The Defence of the Realm (103 page)

In the recruitment of female officers the Service moved ahead of much of Whitehall and most employers in the private sector. By the early 1990s some 40 per cent of its officers were women.
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Smith's term as DG saw an extensive revision of the training programme for ‘General Duties and Staff Officers', which for the first time included residential courses. The reforms of the Smith era owed little, if anything,
to the DG himself, who did not prove to be the great reformer for which his Whitehall backers had hoped in 1978. As one of his directors recalls: ‘He did not immerse himself in the business as he would have had to have done to make a great reform.'
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Though less disastrous than Hanley had predicted, Smith was none the less unsuited for the role of DG, more aloof and less at ease with staff than Hanley had been. He began badly at his first meeting with directors and senior staff on 7 April 1978. One of his successors, Sir Patrick Walker, later recalled, ‘It was awful. He stood on the stage while we sat in rows. No message came across. He was ill at ease and stilted.'
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Smith's declining influence in Whitehall was shown in 1980 by the collapse of plans for the first ever visit by the Queen to Security Service headquarters, which was expected to boost staff morale. The visit, which initially aroused no opposition within Whitehall, was agreed with Buckingham Palace but then cancelled on the insistence of the FCO which declared that, since it was inappropriate for the Queen to pay even a secret visit to SIS (for fear of compromising its unavowable status), it would be unfair to SIS for her to visit the Security Service.
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Smith seems to have accepted this snub to the Service from the FCO, of which he was a distinguished former member, without making a serious attempt to fight its corner. A senior diplomat who had had high expectations of Smith believes that his lack of impact as DG was due partly to the fact that he was constantly preoccupied by the long-drawn-out terminal illness of his wife, to whom he was devoted.
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Smith gave a widespread impression within the Service of distaste for some of the operations for which he was responsible as DG. One of his senior officers recalls resenting the way in which ‘he kept far away from A Branch and left it all to John Jones [a former Director A], regarding it as dirty work.'
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Smith's lacklustre performance raised the reputation of Jones, the unsuccessful internal candidate to succeed Hanley, who had remained DDG and had a closer involvement in the running of the Service than the DG. One of the directors remembers Jones's period as DDG under Smith as ‘his finest hour . . . John Jones kept the whole thing afloat.'
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In November 1980, Willie Whitelaw, who had become home secretary after the 1979 Conservative election victory, told Mrs Thatcher that he was strongly in favour of Jones becoming DG after Smith's retirement in March 1981: ‘I have given a lot of thought to this appointment and have made a point of observing Mr Jones at close quarters over the last eighteen months. I am satisfied that he is the right man for the job . . . Another outside appointment would upset the Security Service and damage their morale.'
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Mrs Thatcher accepted the case for an internal candidate but was unenthusiastic about Jones. After a visit to the Service's Gower Street headquarters in December 1980, partly intended to give her an opportunity to assess internal candidates for the succession to Smith, she ‘thought [Jones] lacked the dynamism and imagination which one would expect in the man who was going to run the Security Service'.
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The Prime Minister found it hard to believe that there was not an abler younger candidate for DG.
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It emerged, however, after inquiry by the Home Office, that under Smith (and probably Hanley too) ‘virtually no career planning had been done; the younger able Assistant Directors were not being brought on in time.' Though criticizing the lack of forward planning,
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the Prime Minister seems to have accepted that there was no realistic alternative candidate to Jones.

In addition to his record in keeping ‘the whole thing afloat' under Smith, Jones seemed to have much to recommend him. He was a rare example of a miner's son who had won a place at Cambridge on the eve of the Second World War. After an undergraduate career at Christ's College interrupted by war service, he had graduated with first-class honours in history, and won another first class when qualifying as a teacher with a Cambridge Postgraduate Certificate in Education. He then spent eight years in the Sudan Government Service, rising to become senior inspector in the Ministry of Education, where, according to a confidential report, he ‘proved quite outstandingly successful'. After joining the Security Service in 1955, he continued to receive glowing reports.
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Despite his considerable talents, however, Jones was far less successful as DG than as DDG. As one of his obituaries later acknowledged, ‘Jones was by inclination as well as by professional training a deeply private man.'
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‘I had a lot of time for John Jones,' recalls his first DDG. ‘Only trouble was he was a terribly shy man. I could not get him to get out and talk, especially to rank and file. It was beyond him.'
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As DG, he was invisible to many members of the Service. One graduate who joined in 1983 recalls that she did not even know his name.
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‘Even when John Jones came to see what we were doing,' recalls a long-serving member of the Registry, ‘we didn't feel he was really interested in us. He seemed to be doing it simply because he felt he ought to.'
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Cecil Shipp, who became DDG in 1982, failed to compensate for the DG's aloofness. He combined, the same member of Registry recalls, ‘a very distant manner with an air of superiority'.
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He was given the unaffectionate nickname ‘Lettuce' (derived from his initials ‘COS', also used as an alternative nickname).
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To many of the staff – even at middle-management level – senior management seemed remote and out of touch.

MI5's uncommunicative management proved incapable of responding
adequately to the damage to morale caused by the arrest in September 1983 and conviction in April 1984 of a disaffected Security Service officer, Michael Bettaney, who had unsuccessfully offered his services to the KGB.
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It was clear from an early stage of the inquiry into the Bettaney case by the Security Commission that there would be criticisms of Service management style. Director C recalls attending a session of the Security Commission at which the DG was questioned about management training in the Service. He believes that Jones ‘torpedoed himself' by replying airily that such training did, of course, take place – though, in Director C's view, ‘this was not true in any meaningful sense . . . The mood of the Commission changed from one of sympathy to one of criticism.'
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Leon Brittan, who succeeded Whitelaw as home secretary in June 1983, spent some time getting to know the Service. Though admiring its operational effectiveness, he found its management style backward. He was confirmed in both views by the Bettaney case, writing to Mrs Thatcher in December 1984:

The management style of the Service needs to become more communicative, and with a more corporate approach. Relations with the other intelligence agencies and with Whitehall could with advantage be more forthcoming . . . At the same time we need to sustain the present high level of operational efficiency in the Security Service, on which so much depends. The professionalism and dedication of the staff are first class.
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The, at first sight improbable, agent of reform was Jones's successor as DG in 1985, Sir Antony ‘Tony' Duff: war hero, ex-ambassador, former chairman of the JIC and Intelligence Co-ordinator in the Cabinet Office, and, at sixty-five, over the Service retirement age. Duff was widely believed within the Service to be Thatcher's choice,
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but this was not the case. Though an admirer of Duff, she thought him too old for the job and favoured an internal candidate.
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So, initially, did Leon Brittan, his PUS Sir Brian Cubbon, and the cabinet secretary Sir Robert Armstrong. All three initially preferred Director K, John Deverell,
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but eventually concluded that none of the internal candidates was suitable. At a meeting on 23 January 1985:

the Prime Minister said that she was now persuaded that the best course was to offer the post to Sir Antony Duff for 2–2½ years: the precise term could be left open within this range. It should be made clear to him that one of his most important roles would be to bring on and establish his successor from the candidates within the Service.
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Despite the managerial problems which led to Duff's appointment, not all was doom and gloom in the Security Service. A rare public glimpse of the Service in one of its leisure moments appeared in a
Guardian
account of a performance of Dvořák's Mass in D in St John's Wood Church on 28 June 1984 by the Service choral society, conducted by Director F.
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At the suggestion of Sir Robert Armstrong the society had taken the name ‘The Oberon Singers' – an allusion to Oberon's words in
Midsummer Night's Dream
, ‘We are invisible, we will o'er hear their conference.'
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Ian Black told
Guardian
readers in an article entitled ‘The spy catchers strike a new note':

More than 100 spy-catching singers and musicians worked their way through a varied programme. The conductor, who could easily pass for a gung-ho school housemaster, lived up to his reputation for amusing eccentricity. ‘I must tell you', he announced as an expectant hush fell over the elegant London church where the performance took place, ‘that we are waiting for a horn.'

. . . Mindful of the Official Secrets Act, the Guardian feels unable to reveal the work name of the choir or the venue of its performances. But the concert was most enjoyable, and, as it was not paid for out of the Secret Vote, we made a modest contribution to help to defray expenses.

The
Guardian
, however, did not gain entry after the performance to the Oberon Singers' drinks and buffet dinner in a nearby church hall.
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Despite such moments of conviviality, morale within the Service during the final year of Jones's term as DG was lower than it has ever been since. Following Bettaney's conviction in April 1984, he issued a statement claiming that the Security Service ‘cynically manipulates the definition of subversion and thus abuses the provision of its charter so as to investigate and interfere in the activities of legitimate political parties, the Trade Union Movement and other progressive organizations'. Though Bettaney's denunciation was widely discounted as an attempt to justify his treachery, the subsequent comments by two young members of the Service who had resigned from it had much greater impact both on the media and on Service morale. Miranda Ingram, a former colleague of Bettaney in K Branch, declared that, though counter-espionage was ‘the acceptable face of MI5', working in F Branch meant ‘monitoring one's fellow citizens' and engaging in activities of dubious legality. But, ‘in the prevailing right-wing atmosphere, an officer who dissents from the official line does not feel encouraged to voice his concerns. He feels that it will be futile or detrimental to his career.' The second former MI5 officer to go public, Cathy Massiter, had worked in F Branch and made much the same points as Ingram in greater detail and with greater force on television as well as in print, claiming that
the Service had been ‘violating' the rules against political bias in operations against the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), had launched investigations in all major industrial disputes and had put under surveillance two prominent members of the National Council for Civil Liberties, Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, both later leading Labour politicians.
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The Massiter case, recalls Stella Rimington:

came as a massive shock to everyone in MI5, so unused were we in those days to any form of public exposure or to any member of the Service breaking cover . . . And here was this erstwhile colleague, someone we all knew well, talking about her work on nationwide TV and what's more giving an interpretation of it which to us seemed distorted and unrecognisable. It was breathtaking.
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The Prime Minister was personally ‘very concerned' by Massiter's appearance on television and asked Sir John Jones for ‘an absolute assurance that there had been no unauthorised interception of subversives'. The DG replied that there had been ‘none since 1972 when it was within his knowledge'. On 4 March 1985, in her last meeting with Jones before his retirement as DG, Mrs Thatcher asked him if he thought there were ‘any more Massiters' in the Service: ‘She said she was very concerned about
the morale of the Security and Intelligence Services
and offered more money or any other help that was needed.'
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Sir Tony Duff's arrival as DG a few weeks later brought about an almost instantaneous improvement in Service morale. Duff was a man of great personal charm (even if he annoyed Stella Rimington and possibly other female staff by calling them ‘Dear') and became the first DG to go round all sections of the Service, asking staff at all levels what they thought needed changing and what their ideas were for reform.
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He also had the great advantage of being the first DG since Sir Dick White thirty years earlier (save, briefly, for Hanley in the last two years of the Heath government) to establish a rapport with the Prime Minister. In the nearly unanimous view of those past and present members of the Service who recall the Duff era, it marked a turning point in Service history. Like Sir David Petrie, another outsider and the most successful of his predecessors, Duff became DG at an awkward moment. He was quick to see the parallel between the main problems facing him and those confronting Petrie in 1941: the Service's difficulty in responding to all the demands made on it, poor morale and lack of leadership. ‘I think we have an easier task than [Petrie] had,' he minuted in September 1985, ‘but the nub of the problem is very much the same.'
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