THE RELUCTANT SPY
As the head of MI6, or ‘C’, Sir Alex Younger has been a huge success. But, as Alex Massie finds, being a spook was a role the ‘notoriously languid’ Scot neither wanted nor sought
We turn the spotlight on Sir Alex Younger, head of MI6, who neither wanted nor sought his role in the SIS
In February Sir Alex Younger, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service more commonly known as MI6, briefed journalists attending the annual Munich Security Conference on the ongoing threats to the United Kingdom and the challenges of keeping pace with an ever-shifting set of dangers that imperil the country’s security in a rapidly changing world.
The briefing offered a rare glimpse into MI6’s world view. The threat posed by international terrorism was, he said, ‘the ultimate manifestation of the eroded boundaries of the 21st century’. A world in flux is a world in which new dangers can arise with startling, threatening suddenness.
Partly as a consequence of this Younger, who is 56 and has been head of MI6 since 2014, was at pains to remind his audience that, despite Brexit, ‘Britain’s commitment to the security of the European continent is unconditional’.
The resetting and recalibration of Britain’s relationship with the continent, and particularly with its intelligence partners in France and Germany, cannot be allowed to impinge upon the cross-border cooperation that is a staple element of Britain’s security architecture.
If this was a timely reminder that Brexit, whatever its merits, cannot be permitted to disrupt or reset all of the United Kingdom’s international relationships, other parts of Younger’s briefing made clear the seriousness of the threats now facing both the UK and its allies. Among these: a resurgent, revanchist Russia; the challenge of handling China’s rise to global prominence and, naturally, the continuing threat posed by Islamic State and other Islamist extremist organisations.
In sum, ‘we do not believe in a Manichean world, but we need to be at least as strategic as our adversaries in the development of our capabilities to respond to hybrid attacks’,
he said. As he put it in a rare public appearance in 2016, ‘the scale of the threat is unprecedented. The UK intelligence and security services have disrupted 12 terrorist plots in the UK since June 2013. And MI5 and the police continue to run hundreds of investigations into those intent on carrying out or supporting terrorist atrocities against our citizens.’
Younger, who was educated at Marlborough College before studying computer science and economics at the University of St Andrews, was appointed ‘C’ – as the head of SIS has been known since the time of its first director, Sir Mansfield Cummings – in 2014. He is the longest-serving head of Britain’s most secretive intelligence organisation in 50 years.
MI6 chiefs typically serve a five-year term, but the Scot’s commission has been extended to cover the immediate postBrexit period, allowing continuity between the end of one era and the start of its replacement. Younger agreed to this extension despite the tragedy endured by his family last year when his 22-year old son, Sam, was killed in a car crash in Stirlingshire.
But as the historian Peter Hennessy told The Times recently, ‘Alex is regarded as having been successful, he is very good with the troops and has the right touch’. Having served six years as ‘C’, Younger is expected to retire at some point this summer. The search for a successor is already underway.
As ‘C’, Younger is the only MI6 officer whose name is in the public domain. Thirty years ago, the Secret Intelligence Service was – quite naturally – still organised along well-established Cold War principles. The service had, it is often claimed, something of the feel of a Pall Mall gentleman’s club. Then it employed around 2,000 staff; now it has 3,300 employees and shares a £3bn budget with MI5 and GCHQ. In a 2018 speech he gave at his alma mater, Younger was at pains to stress that MI6 is no longer, to the extent it ever was, an old boys network.
‘The stereotype is that we only want a certain “type” to join MI6,’ said Younger. ‘This is false. If you think you can spot an MI6 officer, you are mistaken. It doesn’t matter where you are from. If you want to make a difference and you think you might have what it takes, then the chances are that you do have what it takes, and we hope you will step forward.’
MI6’s officers are now arguably younger and more diverse than at any point in its history: less male and less white than has traditionally been the case. Would-be recruits require curiosity, ‘a developed degree of emotional intelligence and empathy and an ability to understand and connect with other human beings’, and, perhaps above all, ‘we need to see in people a developed moral literacy, such that they can operate, often independently and in comparatively isolated circumstances, in a way that fully esteems us as a service that reflects this country’s values’.
All of which lends a certain irony to the manner in which Younger was recruited himself. While at St Andrews he had a university commission in the Royal Scots before spending a
year at Sandhurst after graduating, after which he joined the Scots Guards where he spent three years, retiring from active service with the rank of captain.
The business of commanding a platoon was, he says, a bracing but necessary development for someone who was, by his own admission, a ‘notoriously languid’ student. ‘It taught me a lot about an old-fashioned phrase, which is self-discipline. Which is not something I think I possessed in abundance before I went through that experience.’
By then he had been approached by the intelligence service, joining it in 1991. ‘I was tapped on the shoulder,’ he has recalled. ‘It was a bit of a surprise – I’ll be frank with you,’ he revealed last year. ‘I had no conception of myself doing a career like this. Which was a good lesson, actually.’
In his speech at St Andrews, he recalled that ‘I found myself sitting in MI6 Headquarters, staring at a blank piece of paper [...] I had been given, as my first job, the task of penetrating an organisation intent on genocide in the Western Balkans in the mid-1990s. Starting from that blank piece of paper, I had to find my way to the heart of that organisation and obtain secret information for the British government.’
This, he explained, ‘took me to places I never thought I would visit, often travelling under a false identity. It involved many nights drinking obscure homemade alcohol, piecing together the intentions of the parties to that conflict, and allowing me to create the secret relationships necessary to provide the intelligence our country urgently needed.
‘I had the satisfaction of knowing that my work, along with that of many others, helped to pave the way for the eventual arrest and prosecution of war criminals implicated in the murder or displacement of hundreds of thousands of people.
‘Intelligence work on its own can’t stop every attack or prevent every evil. But it can shorten wars, and it can and does save lives. That sense of pride at being part of an effort and cause greater than myself has never left me for a single day of nearly 30 years serving my country as an intelligence officer.’
That spell in the Balkans was followed by a posting to Vienna where, true to the traditions of the service, Younger operated under diplomatic cover. That in turn led to a spell in the Middle East then, after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, Younger headed MI6’s station in Kabul.
‘After the 9/11 attacks I witnessed at every level in SIS a profound impulse to step forward into the line of danger. We felt that our organisation was one of the few that could make a difference, faced with a wholly new, and open-ended, threat from international terrorism.’
Despite being ‘proud of the courage and reflex to do the right thing that SIS demonstrated’, Younger allows that, with the benefit of hindsight, too many of MI6’s officers were unprepared for the challenges that awaited them in Afghanistan. In like fashion, the mistakes made in assessing the threat posed by Saddam Hussein in Iraq damaged the organisation. It has taken years for those wounds to heal.
Nevertheless, while the intelligence services must appraise and learn from their failures as well as their successes, such internal agonising cannot be permitted to cast too great a shadow over new security threats. Younger claims that the threat of terrorism is enabled by a lack of boundaries in the modern world. But even here, some modesty must be insisted upon; the security services can help reduce the threat posed by ISIS and those inspired by it but they cannot eliminate that danger. ‘You can’t use military force to kill an idea,’ Younger notes.
Moreover, there is a sense in which intelligence gathering and threat-suppression is an endless game of Whack-A-Mole. No sooner is one danger reduced than it is replaced by another.
“I had to find my way to the heart of the organisation and obtain secret information
Islamic State – or Daesh – may have been largely defeated on the battlefield but ‘I should say also that al-Qaeda […] has undergone a certain resurgence as a result of the degradation of Daesh and it is a force that should also be taken seriously.’
Younger, whose hobbies outside the clandestine world include sailing and mountaineering, was responsible for counterterrorism planning for the London Olympics in 2012 before his appointment as ‘C’. He was not a surprising or left-field choice, but he has earned praise for the manner in which he has quietly modernised the organisation even as it adapts to the requirement to combat multiple – and multiply-varied – threats. Episodes such as Russia’s attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal, a former MI6 asset, in Salisbury served as a grim reminder that some old adversaries are foes once again.
According to Younger, ‘we need to be really, really clear with them [the Russians] that whatever they think they are trying to achieve with this concerted campaign of covert and overt action to denigrate the quality of our institutions and alliances, it’s not going to work – it is going to come at too high a cost.’
Many of the new threats faced by the UK would previously have been considered deeply unconventional. It is, therefore, perhaps unsurprising that MI6’s Cyber Directorate has been the fastest growing part of the organisation during Younger’s tenure. Disinformation, too, and the need to combat foreign interference in western democratic processes – as witnessed in the most recent French and American presidential elections – requires the security services to be nimbler than ever.
A world in which nothing is ‘true’ is a worryingly shadowy one that increases the risk that civil society itself can be undermined or otherwise degraded by hostile actors.
Unavoidably, the rise of China to near-superpower status – at least if measured by economic and diplomatic clout – poses new challenges. Younger stresses that although China is ‘not susceptible to binary observations or caricatures’, its increasing power in terms of communications technology, artificial intelligence and other matters should be understood as a ‘wake-up call’.
Allowing Chinese companies such as Huawei to build parts of Britain’s 5G technology infrastructure comes with risks but these, as the government has argued, can be managed if sensitive parts of the UK’s communications networks – including those used by the intelligence services – are declared off-limits. Ultimately, Younger argues, ‘we need to be at least as strategic as them when it comes to the development of the skills and capabilities and technologies in those key areas’.
The contrast between the real life of an MI6 officer and the public’s idea of that existence has always been acute. And yet the service retains a glamour partly on account of its most famous fictional operative. This is a cross borne by all MI6 officers and Younger is no exception. ‘I’m conflicted about [James] Bond,’ Younger concedes. ‘He has created a powerful brand for MI6: as C, the real-life version of M, there are few people who will not come to lunch if I invite them. Many of our counterparts envy the sheer global recognition of our acronym.
‘And to be fair, there are a few aspects of the genre that do resonate in real life: fierce dedication to the defence of Britain, for example. The real life ‘Q’ – who is currently, and for the first time, a woman – ‘would want me to say that we too enjoy – and, indeed, need – a deep grasp of gadgetry. But that’s pretty much where the similarity ends. And, were Bond to apply to join MI6 now, he would have to change his ways.’
As in fiction, so in the real world which, ever changing, requires an intelligence service to change too, the better to keep up with or half-a-step ahead of its adversaries.
“Were James Bond to apply to join MI6 now, he would have to change his ways