Secret Service

National Security in an Age of Open Information

Jonathan Evans, Claire Foster-Gilbert

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781912208951
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Secret Service, former Director Deneral of the British Security Service Jonathan Evans reveals how he balanced two apparently irreconcilable pressures during his tenure with MI5: state secrecy and public transparency. Despite popular perception, Evans argues, these values need not be at odds. Intelligence and the press share many goals, and partnerships formed on these grounds often prove fruitful. In disclosing his methods, Evans compares his approach with other agencies, especially in the United States, and speculates on the UK's post-Brexit collaborations with European security services. In short, Secret Service presents an on-the-ground picture of life in British intelligence, one that calls us to care for the moral health of both the institution and its operatives.

Secret Service: National Security in
an Age of Open Information

Jonathan Evans

One of the intriguing things about being head of MI5 is meeting the heads of other security and intelligence services throughout the world. You soon learn that there is a crucial distinction between those security chiefs who see it as their job to keep the people safe, and those who see it as their job to keep the president safe from the people. To put it another way, some secret agencies serve their society and some serve their political masters.

In the UK, the position is clear: the role of the secret agencies is to serve the people by protecting them from national security threats such as terrorism and espionage. What’s more, operational decisions, such as who is investigated and how, cannot be made by ministers but instead rest with the professional heads of the agencies. National security in Britain today is thus citizen-centric: protecting the citizen from threats that only government capabilities can address. This approach to national security is reflected in the government counterterrorism strategy ‘CONTEST’, whose stated aim is to ensure that ‘people can go about their lives freely and with confidence’.²⁰ The secret agencies are public servants, not masters, and they are expressly forbidden from acting in the interests of any political party.

We are lucky in this country to have a long tradition of public service which, while not always fashionable, still has real meaning. It is this tradition that the Westminster Abbey Institute seeks to foster and celebrate, and the Institute, in my view, is right to do so. We should celebrate the fact that so many young (and sometimes not so young) people choose to devote their working lives to public service of many sorts. In the same way, we should celebrate the remarkable number of voluntary organisations working for the common good that we are fortunate to have in this country. This same public service ethos lies behind the instinct for balance and accuracy, which is demonstrated in the best of our journalism. We see public service also in the willingness of people to serve in the intelligence and security services. Here, public acknowledgement is necessarily rare, but the demands on the time, ingenuity and, occasionally, courage of members of the agencies can be considerable. This we might call ‘secret’ public service.

At the heart of this ‘secret service’ is a rather awkward truth: in order to be able to serve the people effectively, the secret agencies need to keep secrets from the people they serve. This proposition derives from the fact that a small minority of these people are engaged in the very activities that the agencies are fighting against. It is easy to say, in this age of open information, that ‘there are no secrets’. It is easy – but it is not true. There are secrets, and it can be vital to the public interest that they remain secret. These are the nation’s secrets, not the secrets of a particular organisation. For example, if MI5 and the police are aware of a group’s plans to mount a terrorist attack, it is very important that the group does not know that it is under surveillance so it doesn’t act precipitately or run away to a safe haven overseas. Investigation must be brought safely and secretly to a point where all the conspirators are known and there is the best prospect of bringing evidence against them in court. Or, again, if an ingenious technique has been discovered that enables the National Crime Agency to identify predatory paedophiles who are streaming live abuse on the dark web, it is in the interests of their potential victims that the existence of that ingenious technique is not publicly revealed. And, more widely, if we believe that the nuclear deterrent is a necessary part of our security against military attack or blackmail, then the whereabouts of our submarines has to remain secret. So, I would contend that there are secrets that it is in the public interest to protect. But this particular facet of the public interest is in contention with other, equally valid, aspects of the public interest, such as the freedom of the media, freedom of information, due accountability and fair and open justice in the courts.

Secrecy is not fashionable at the moment; it provokes suspicion. The current fashion is for transparency and disclosure. Traditional understandings of secrecy and even privacy are changing. Social media and the internet encourage us to share a great deal more information about ourselves, either directly or with our notional consent. Lower levels of trust in established institutions mean that we expect public figures and institutions to do likewise – sharing information, whether that means responding to freedom of information requests²¹ or putting their personal tax returns into the public domain (unless you are Donald Trump). This new ‘information environment’ has had undeniable benefits: child abuse that had been hidden for decades has been revealed; abuse of expenses by parliamentarians was famously exposed – not by auditors or oversight committees, but by a free press. The effectiveness of government policies can be scrutinised in the light of actual evidence rather than conjecture or assertion, and freedom of information is often the tool that enables the media to obtain the evidence needed to undertake this scrutiny. But this is a tricky world for an organisation that needs not only to protect its own secrets but also to intrude into those of others. It is sometimes said that sunlight is the best disinfectant, but how can that work for an institution that has to keep secrets?

*

The Security Service that I joined in 1980 was not an institution where the word ‘sunlight’ sprang readily to mind. Unbelievable as it may sound, it was only two days after I arrived that I realised that I had actually joined MI5. It did not exactly throw wide the doors and welcome scrutiny. The existence of the service was avowed but very little else about it was. Who worked for it? Where were its offices? What was its budget? What did it do? What was its relationship with government? All of these were secret, and yet MI5 was the most open of the three intelligence services! Back then, MI6 was not avowed at all, despite having a big building in Lambeth, and GCHQ was acknowledged only as a research centre for Foreign Office communications. MI5’s relations with the media were minimal. The MI5 legal adviser occasionally had lunch with a trusted contact in the broadsheet press, but that was it. Otherwise, press relations were consigned to the ‘D-Notice Committee’, which maintained a chivalrous arrangement whereby the media voluntarily agreed not to publish damaging information on defence and security matters. (This arrangement still exists, in a modified form, today.) But despite this lack of sunlight, MI5 did not, in my experience, harbour the terrible infections that one might expect. It was a bit fusty; it was a bit old fashioned and maybe not terribly efficient, but I don’t think the lack of sunlight led to anything all that much worse than that. The fundamental values of the service were pretty decent, if unspoken, despite the inward-looking culture. So while the sunlight of scrutiny might be a form of disinfectant, it is certainly not the only way to preserve the integrity of an organisation. Something else was keeping people, broadly speaking, on the straight and narrow.

Of course, our secret services today are a great deal more forthcoming than they were. The relationship between the intelligence services and the media, one important aspect of greater openness, has moved on a long way since I joined MI5 over 35 years ago. In many ways, I believe that this relationship has been beneficial to the service, to the media and to the public. In the old days, a vicious cycle sat at the centre of the relationship. The agencies would not communicate with the media and, as a result, the only voices the media heard were those of the ill-informed or ill-intentioned. Consequently, much reporting on intelligence matters was also ill-informed or hostile, and this only reinforced the problem: since the media were ill-informed and hostile, some in the agencies thought, what was the point of talking to them?

There were those, of course, who benefitted from this stalemate. I can remember reading, as an undergraduate, Chapman Pincher’s racy and revelatory boo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• About the Contributors
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Notes