Intelligence and Security Committee Annual Report for 2010-11

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, for securing this debate. Sir Colin McColl, a former chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, was asked some years ago to encapsulate the purpose of British intelligence. He replied that its job is to provide,

“cats’ eyes in the dark”,

for its customers. I regard the Intelligence and Security Committee in a similar light, for it provides Parliament and the public with an indispensable pair of cat’s eyes into the necessarily dark world of our secret state. I therefore welcome the committee’s new remit, reach and status as a committee of Parliament and support the words of the noble Marquess about the need for extra resourcing.

Last Thursday, I found myself on the 2.30 from Paddington—to give the occasion a Miss Marple-ish touch—with the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, the founding chairman of the ISC, who guided the committee through its first seven years of life after its creation by the Intelligence Services Act 1994, during which, as the noble Lord, Lord Butler, has already said, great strides were made. The noble Lord, Lord King, told me not only how much he regretted the short notice of our debate today and that he could not alter his travel arrangements and be here but also that he, to use his own words, “always thought that the ISC would be a Select Committee one day”, and that this would be, “a natural progression”.

In my judgment, the committee’s work over the past 17 years represents a significant constitutional development alongside its regular functions of inquiry, scrutiny and report. We have come a very long way on the openness front. In 1982, when I was working for the Economist, the Falklands War erupted as if out of the blue. In the Economist the following week I produced a chart of what we called the “Falklands war machine”. In it I put the Joint Intelligence Committee in the hierarchy of the Defence and Overseas Committee of the Cabinet, and so on, and what was going to be the War Cabinet, and mentioned the weekly production of the summary of intelligence, the Red Book. The reaction in Whitehall was astonishment; it was if I had held a crucifix to Dracula. We have, indeed, come a very long way, and quite rightly. The ending of the Cold War made it so much easier as well in terms of admitting to all of the agencies and the structure of Cabinet committees and assessment staff and so on beneath.

Perhaps I may concentrate today on the terrain covered by section 5 of the ISC’s 2010-2011 report—the configuration and the working rhythms of the central intelligence machinery. Since the committee reported and the Government replied, we have had the report to the Prime Minister prepared by Paul Rimmer of the Cabinet Office’s assessment staff, and Kieran Martin, then of its Security and Intelligence Secretariat, on the future workings of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

In essence, the Rimmer-Martin report recognises the new reality—that the JIC has become partially eclipsed by the work of Mr David Cameron’s highly significant innovation on the first day of his premiership when he created the National Security Council. As the National Security Adviser, Sir Peter Ricketts, expressed it during an International Institute of Strategic Studies seminar on 30 November—at which the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, was also present—the NSC has become,

“the uber customer for the intelligence product”,

which, he explained, has resulted in a,

“big change in the landscape of the JIC”.

The Rimmer-Martin report, which the Prime Minister has now signed off, declares that,

“The NSC’s priorities should be the lead driver of the JIC agenda”,

and that,

“The NSC (Officials) meeting”,

each Wednesday morning,

“is best placed to oversee the tasking of the JIC, in line with its core role of setting strategic direction for the NSC. The NSC(O) should therefore task the JIC. However”,

Rimmer-Martin continues,

“the JIC must retain the latitude to provide early warning on issues outside the immediate cycle of the NSC agenda”.

As a result, from next month, January, JIC meetings are to divide into two: into a monthly gathering of principals at four-star level, including the heads of the agencies, as has been the norm, to take the more strategic and longer-term papers prepared by the assessments staff; and weekly meetings in the interim of sub-principals, “to agree papers in between”.

I recognise that these arrangements reflect the new reality. Over the past few years, even before the creation of the National Security Council, it has sometimes been hard to entice busy grade 4s to JIC meetings. For a while they fell to fortnightly rather than weekly, which was a mistake. Indeed, I have heard the JIC described by an initiate as, “the most highly paid re-drafting committee in Whitehall”. I am reassured by the fact that the assessments staff reports are very much a part of the NSC’s meetings and that the assessments staff continue to produce each morning the daily highlights of intelligence summaries for the Prime Minister and those Ministers inside the inner intelligence loop. I note, too, that the JIC will continue to set the annual requirements and priorities for the intelligence and security agencies.

However, I am concerned that some key elements of the JIC tradition might fade under the new dispensation. The most crucial and lustrous elements of that tradition emerged from the experience of the JIC during the Second World War, after Winston Churchill brought the JIC fully into the Whitehall sun—and after a pretty feeble first four years of life following the committee's establishment in 1936. It was the working assumption that the painters of the intelligence picture would keep firmly separate from those who decide what to do on the basis of it, and that the intelligence providers and the JIC analysts do not fall into the trap either of advocacy or of telling their customers what they wish to hear, rather than speaking truth unto power. I have always believed truth unto power to be the gold standard of all Crown service, but especially those of the secret servants of the state. There have been lapses during the history of the JIC, but that tradition has always been restored and remains much admired by allied intelligence nations.

Early in the new year, a chairman of the JIC will be appointed to replace Alex Allan, for whom I have the highest regard. I hope that his successor, whoever he or she may be, will be steeped and marinated in that great tradition. I hope, too, that the Intelligence and Security Committee will keep a close watch on the new arrangements, to protect the JIC as best it can from further marginalisation and to report to Parliament next year how the NSC's pace-making and task-mastering has played out in real terms, both within the central intelligence machinery and in the work of the secret agencies. As ever, the ISC must be Parliament’s cat’s eyes in the dark.