Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament

Lord Ricketts Excerpts

Monday 9th September 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Ricketts (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, for securing this debate, which gives me the opportunity to speak about intelligence matters for the first time since I joined your Lordships’ House. I follow three speakers who have eminent credentials for commenting on these matters. Mine are far more modest. I was, as a member of the Diplomatic Service for 40 years, an enthusiastic consumer of the intelligence community’s products, and I had some oversight of their activities twice: first as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee in 2000 and, more recently in 2010, as National Security Adviser, when I also oversaw their budgets, and indeed wrote the annual appraisals of the heads of the intelligence agencies. It was a singular privilege.

Having worked very closely with the intelligence community throughout my career, I regard the men and women of the agencies as one of the greatest assets we have in the British public service. They are quite rightly held accountable to the very highest standards, largely by the ISC itself. I am perhaps the only person here who has had the privilege of appearing in front of the ISC in various capacities—although perhaps my noble friend Lord Anderson has. Inevitably, the agencies’ triumphs are not well known to the British public, while their failings and shortcomings come under intense scrutiny.

Things were in a fairly patch when I became the National Security Adviser in 2010. There had been a great deal of adverse publicity around rendition. The agencies were engaged in the grinding civil litigation brought by the Guantanamo Bay detainees, which was absorbing a huge amount of resources, but they were handicapped by the fact that the Government could not produce in court the secret evidence to support their case. It is very encouraging to see how successfully a line has now been drawn under that period. Credit for that goes to the Cameron Government, and particularly to the then Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke, who was willing to legislate to make exceptional arrangements for the agencies to be able to defend themselves in court where necessary.

A good deal of credit for the turnaround in public confidence in the agencies and in the morale of agency staff goes to the ISC. Its work on detainees and rendition absorbed an enormous amount of time and effort and there were frustrations at not being able to bring it to a final conclusion. None the less, the 2018 report shed as much light as was possible on what went wrong and why. Like others who have spoken, I believe that establishing the facts and being honest about failings is important in re-establishing public confidence. The committee’s report makes it very clear that the staff of the agencies were working under intense pressure, at a time of real national emergency, in the months and years after 9/11. True to their values, they have learned from their mistakes.

It is vital for all of us that we have a self-confident and well-respected intelligence community, and I believe that we are in a much better place now than in 2010. Given the high level of terrorist threat that the country has been under in recent years, it is pretty remarkable that so many plots have been thwarted. However, there are always lessons to learn when things go wrong. Here, the committee’s report on the 2017 attacks and what needed to change was exemplary, both in helping the public to understand the incredibly difficult context in which the agencies work and in bringing forward useful and practical recommendations for future improvements.

I will not comment further on counterterrorism while in the presence of such a distinguished specialist as my noble friend Lord Anderson of Ipswich. Instead, I offer two comments that look forward and will perhaps help inform the committee’s judgments about its priorities in the coming years.

The first is on the impact of Brexit on intelligence work and co-operation. It will be important for the committee to keep this under review in the months and years to come. My feeling is that this is one area of Britain’s national security which is unlikely to be seriously impacted by Brexit. While Britain’s overall international standing and weight is bound to be diminished by leaving the EU, our key intelligence relationships should not be damaged. That is clearly true of the Five Eyes community, which operates well outside any EU context, and will largely be the case for co-operation with our main European partners, which exists almost entirely outside EU channels.

That is in sharp contrast to the position of law enforcement and judicial co-operation, where a no-deal Brexit risks very serious and immediate damage to connectivity to databases, the alerting systems and the European arrest warrant instrument that we need for our security. I was worried to read in my Financial Times this morning a suggestion that in the current round of discussions in Brussels being held by Mr David Frost, international security and defence is going to be given less priority in the negotiations. That seems worrying. The Minister may be able to help us on that aspect. If the connections we have with our European counterparts through the EU are severed from one day to the next by a no-deal Brexit, that is bound to make the job of law enforcement more difficult. The relevance of that to this debate is that however good intelligence work is, it normally requires flexible, agile law enforcement work to give it effect and to stop the threats that that intelligence illuminates.

My second and last point is more general. Throughout my career, I have seen that the intelligence community has been able to refocus as the threat changes. For the first 40 years of the post-war period, it was the confrontation with the Soviet Union, and for a lot of that time it was the effect of IRA terrorism. After 1989, we saw the intelligence community very effectively refocus on regional issues to back up western interventions in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. After 9/11, counterterrorism obviously became the central issue, particularly for the Security Service, but the threat moves on. For example, cyber is now rightly a very high priority. It is excellent that we have a first-class National Cyber Security Centre under its director Ciaran Martin, in whom I have the fullest confidence.

I hope the committee will keep in mind the need for the intelligence community to reflect the fact that great power competition is rising as a challenge to this country. It is very encouraging that the committee has been looking at Russia, and I welcome the inquiry into China, Huawei and telecoms security. I hope the committee may be able to untangle for us all whether Huawei indeed represents a national security threat to this country or whether it may not be more about industrial competition and protectionism from some of our allies. There is an issue about whether the intelligence community has the human skills in the right place to deliver this new focus on the emerging threat of great power competition, given that we are likely to face a post-Brexit world where we have nationalist powers increasingly feeling that they can ignore international rules with impunity.