be quite fragile in circumstances where there can be no public praise for success, when a planned terrorist incident does not take place, but failure is there for all to see, in glass-covered streets and ruined buildings, and sometimes also maimed and dead people. We took it hard when we failed, even though we did not expect always to succeed. But the readiness of the Prime Minister to come and thank the staff when they had some success known only to a very few was very reinforcing.
When I first went to call on John Major to be introduced by my predecessor, he saw us in a sitting room, which at the time he used as a small meeting room, but he seemed uncomfortable there and complained rather grumpily that it smelled. Whatever was causing the smell was apparently incurable, as after that when I went to call on him he was always in the Cabinet Room, sitting at the long table and looking rather lonely. Not surprisingly, he often seemed rather gloomy, and I rarely brought him good news. But he used to enjoy pulling my leg, which he succeeded in doing quite well when I was new. He once asked me with great solemnity how many telephone interceptions we were doing without a warrant. I was rocked back at the idea that the Prime Minister should for a moment think that his Security Service was intercepting telephones without a warrant. Or, on the other hand, that if I were the sort of person who would lead an organisation that broke the law, I would calmly tell him about it when he asked. But when I got to know him better, I realised that he liked to ask this sort of question just to see how I would react. In similar vein, he once asked me solemnly which Members of Parliament we were investigating. By then I knew him better and I knew what he was up to. He knew perfectly well that if I had ever thought that there was a need to investigate any, he would have been the first to know about it.
Much later, as things began to get very difficult with his Europhobe MPs, he used to ask wistfully whether I had any techniques for dealing with dissidents that I could pass on. By then I felt quite sorry for him and I would come back thankful that I was leading a team of colleagues who were supportive, who broadly thought the same way about the issues we were dealing with and were united about the way to go about tackling them. He on the other hand seemed isolated, surrounded by people who were looking primarily to their own self interest, and who even if they were broadly supporters could not be relied on not to undermine him behind his back. I was profoundly thankful that I was not in politics. But in spite of it all he still kept his sense of humour and just before I left he got me to join in playing a joke on Marmaduke Hussey, then Chairman of the BBC. I was at No. 10 for one of our regular briefing meetings; the Prime Minister’s next appointment was with Duke Hussey. A few days earlier the BBC had broadcast a leaked document, which the government regarded as damaging and they were rather put out. The Chairman had been called in to account for the BBC’s actions. ‘Let’s give him a shock,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘You stay on and be in the room when he comes in. Then he’ll think he’s really in trouble.’ So, when we came to the end of our meeting, Alex Allen, John Major’s Private Secretary at the time, showed in Duke Hussey. On seeing me, perfectly on cue, Duke said, ‘My God, it’s not that bad is it?’ The Prime Minister roared with laughter and I left them to it.
However, my observation of government ministers was that they were chronically exhausted. This showed more and more as the parliamentary term wore on. I don’t think I am any more boring than other people, so perhaps it was because many of my meetings with ministers were to brief them, rather than to ask them to take decisions, that I frequently found myself talking to a zombie-like figure, slumped in his chair, with drooping eyelids and a whey-coloured face. Michael Howard’s way of dealing with his lack of sleep was to rock and lurch in his chair, which was slightly disconcerting until you realised what he was doing. John Major once admitted during a briefing meeting that he just could not keep awake and I left. Douglas Hurd used to sink far down into his chair and hood his eyes so you could not tell whether he was awake or asleep.
The middle of my time as Director-General was overshadowed by a great tragedy for the whole intelligence community. On 2 June 1994 I had just got home from work at about 7 p.m. and was thinking about telephoning my brother to wish him a happy birthday when the phone in the kitchen rang. It was the Duty Officer. He said, ‘There’s some bad news.’ That is a phrase I hate. All sorts of possibilities went through my head. Had one of the girls had an accident? Had a mortar bomb blown up Whitehall again?
It was bad. A helicopter was missing on its way from Northern Ireland to Scotland. It seemed likely, said the Duty Officer, that it was the Chinook carrying colleagues who were working in Northern Ireland, with RUC and Army personnel, on their way to their annual conference. Efforts were being made to find out whether it was indeed that helicopter and if so, precisely who was on board, but things looked grim. Meanwhile the television was carrying the story and the wives and families of those who might be involved were ringing up desperately for news.
A dreadful evening began. It took some hours to confirm that it was the Chinook and that everyone on board was dead. The helicopter had come down on a remote headland on the Mull of Kintyre, near the lighthouse, but miles from anywhere else. It was a dark, misty night and pouring with rain. I spoke on the telephone to the wives of some of those who had been lost, but what comfort could I give? A couple of days later I went over to Northern Ireland to call on the bereaved. It was a terrible time. The families were heartbroken and the colleagues of those who had died were stunned with grief. We could do no more than sit silently with each other. I felt both grief and responsibility, as the leader of the organisation which had unwittingly sent them to their death.
Then began a dreadful period of weeks of funerals. I will never forget the funeral of the Head of Special Branch of the RUC, a great colleague of my Service and a dedicated police officer. It took place in Newtownards, on a dark, rainy Northern Ireland day. After the service the mourners lined up behind the coffin to walk to the graveyard, as is the custom in Northern Ireland. The uniformed officers of the RUC and the military walked first in the cortège, behind the coffin, and then came the civilians. I walked behind an RUC officer and I watched the rain pour off his cap and down the back of his uniform jacket in big drops. What a terrible day.
Then there were the funerals of our own staff, some of them men with a lifetime of public service behind them, others young men with promising futures and young wives and families. Their families had not known exactly what their husbands, fathers, sons or brothers did but they had trusted us to look after them. And we had not done so. It was a very bad feeling, which I will never truly get over.
I retired from MI5 in April 1996 after twenty-seven years as a member and just over four years as Director-General. I left a very different organisation from the one I joined as a Junior Assistant Officer in 1969. I started out in a fairly lighthearted spirit, enjoying what I saw as the eccentricity of it all and thinking it might be fun. Before long, it became much more serious and I grew to be convinced of the fundamental importance of the job we were trying to do and involved intellectually in tackling some of the difficult issues that the doing of it raised in a democracy. I lived through some big institutional shocks and helped to manage the consequent changes; the four years I was Director-General saw as much change as any previous period. By the time I left in 1996, I was confident that anyone joining would feel that they had become part of a modern, accountable and respected organisation, clear about its role and responsibilities and professionally competent to carry them out with probity, imagination and drive. I felt proud of the contribution I had made to achieving that.