The Defence of the Realm (158 page)

Even the historical profession has suffered from a degree of Historical Attention Span Deficit Disorder so far as the Security Service and the rest of the intelligence community are concerned. The well-publicized successes of British codebreakers against Germany during the First World War should have alerted historians to the possibility that there might have been similar successes in the Second World War. Until the revelation of the ULTRA secret in 1973, however, almost no historian suspected that SIGINT had played a significant role in the defeat of Nazi Germany.
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In 1984 David Dilks and I described intelligence as the ‘missing dimension' of twentieth-century British historiography.
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Though intelligence is no longer missing, British historians in a great variety of fields have yet to consider the relevance of Security Service history to their own research. The fact that both the first female financial controller of any British government department and the first female head of any of the world's major intelligence services worked for MI5 has, for example, so far failed to attract the interest of gender historians. Many histories of British decolonization do not mention the role of MI5. Many biographies of British prime ministers have little, if anything, to say about their attitude to intelligence and the intelligence services. As usual, however, lapses by one generation of historians provide some of the main research opportunities for their successors.
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The Security Service, like many other institutions, has in the past paid too little attention to the lessons of its own history. Some senior officers have mistakenly seen all but the most recent ‘lessons learned' as a barrier to innovation. Sir David Petrie, one of the Service's most successful DGs, believed that ‘Too much of a past that is now remote can help but little with useful lessons.' In reality there were a number of ‘useful lessons' from the past that senior management had overlooked. Kell had failed to heed the warning in an MI5 report at the end of the First World War that, in the event of another war, the Service would be deluged with ‘a flood of
paper'. The Service's lack of preparedness to deal with fifth-column scares in 1940 reflected a failure, once again, to learn from the experience of the last war, whose outbreak had provoked ‘a virulent epidemic' of spy mania.
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During the remainder of the twentieth century, underestimation of the deficiencies of Soviet intelligence analysis, intelligence confusion at the beginning of the Northern Ireland Troubles and delay in identifying the threat from Islamist terrorism provided further evidence of HASDD. In each instance, however, the Security Service learned from its mistakes. Within six months of the near-collapse of MI5 administration in the summer of 1940, the Twenty Committee under an MI5 chairman was running the Double-Cross System. The intelligence provided by Oleg Gordievsky later gave the Security Service, like the rest of the intelligence community, an unprecedented, if belated, insight into the blinkered mindset of the Centre and its misunderstandings of the West. Once the Service had gained the lead intelligence role in Britain against Republican terrorism in 1992, with police help it successfully prevented PIRA's most dangerous mainland campaigns from achieving their objectives. Since MI5 began to focus fully on the threat from home-grown Islamist terrorism in 2003, it has – so far – successfully prevented the majority of planned terrorist attacks.

Seen in long-term perspective, there is greater continuity between past and present threats to national security than is often supposed. Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate, Holocaust survivor and human rights activist, forecast several years before 9/11: ‘The principal challenge of the twenty-first century is going to be exactly the same as the principal challenge of the twentieth century: How do we deal with fanaticism armed with power?'
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The three men who have posed the greatest threats to British security since the 1930s – Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Usama bin Laden – have all been ‘fanatics armed with power'.

Fanaticism, like other disorders, however, evolves over time. What makes the early twenty-first century a less dangerous place than the twentieth is that fanatics no longer control any of the world's major powers. There is no realistic prospect of another Hitler in Berlin or another Stalin in Moscow. Unlike Hitler and Stalin, today's most dangerous fanatics – terrorist groups (Al Qaida chief among them) and rogue regimes – are on the margins of the international system rather than at its centre. But if the political power of fanaticism has declined, its destructive capacity over the next generation is likely to be increased by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
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Bin Laden declared in 1998 that acquiring these weapons
is a ‘religious duty'. A year before 9/11, without realizing it at the time, Security Service counter-proliferation operations disrupted a first attempt by Al Qaida to obtain material in Britain to develop biological weapons. The ambition of Dhiren Barot, the chief Islamist plotter arrested as a result of Operation RHYME in 2004, was to explode a radioactive ‘dirty bomb'. Though, as Barot acknowledged, he failed to make the contacts necessary to achieve his ambition, other terrorists will try to succeed where Barot failed.

In the twenty-first century, as in the twentieth, some of the challenges faced by the Security Service will be difficult, if not impossible, to predict. One of the lessons of its first hundred years is that it will respond to these challenges best if it has a long-term perspective. In the words of Winston Churchill, for half a century a committed supporter and occasional critic of the Service, ‘The further backwards you look, the further forward you can see.'

Appendix 1

Directors and Director Generals, 1909–2009

Note: The title of director general was first used by Sir David Petrie. Kell and Harker were both designated director.

 

Appendix 2

Security Service Strength, 1909–2009

 

Appendix 3

Nomenclature and Responsibilities of Security Service Branches/Divisions, 1914–1994

1914

 

1916

 

1931

 

1941

 

1953

 

1968