The Defence of the Realm (104 page)

On 2 May 1985 Duff created a new P (for ‘policy') Branch ‘to make
recommendations to me on changes in the Service's management, personnel and security policies and procedures'.
⁹⁶
At a meeting for staff and spouses three years later, Director P was able to report that, though reform was still continuing, ‘we can look with some satisfaction to the new personnel arrangements that have been devised,' among them:

– a permanent 10% ‘edge' over Civil Service pay [which subsequently proved to be temporary]. This was a significant achievement at a time when the Government was looking for ways of reducing expenditure; and it points to the value the Government attaches to the Service.

– clearer and more rational career structures

– more training of all kinds

– improved welfare arrangements, ranging from health checks to better staff restaurants

– more open staff reporting systems, indeed more openness generally.
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Following the reforms of the Duff era, length of service also had much less influence than previously on promotion.
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There were also significant shifts in Service priorities. Though counterespionage remained its most important activity, counter-subversion declined rapidly and counter-terrorism became more important than ever before. The officer appointed by Duff as Director F, who had never previously worked in the Branch, had no doubt that his remit was ‘to run the Branch down': ‘I read a lot of the papers when I got there. It seemed to me we had always overstated the threat since Communists at no stage would have filled a Football Stadium.'
⁹⁹
Whitehall's growing recognition of the threat from international terrorism in the mid-1980s produced a major change in Security Service culture as well as a shift of Service resources.
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Patrick Walker, an Oxford graduate who had joined MI5 from the colonial service in 1963 and became Director FX (counter-terrorism) in 1984, was struck by the way during the decade the Service ‘moved from being an introvert organisation with few Officers (and certainly not the more junior) in touch with Whitehall Departments to a Service at ease in Whitehall and confident in its expertise'. With the appointment, on Walker's initiative, of an out-of-hours duty officer from his branch to deal with terrorist incidents (in addition to the regular Service night duty officer), the Security Service completed its transformation into an operational service capable of operating around the clock.
¹⁰¹
Stella Rimington, who became Director FX in 1988, was similarly impressed by the emergence of a new generation of officers ‘quite different from those who had been around when I first entered the Service':

The new breed of MI5 officer was comfortable in Whitehall, sitting on committees and discussing issues with ministers and their advisers. As more and more counterterrorist operations were successful and ended with the arrest and trial of the suspects, giving evidence in court became much more common. Those who were able to meet these new requirements thrived and advanced, those who couldn't either left or became back room players.
¹⁰²

Whereas changes under Smith had been introduced from on high, the changes of the Duff era were introduced after wide consultation within the Service. In the autumn of 1985 Stephen Lander, then deputy head of B2 (personnel), reported a widespread belief among new entrants that the traditional practice of placing them in F2 to learn to identify members of the CPGB was outmoded and boring. He proposed recasting the General Intelligence Duties (GID) training package, arguing that, with the contraction of F Branch, GID staff would in future ‘spend less of their careers on counter-subversion work'.
¹⁰³
Director F, perhaps voicing a generational divide within the Service, strongly disagreed:

Basic to all intelligence work is the investigation of individual suspects and basic to that work are what some lightly dismiss as the routine work of identification and the type of studies which F2C engage in. It is as fundamental in my view as learning to shoot for a potential infantry officer.
¹⁰⁴

On the initiative of P Branch, mentoring was introduced in 1986 (initially on a trial basis) to provide training on the job, but with the proviso that ‘Mentoring is learning from experience; it is not a replacement for conventional training but an additional training tool.'
¹⁰⁵

Well before Duff retired on 6 January 1988, all the internal candidates for the succession at the time of his appointment had ceased to be in contention. Duff's choice as DDG (Organization) was Patrick Walker. Though Walker had not been in the running to succeed Sir John Jones, he had impressed Duff by his success as Director FX and by his insistence on the need for the Service to have a round-the-clock operational capability. By May 1987 Duff had concluded that he was ‘the only real contender' to become the next DG.
¹⁰⁶
Walker's nomination was accepted by the Home Office and Number Ten. He was the last DG with a colonial background. Among his recreations was cricket; playing for the MI5 team, he and Stephen Lander opened the batting together.

On 7 January 1988, the day after his retirement, Duff drew up ‘a sort of valedictory' on his period as DG, which he sent to the PUS at the Home Office, Sir Brian Cubbon, who forwarded it with his personal commendation to the Home Secretary.
¹⁰⁷
Some of it, Duff believed, was ‘not suitable for Security Service eyes' – though he later slightly relented and sent a copy to Patrick Walker for his personal information only. The core of what Duff considered unsuitable for Security Service eyes concerned its relations with government. Despite the emergence of a new generation of officers more at ease in Whitehall, Duff still saw a danger that the Service might return to old ways:

An eye-catching job advertisement in the
Guardian
in 1988.
Guardian
readers were unaware that the jobs were in MI5, which did not identify itself by name in such advertisements for another nine years.

It seems to me that in the past there has been a tendency within the Service to regard itself as being a thing apart, an entity that should exist in its own right and that should perform its given functions regardless of the views, activities, and indeed requirements of the government. In terms of maintaining a proper political neutrality, and of not being diverted from a proper concentration on the requirements of national security, it is right that the Service should maintain a certain detachment. But this must not be exaggerated. If the Service is to perform effectively and usefully, it must understand the politics and needs of the government of the day, and consider its own work in that context, and if it is to be able to make an appropriate contribution to the counsels of government, and to have its views listened to with attention, it must take pains to obtain and retain the esteem of ministers, officials, the military and the police.

This is possibly the most difficult lesson for members of the Security Service to learn. They are learning it – but unless they are encouraged from within and without the Service to join willingly and actively with other departments and agencies in the consideration and discussion of matters on which they have a contribution to make, or from which they can gain experience or advantage, they will slip back.
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Cubbon agreed, telling the Home Secretary, ‘The Security Service will slip back into its shell unless Whitehall itself is organised to encourage it in the opposite direction.'
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Duff was also concerned about the Service's public image. That image had been severely damaged by the public relations fiasco of the unsuccessful attempt to prevent the publication of Peter Wright's memoirs, which reached a humiliating climax in Australia late in 1986. The well-publicized proceedings in the New South Wales Supreme Court, some of which combined the entertainment value of
Yes Minister
and
Fawlty Towers
, ended in victory for Wright and exposed the Service to public ridicule.
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Duff saw no easy way to restore MI5's reputation:

In the face of the sustained criticism and vilification of the last year or two, arising chiefly from the ramifications of the Peter Wright case, the Service has kept up its spirits pretty well. But these unremitting attacks do have their effect and my fear is that in the longer term the Service will be damaged in a number of ways.
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An example of the sometimes dismissive tabloid image of MI5 in the wake of the unmasking of Anthony Blunt, the treachery of Michael Bettaney, the
Spycatcher
affair and other damaging publicity (Bernard Cookson,
Sun
, 29 April 1987).

To provide a secure outlet for future complaints by discontented intelligence officers, Mrs Thatcher announced in November 1987 the appointment of an ‘ombudsman' or ‘staff counsellor' for the intelligence services to whom any of its members could take ‘anxieties relating to the work of his or her service'.
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For the Security Service to win public confidence it also required a statutory basis. Duff argued, as he had done since his early days as DG: ‘A good Security Service Act is now essential.'
¹¹³
Before he became DG the main impetus for reform of Security Service management had come from Whitehall, sometimes encountering opposition from the Service. After 1985, however, pressure for putting the Security Service on a legal footing came from the Service itself and was initially resisted by Whitehall. Nothing better epitomized the transformation of the Service during the 1980s than its ultimately successful campaign for the passage of the Security Service Act of 1989.
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1

Operation FOOT and Counter-Espionage in the 1970s

Operation FOOT, the mass expulsion of Soviet intelligence officers from London in September 1971, marked the major turning point in Security Service counter-espionage operations during the Cold War. As a retrospective Service report on FOOT recalls: ‘The steady and alarming increase in Soviet official representation in the UK during the 1950s (from 138 in 1950 to 249 in 1960), accompanied as it was by a proportional increase in the number of Russian intelligence officers (IOs) threatened to swamp our then meagre resources.'
¹
To expand its counter-espionage capability, the Service was authorized in 1962 to recruit an additional fifty officers, 150 ‘other ranks' and a hundred in secretarial and clerical grades.
²

However Soviet representation continued to grow and it soon became clear that the only effective way of containing the R[ussian] I[ntelligence] S[ervice] threat lay in a limitation of the number of Russian officials. We therefore set about a long and painstaking process of educating the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and other departments at all levels about the reality of the threat and the need to impose a ceiling on the numbers of Russians. An important feature of this programme of education was the consistent and well-documented presentation of recommendations for the expulsion of individual Russians and for the refusal of visas to others. Not all our recommendations were accepted but between 1960 and 1970 we secured the expulsion of 25 Russians for engaging in inadmissible activities and the refusal of about 40 visas.
³

Some senior FCO officials, however, persuaded themselves during the later 1960s that the threat from the KGB was declining rather than rising. In May 1967 the future PUS, Sir Denis Greenhill, told a Service symposium that, in the less tense climate of East–West relations which had followed the Missile Crisis, he expected the Golden Age of the KGB to draw to a close and its influence to diminish.
⁴
His timing could scarcely have been worse. The newly appointed KGB Chairman, Yuri Andropov (later the only intelligence chief to become Soviet leader), was one of the leading
advocates within the Politburo of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the following year.
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