Intelligence and Security Committee: Annual Report 2011-12

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the intelligence community for keeping us safe throughout our stellar Olympic summer. As a historian, I hope the Cabinet Office has commissioned an internal study of how it was done, for two reasons: first, to serve as what Whitehall used to call in the old days a fund of experience document, which can be drawn upon for the planning and protection of future great national events; and secondly, when the passage of time permits, so that the study can be declassified for future generations to appreciate a job extraordinarily well done. As far as one can see, as an outsider, the operation involved almost every element of the British intelligence community.

On that theme, I am pleased that the remit of the Intelligence and Security Committee is to be widened to embrace the community in its entirety. I note from last July’s report that the committee, rightly, places much weight on the value of horizon scanning. There have been some encouraging developments on the horizon-scanning front, in the secret world and beyond, since the document we are debating this afternoon was placed before Parliament.

Little noticed on page 17 of the coalition’s Civil Service Reform Plan last June was a paragraph on horizon scanning which read:

“The Government needs to continue to strengthen its strategic thinking and horizon scanning, given the current environment of change and uncertainty. A review of the capability will be completed by Autumn 2012”.

Completed on time it was, and I am delighted to say that the Cabinet Office has declassified it this very day.

I should declare a minor interest. I delivered a short presentation to the review team early on in its work about the history of horizon scanning in the United Kingdom since the Committee of Imperial Defence—the National Security Council of its day—prepared its first War Books in 1912-13. The review was led by the Cabinet Office’s Joint Intelligence Organisation, so its work is well within the remit of ISC oversight.

The motive power of the review of cross-government horizon scanning as it is called, is to make better use of the considerable array of horizon scanning already undertaken across a range of departments and agencies—domestic, foreign and secret—and to embed the combined product more effectively in policy analysis and planning. Horizon scanning is, by its very nature, a perilous craft but, as the review states: “The benefits of conducting horizon scanning outweigh the negatives when it is used to add value to strategic decision making. It is a wasted resource if it is not ultimately used to inform the policy agenda in a coherent way”.

I understand that the report’s recommendations that the Cabinet Secretary should be the “champion” of trans-Whitehall horizon scanning has been implemented and that Sir Jeremy Heywood has already chaired the first meeting of his Permanent Secretary-level group which will be underpinned by a second group at director level, led by the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Jon Day.

These developments strike me as a wholly beneficial addition to our country’s ever needed capacity to look over the other side of the hill, and I hope the ISC will apply attention and support to the new arrangements.

There is one delicate sphere of horizon scanning which I think it is timely to contemplate. May I respectfully suggest to the ISC that, during the coming two years, it keep a close, scrutineer’s eye on the depth and width of contingency planning within the secret world about the possible impact of a Scottish separation on what we would no longer be able to call—should it happen—the British intelligence community?

Certain thoughts arise: would Scotland want its own security and intelligence agency with a “McC” in Edinburgh? Would an independent Scotland seek its own bespoke GCHQ? Signals intelligence is a costly and complicated business with an infrastructure all its own. Would we see aerials and antennae springing out of the thin soils of the Cheviot Hills? Would those old Cold War listening stations on the north-east coast of Scotland crackle back into aural life? In submarine terms, who would warn the Scottish Government of a Russian Akula lurking in the Minches? Would a Scottish intelligence liaison officer from the Scottish High Commission in London take his or her place every week at the Joint Intelligence Committee alongside the American, Canadian and Australian representatives? I have more than a suspicion that our United States intelligence allies would be far from radiant about the prospect, especially if there was a determinedly non-nuclear Government in Edinburgh.

I should not expect such contingency planning—which I sincerely hope is already under way—to be made public. However, I would hope that the ISC could examine it on behalf of Parliament and the public.

Last year’s ISC report, as has already been mentioned, examines horizon scanning very much in the context of the foreseeability—or otherwise—of the Arab spring. I had a great deal of sympathy with C’s argument, as reflected in the report, that that was the last thing Middle Eastern and north African regimes expected, so their secret worlds were not brimming with their own prescient forecasts which western intelligence might have acquired by clandestine means for warning purposes.

I thought of this old and ever present “secrets and mysteries” problem that our intelligence-gatherers always face when the files of the Franks inquiry into the origins of the Falklands War were declassified a few weeks ago. The noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, gave absolutely riveting evidence to Franks—the transcript of which, in parts, reads just like a film script. In one section she expresses a degree of sympathy for the analysts, despite her criticisms of the intelligence community on its pre-invasion performance. Here she is in an exchange with Oliver Franks about such criticism:

“It would be the easiest thing in the world for the JIC, or whoever does the actual intelligence assessment, to say to ministers that every single thing in the world could blow up into a major incident within the next few weeks or months—Belize, Cyprus, Hong Kong … It would not be helpful, it would be incompetent, it would be weak. They have to try to alert us to some of the priorities, they have to make an assessment which does not say everything is on a knife edge”.

Another thought arose when reading the Franks inquiry transcripts. The great and the good Oliver Franks asked each of the four Prime Ministers who gave evidence—Harold Wilson, Ted Heath and Jim Callaghan, as well as the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher—about the use they made of their intelligence feed when they were in No. 10. In their different ways they made it plain that among the piles of red boxes that the private office prepared for overnight or weekend reading, they reached first for what the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, called the “hot box” containing the intelligence. It was so much more interesting than yet another brief on local government rate support grant, but that is my observation, not that of the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher.

Although perhaps it has happened already, it strikes me that it might be valuable if the ISC conducted a survey with its questions modelled on the Franks approach of how Mr David Cameron and the Ministers in the inner intelligence loop make use of the product from our country’s remarkable £2 billion a year intelligence and security machine. Again I suspect that the results could not be published, but it would be instructive and valuable, not least as an indicator, of how the new National Security Council-led tasking is playing out in real terms.

I have a final thought that is linked to the coalition’s Civil Service Reform Plan. It contains a so-called “Action 11” which has aroused anxieties about a possible seeping politicisation of the senior ranks of the Civil Service if Secretaries of State are given the proposed “greater influence” over new appointments. I hope that the ISC will keep a careful eye on this. If there was the slightest whiff of politicising the top appointments to the secret world it would amount to an anxiety of national proportions. For almost above all others, the Queen’s most secret servants possess an overriding duty to spare their ministerial customers nothing; always and everywhere to speak truth unto power. Theirs is among the toughest of callings in Crown service; placing patterns on fragments, constantly dealing with the grimmest possibilities and the darkest sides of human nature. As the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, told the Franks inquiry, the JIC is,

“presented with a series of shafts of light of varying quality and brightness on a scene and their job is to fill those in, link them and relate them to make a coherent picture”.

Those who undertake this stretching task day in and day out, and those working in the agencies who supply the particles of the intelligence picture, deserve our special gratitude and appreciation.