Corbyn would be a problem for security, says historian to MI5
For a profession whose purpose is to find out information, spies know surprisingly little about their own past. But secret agents now have no excuse not to know about their antecedents. Professor Christopher Andrew, the official historian of MI5, has charted the evolution of espionage from the Old Testament in a new book.
“There was no profession that knew so little about its own history as the intelligence community did,” he says.
The role of Britain’s security services is evolving, with GCHQ coming out of the shadows to defend us against cyber-hackers attempting to shut down our power stations or disrupt our markets.
And were a Labour government elected, the relationship between Prime Minister and Britain’s spy agencies could become very different.
I ask Prof Andrew, a fellow at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, for more than half a century and Emeritus Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, whether he thinks MI5 and MI6 would be reluctant to tell Jeremy Corbyn, should he become prime minister, all he ought to know.
“I simply think that however unfortunate it is, the constitution has it that if the prime minister wishes to be informed, the prime minister is informed. One question is how far Corbyn would wish to be informed. It doesn’t seem a subject that engages his attention. There are some people in the shadow cabinet who have called for the closing-down of MI5.”
But would the Americans share sensitive intelligence under a Corbyn administration? “I can’t imagine the special relationship being the same. But it would be part of a broader problem. Does he believe in Nato? So it’s the whole of Western defence, and not just the intelligence angle of it, that would be the problem. Nothing I have heard him say gives me any confidence – whether about his understanding of the Cold War, or of Venezuela. It is a deeply eccentric view of international relations.”
Prof Andrew’s interest was stirred by a Victorian children’s illustrated bible. “Until the 20th century the most popular image of espionage was of two of Moses’s spies struggling back from their mission to the promised land, reporting that it was indeed flowing with milk and honey, but carrying a bunch of grapes so big it took two people to carry them,” he says.
The fascination was compounded by his PhD research, when he realised the France of Richelieu was better at breaking codes than the nation was at understanding German signals during the Great War.
When he arrived at Cambridge in the early 1960s it was “full of Bletchley Park veterans, many of them historians” – none of whom would acknowledge that part of their past. “They had two separate lives: in one compartment they were researching, writing and teaching history, in another – which for some of them was the most interesting thing they ever did – was something they weren’t allowed to talk about.” But they also exemplified the lack of knowledge about the history of their profession. “The men and women at Bletchley had no idea that in the Napoleonic Wars we had broken the French ciphers, any more than those people knew how ciphers had been cracked when we faced the threat from the Armada.”
To Prof Andrew, the historical perspective is essential for improving the art of intelligence. “It’s not uncommon to find people managing intelligence who have so little knowledge of the past that they don’t realise that they aren’t as good as people were a couple of hundred years before. Antoine Rossignol [who developed a system of coding] was so appreciated by Cardinal Richelieu that he was given enough money to buy a chateau at Juvisy, where he was visited by Louis XIII and Louis XIV.”
He found that the French, like the British, for a long time denied the existence of such dark arts. “When I wanted to write about décryptage – breaking the codes – I was simply told that décryptage was a concept that doesn’t exist.”
In England, Elizabeth I came to depend on spies – “no monarch was ever at such risk of assassination”
– and valued them because “our chances of thwarting the Spanish Armada seemed, we thought, to depend on knowing when it would sail; and the Queen’s survival depended on our knowing about plots to kill her.” Her codebreaker, however, got a pension rather than a chateau.
Prof Andrew feels there is a wide misunderstanding of what spies do. “Because espionage is the only profession in which a fictional character is many, many, many times better known than any real member of it, we have acquired a novelist’s idea that there is a constant accretion of information, rather than moments that irrevocably change history.” But there are such moments – the failure of the Armada was one.
I ask him what was the most significant change espionage has wrought in history. “The Cuban Missile Crisis. It comes pretty close to thermonuclear war. If the Americans hadn’t discovered the existence of the bases until they were operational – which was what Khruschev intended – then it is likely there would have been an air strike. And it is hard to imagine how a conventional war could have been stopped from turning into a nuclear war at that point.”
We discuss more recent lessons. Dodgy dossiers, he points out, have been produced on the orders of a state since time immemorial. “Stalin was very good it: it was absolutely a standard procedure.” But the mess made by Tony Blair during the Iraq War “was cock-up rather than conspiracy. American intelligence by 2003 was not a patch on how it had been in the Second World War”.
Quoting the Chilcot report – of which “I do not have a high view” – he mentions a senior SIS officer who said “if we had ventilated views on Iraq’s political geography, and the impact of its history on it today, people would have told us to shut up”.
Prof Andrew observes: “There was absolutely no question of learning from experience. This repeats itself more in intelligence than in any other area because the experience is less well known, and much of it classified. That is why you get major policymakers whose abilities are adequate in other ways who do so badly in matters of intelligence.”
I ask him if he thinks Mr Blair knew the American intelligence was defective. “No. It just didn’t occur to them that there were no WMD. There was no doubt at all they would discover them. You just have to make a case – and once you discover them, the case is irrelevant.”
He thinks the nature of the threat from Islamic fundamentalists “is far better understood than it was” but that the secularisation of western society made it hard for intelligence operatives to foresee 9/11 and some of the subsequent outrages. “Introductory lectures in history at this university have to begin by explaining basic Christian doctrine. There are so many people now for whom Christian belief is just an aberration. And so when you’re explaining why people do things, religion just doesn’t come into it. Just before the Iranian revolution no one paid any attention to Khomeini – the idea there could be a religious revolution was just unthinkable. They attempted to explain terrorism in secular terms – which was an absolutely key failure.
“Bin Laden was the most homicidal poet of modern times, expressing himself in verse, as many jihadists do. No one grasped his opposition to Saudi
‘One question is how far Corbyn would wish to be informed. It doesn’t seem a subject that engages him’
Arabia because he expressed it in verse.”
Now he fears a “step change” – he remembers Bin Laden’s phrase that it was a “religious duty to acquire weapons of mass destruction”. “In 2004 Islamists tried to get a dirty bomb together but they failed: but recently there have been one or two close calls. At Mosul they had a large cache of radioactive cobalt used in cancer treatment; luckily it was found intact when they were thrown out. But Islamic State won’t make that mistake again. And now the Germans have discovered the early stages of biological warfare using ricin.
“My feeling is that at a tactical level we aren’t doing too badly, but strategically something is inevitable. The most likely outcome is a dirty bomb, which doesn’t take too much expertise to put together.”
He feels the history of the Cold War should teach something about how to handle the Russians. “Putin is absolutely par for the course. What is crazy is the extent of embarrassment we felt initially in investigating the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. If it hadn’t been for Marina Litvinenko it would never have been examined.
“From the 1920s to the present day the Russian state has undertaken assassination out of area. Killing traitors abroad was a standard operation, mainly during the Stalinist era before the Second World War – Trotsky most famously. After the war they tried to kill Tito. Khruschev went after Ukrainian nationalist leaders in exile in Germany. But then two KGB assassins defected amid huge global publicity, and so in the Brezhnev era there was a period of caution, though plans continued to be drawn up but are only authorised when it looks as though they can get away with it – notably Georgi Markov” – the Bulgarian dissident killed in London by a poison-tipped umbrella in 1978.
“But as soon as Putin took over he revived the tactic. He was not bothered. He mocks us in a most unusual way – in 2007 he announced that one of his atomic spies would be made a hero of Russia. It was the spy who provided the intelligence on the initiator used to explode the first US atomic bomb, and the first Russian one. That initiator was Polonium 210; and he feted this man just before Litvinenko was poisoned by Polonium 210. It just doesn’t bother him.”
Putin “isn’t going to change. And the problem in dealing with him is the irreversible decline of Russia. Many bright young Russians are leaving the country – you find a lot of them at Eton – and will make their lives in the West. He is completely unreformable. They can’t make anything for the rest of the world, and their oil and gas industries are declining in importance.”
Should the intelligence services have realised the threat to the Skripals? “MI6 should have entertained it as a possibility. But spotting the target isn’t straightforward.
“There are many sitting targets. Putin’s view is that traitors kick the bucket.”
The Secret World: A History of
Intelligence, by Christopher Andrew (Allen Lane, £35), is out now, To order your copy for £30, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk