EU and Russia (EUC Report)

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to be the first to congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Oxford and Asquith, on his very fine maiden speech. Given his deep immersion in the questions before your Lordships this afternoon, it is a tad anxiety-inducing to be the next in line on the speakers list.

The noble Earl carries one of the most lustrous and resonant names in British political history. His great-grandfather, the last Liberal leader to preside over a wholly Liberal Government, has occupied a special place in our shared historical memory since those of us of a certain age first read Roy Jenkins’s excellent biography of HH Asquith in the mid-1960s. The noble Earl’s immensely distinguished Crown service has been rather more in the shadows than that of his great ancestor, but he has done the state some very considerable service in his diplomatic career. Although I know that he is too discreet to mention it, the noble Earl possesses a special place in intelligence history as the officer who spirited that remarkable and brave man, Oleg Gordievsky, out of Russia and into Finland in the boot of his car. I am sure that his maiden speech this afternoon is but the first flow of a cataract of wisdom and judgment to come in future debates, which we anticipate with keenness and enthusiasm.

Like so many of your Lordships, I am a child of the Cold War. Born in the late 1940s, ours was the first generation to grow up in the shadow of the bomb. We knew what those mushroom clouds over Japan in the last days of the Second World War meant—an entirely new era in international affairs. We did not need a degree in theoretical physics when we read about the H-bomb tests in the 1950s to understand that these new thermonuclear weapons were over 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That the Cold War ended without general war and nuclear exchange was and remains the greatest shared boon of our lifetime. Yet here we are, in the spring of 2015, a generation after the Cold War ended, debating Russia’s capabilities and intentions, trying to read the mind of the man in the Kremlin, and worrying about the dangers inherent in escalating tensions and about the condition of the critical Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949, signed for the UK almost exactly 66 years ago by the magnificent Ernest Bevin.

There is a school of thought that the Cold War did not die, rather that it went dormant for a time. There is something in this argument. For example, the Queen’s most secret servants will tell you that the Russian intelligence service has exactly the same number of officers operating under diplomatic cover in London as it did in the mid-1980s; around 34 the last time I looked. With its deep and traditional faith in human intelligence, the Russians also keep a string of “illegals” living under deep cover in our islands, who are fiendishly difficult to detect unless they make a slip. The Queen’s underwater servants in the Royal Navy Submarine Service will tell you that the deep Cold War never really ceased and has picked up noticeably over the last few years. Indeed, I experienced a whiff of it myself in the Atlantic off Florida when witnessing a test launch of one of the Royal Navy’s Trident D5 missiles following the mid-life refit of HMS “Vigilant”. I was on board the survey surface vessel, just two and a half miles from where the missile would burst from the ocean. Another three miles beyond me, a huge Russian spy vessel dripping with electronics could be seen trying to get into the test area and being prevented from doing so by the US Coastguard. When it was all over, the captain of the Russian spy vessel came across the open channel to congratulate all of us, in a perfect Oskar Homolka English accent.

The finely judged and carefully calibrated report on the EU and Russia before us today stimulated a range of deeper memories for me and aroused one particular current anxiety. My most vivid memory is of a study of unintended East-West escalation produced by the Cabinet Office’s Joint Intelligence Committee in the weeks following the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when we truly neared the nuclear rim in a crisis that pretty well came out of the blue—Berlin rather than Havana being the place where we thought the greatest tensions would be played out. In November 1962, the JIC defined “escalation” as,

“the process by which any hostilities, once started, might expand in scope and intensity, with or without the consent of Governments”.

There followed a passage in that JIC assessment, which the report before us today summoned from my memory. It read like this:

“Once any hostilities had started agreement on a cease-fire would involve one side or the other accepting a tactical defeat or both sides a stalemate on what must be a highly important issue. The chances of such an agreement would be better if the attacking side realised that it had miscalculated the importance to the other side of the interests involved or the will and ability of the other side to resist”.

This is exactly what happened after Mr Khrushchev covertly placed his intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles on Cuba.

I am not a “history repeats itself” man, but I am with Mark Twain when he said that history may not repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes. In the context of Russia, Ukraine, the EU and NATO, I think that it is the possibility of unintended escalation—of a misreading of minds, intentions and possible responses—that most worries us. In Bevin’s time, Article 5 of the NATO treaty was as powerful as it was simple. It says:

“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”,

and that the parties individually and in concert will take,

“such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area”.

It was that clarity and simplicity that helped keep the Cold War cold.

The framers of that treaty almost exactly 66 years ago could not have foreseen the end of the Cold War, Poland and the Baltic states as full members of NATO, and a range of unimaginable new instruments at the disposal of the Kremlin. Stalin may have possessed what we thought were 175 divisions and, from August 1949, an atomic weapon, but Putin has a gas tap and he has cyber. What kind of attack and what magnitude of damage inflicted on a near-neighbour Article 5 country would be deemed to have activated Article 5 in current circumstances?

We live in an age of what is called “ambiguous warfare”. Mr Putin is a skilled player of this; it is what he does best. His currency may be falling, his GDP shrinking and the hydrocarbon clock may be ticking long term against his oil and gas position, but this is an activity at which he excels, and it is, I suspect, a near-constant temptation for him. Yet Mr Putin, too, is a child of the Cold War. He, too, grew up in the shadow of the bomb. He knows full well what a serious Article 5 incursion would mean.

Nerves need to hold within the NATO alliance. A new containment strategy needs to be pursued for as long as is necessary. I share the Select Committee’s conclusion that firmness combined with a pursuit of a new, more co-operative relationship with Russia when possible is the way forward to prevent current anxieties and crises,

“deteriorating into something resembling the Cold War”.

It might be fraught; it will not be edifying; it will not be swift; but it is what has to be done.