11 August 2016

Do you know MI5 from MI6?

Your guide to the United Kingdom intelligence system

by Tim Marshall

Most Shaw Sheet readers will be taking away the Chilcot report to read on holiday.  It is certainly long so to make it more digestible we have decided to sketch out the various organisations which constitute the intelligence community and to put them in context for you.  They are:

The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) – otherwise known as MI6.

The main task of SIS is to gather information/intelligence from other countries: information which that country wishes to keep secret or, at least, confidential.  Intelligence officers are assigned to countries and are sent out under diplomatic cover.  To all appearances, they are ordinary members of the diplomatic corps.  The Minister responsible for SIS is the Foreign Secretary.

Members of SIS are essentially agent-runners in that they identify and try to recruit people who have or may have access to sensitive information.  Sometimes the targets agree to provide information in return for money, sometimes for ideological reasons.  Sometimes they do it out of resentment.  Many years ago, the KGB recruited a member of the Swiss military forces.  The spy angrily refused any payment and regarded the offer as offensive.  He had been passed over for promotion and was trying to get his own back.

Successes for SIS have included the recruitment of Oleg Penkovsky, who provided vital information to the Macmillan Government at the time of the Cuban missile crisis.  More recently, SIS recruited Oleg Gordievsky, a member of the KGB, who provided very important intelligence as to the inner workings of that organisation.

The Security Service, otherwise known as MI5.

The Service was always acknowledged and recognised (unlike SIS, which successive Governments, until recently, denied existed).

The remit of the Service was, for many years, laid down by the Maxwell Fyfe Directive which set out its responsibilities.  The Service is now on a statutory footing, the latest statute being the Security Service Act of 1996.  The Minister responsible for the Service is the Home Secretary.

The Service is responsible for counter-terrorism (now mainly concerned with the threat from Islamic terrorists), counter subversion (monitoring the extreme left and the extreme right), counter espionage (exposing spies who are providing sensitive information to other countries), counter intelligence (identifying members of foreign intelligence services operating in the UK under diplomatic cover or as “illegals”) and protective security (advising government departments on how to keep their information secure).  The Service also monitors drug traffickers and those engaged in money laundering.

The Service does have an agent-running section, whose members seek to recruit and run agents against targets considered to be a threat to UK security.

The Special Branch.

Members of the Security Service are ordinary members of the public in that they have no powers of arrest.  That is why the Service co-operates closely with Special Branch.  Every police force in the UK used to have officers assigned to Special Branch (they probably still do).  That is why, if an arrest is to be made, the police execute the warrant and not the Security Service.

Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

This organisation is based in Cheltenham and is the successor to the Government Code and Cypher School which, during the war, was based in Bletchley Park.

GCHQ monitors communications and tries to break the codes and cyphers of hostile Governments and of terrorist suspects.  It is probably the most secret of the four organisations.

General

One of the dangers of providing intelligence is that the service concerned may be tempted to say what it thinks the recipient wants to hear, instead of being objective.  That happened in the First World War when the head of military intelligence on the Western Front gave flawed reports to Field Marshall Haig which encouraged him to believe that planned offensives would result in the long-awaited breakthrough.

In the build up to the invasion of Iraq, all the intelligence services were asked to contribute to the Joint Intelligence Committee’s appreciation.  Eliza Manningham-Buller (the Director General of the Security Service) refused because she was not satisfied that the information her service had in its possession was reliable.

The Defence Intelligence Staff (David Kelly was seconded there) were of the view that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction which posed a threat.  This analysis was ignored and, in effect, suppressed, which was why David Kelly was so appalled.

It appears from the Chilcot report (and the earlier Butler report) that SIS was not sufficiently objective and that the Chairman of the JIC, John Scarlett, was too close to the Blair Government and its personnel.  The Butler report recommended that the chairmanship of the JIC should, in future, be a final career posting, thereby avoiding the risk of the chairman succumbing to political pressure in return for career advancement.

Many years ago under a PM who shall be nameless, the Service was asked to investigate an organisation/people who were opposing Government policy.  The Service refused because there was no security issue involved: opposing Government policy was not subversive per se and so did not fall within the terms of the Maxwell Fyfe Directive.  The intelligence services have to be jealous of their reputation and their integrity.

So that’s it.  You are now ready to dive into the Chilcot report.

 

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