An overview od US and UK Security Services

• Full acceptance of the Butler criticisms, especially the need to keep testing key pieces of intelligence-and the assumptions shaping their interpretation-before they are included in assessments sent to ministers and customers in the civil and diplomatic services and the armed forces. And the testing should be more rigorous than it was before the war in Iraq.

• To help achieve this, the Cabinet Office's 3o-strong assessment staff will grow by about a third. It will also develop a separate team to challenge assessments, precisely to diminish the risk of "group think" which worried Lord Butler, and to improve longer-term thinking about possible future threats.

• Intelligence analysts, whether in the secret agencies, in the Foreign and Common-wealth Office or at the Ministry of De-fence, will become part of a new joint analytical community with its own head of profession and shared training facilities.

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(15) An overview of US and UK Security Services This compendium of articles from MI6; MI5; CIA; the Economist and sundry other sources portrays the current state of US and UK security services. The spy game The US Position: Can Spies be made better? The UK Position: Cats’ Eyes in the dark On our top Spooks On MI5 MYTHS AND MISUNDERSTANDINGS On Donald Rumsfeld On Condoleezza Rice Security Service MI5 – A Brief History Secret Intelligence Service MI6 Some downloadable reports here National UK Intelligence Machinery (PDF) MI5 in the UK – A US Report (PDF) National Counterintelligence Strategy of the US (PDF) Rapport Echelon The spy game The use and abuse of secret agencies An army without secret agents", Sun Tzu observed 2,500 years ago in "The Art of War", "is exactly like a man without eyes and ears." From Moses and Caesar to Churchill and Stalin, rulers have made use of spies to ferret out useful information about their opponents, both at home and abroad. Yet even as governments have built up their intelligence services, they have cursed the failings of their spies: their cost, their tendency to break the law and, above all, their habit of getting things wrong. America's and Britain's spying operations both stand cursed at the moment. Two years after the Iraq war began, both services are guilty first of supplying faulty in-formation about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and then of letting that information be exaggerated, or at least simplified, by their political masters. America's vast security apparatus also failed to prevent the September 11th atrocity. Add in other errors from the not-so-recent past-the failure to foresee the end of the Soviet Union or that India and Pakistan would go nuclear-and these intelligence systems look dangerously accident-prone. More money, more power, same old faces On the face of it, the spies have been punished for this failure in a curious way. They have been given vastly more money to spend. Their powers have been increased, particularly in surveillance. And, given the immensity of their failures, remarkably few senior spooks have been removed or punished. George Bush recently awarded the congressional medal of freedom to the CIA director, George Tenet, who reportedly called the evidence of WMD in Iraq "a slam-dunk". In fact, both countries have now launched their most thorough intelligence reorganisations since the end of the second world war. In America, the change is more obvious. George Bush has appointed a new intelligence overlord who is sup-posed to bond together America's unwieldy 15 agencies (and a $40 billion budget): John Negroponte, the current ambassador to Iraq, goes before a Senate confirmation hearing next month. There is to be a new National Counter-Terrorism Centre. Mr Bush has also installed a new director at the CIA, Porter Goss, who has caused a fuss in Langley by booting out a few of the CIA'S top brass. And the CIA and the FBI, long reluctant allies, have been told to work together. Britain's intelligence service is much smaller than America's and heavily reliant on it, especially for high-tech data. But it is one of only three truly global services (the other is Russia's), and for historical reasons is still looked up to in the business. Its reorganisation has been more subtle than America's. It has its own new counter-terrorism centre, but it has focused largely on setting up double-check systems to see that material is genuine and assessments are challenged. Do these reorganisations make sense? Or have the two countries just handed over more liberties and cash to bureaucrats skilled in telling politicians what they want to hear? Two things caution against any rapid judgment. First, it is always hard to work out how good spies are (their main achievements are usually things that do not happen). Second, the main intelligence failures concerning both Iraq and September 11th were less to do with organisational flow-charts and money than with a shortage of rigour and flair. America relied too much on high-tech surveillance. It does not seem to have had any agents in either al-Qaeda or Saddamite Iraq-despite the fact that Saddam Hussein had plenty of enemies and Osama bin Laden was recruiting willy-nilly. September 11th happened largely because nobody at the time could conceive that it would happen; nowadays, the FBI might be more suspicious of young Arab gentlemen taking flying lessons without wanting to know how to land. Putting those two caveats to one side, the current reorganisation in America still seems flawed. The old system-a mess of competing agencies mainly set up to collect information on other countries, not on shadowy non-state actors like Mr bin Laden-plainly needed changing. But the reforms look half-hearted. For instance, having a single figure in charge of intelligence probably makes sense, but even Mr Negroponte's new power will not give him a real grip on his sprawling empire (much of which is run by the Defence Department). America has also resisted the idea of setting up a domestic intelligence service similar to Britain's M15; instead, it will persist with the idea of turning the FBI'S policemen into spies. Freedom to snoop but not to imprison What of the worries about civil liberties and political interference? Most of the new powers granted to the spooks have to do with surveillance and information-sharing. Those seem a regrettable necessity in the light of September 11th. What is important is that these new powers are regularly monitored and assessed. That brings in the question of political oversight, and it is here that the picture starts to cloud over. On both sides of the Atlantic, the worry persists that the spies are too close to their masters. Mr Goss is a former Republican congressman; the current head of M16, Sir John Scarlett, was in effect Tony Blair's main witness in the fuss about whether Downing Street "sexed up" its Iraqi dossier. The current reorganisations make too little attempt to clear up these conflicts of interest. This could matter enormously if the politicians once again call on intelligence to justify military action-in Iran, say, or North Korea. In both Britain and America, the spies remain on watch. The current threats-terrorism and proliferation-have made their work both more important and much harder. Mean-while, the comforting idea that technology would make spying more of a high-tech science was blown apart by September 11th and the Iraq fiasco; it is now a more risky, more human affair where real eyes and ears matter. So far the spooks have been given much of what they want: more money, more power and a relatively gentle reorganisation. They now need to prove their worth. The US Position: Can Spies be made better? ‘We tend to meet any new situation in life by reorganising’ Petronius Arbiter, a 1st-century Roman satirist, is supposed to have remarked. "And what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation." Wonderful, indeed, for John Negroponte, America's ambassador to Iraq, who will leave Baghdad this month to become America's first director of national intelligence (DNI). Mr Negroponte may come to question which job is the more harrowing. On one side, murder and mayhem; on the other, mayhem and mystery. The creation of the DNI was a well publicised reform, approved by both Republicans and Democrats, which was intended to improve the performance of America's intelligence agencies in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September nth 2001. But precisely what power it will confer on Mr Negroponte is, as yet, unknown. So too is what power he will subtract from others within the 15 arcane agencies he will direct. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the best known, accounts for only about a tenth of the intelligence budget, the biggest of all, the National Security Agency (NSA), with 30,000 employees, re-sides in the Department of Defence (DOD) under the pugnacious Donald Rumsfeld: nor should the increasing influence of Condoleezza Rice be ignored--.as Mr Negroponte turns his thoughts away from bombs and gunfire inside the green zone, he may hear a rattle of daggers being drawn in Washington, Arlington and Langley. America's secret world is inefficient and demoralised, and has been for some time. The CIA in particular is an unreformed, substantially unaccountable bureaucracy, which has almost never sacked anyone, which appears deluded by its own mythology and which, despite some notable successes, is burdened by a miser-able run of failures. The entrance-hall at Langley is decorated with a black star for every CIA officer killed fighting the cold war. A more telling record, according to several former spooks, is that the agency in those years did not recruit a single mid-level or high-level Soviet agent. Every significant CIA informant was a volunteer. And the agency was comprehensively in-filtrated. At one point, every CIA case-officer working on Cuba was a double agent. All but three CIA officers working on East Germany allegedly worked for the Stasi. As for those brave volunteer agents, Aldrich Ames, a greedy drunkard in the CIA directorate of operations who was bought by the Russians, put paid to many-as did another mole, Robert Hanssen, in the FBI. When it comes to recruitment and filing intelligence from the field, quantity has often mattered most. In cold-war Africa, American spooks allegedly paid for the same information obtained for nothing by American diplomats over lunch. One re-cent case-officer, Lindsay Moran, says she was aware that an agent she was running in the Balkans was peddling worthless in-formation, but she was repeatedly refused permission to end the contact. "It gets de-pressing," she said. "You start to wonder whether we can do anything good at all." More recent events have brought shame on the intelligence agencies as a whole. They failed to predict both the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the Soviet Union's break-up a decade later. In 1998, America's spies were taken by surprise when India tested a nuclear bomb; they then advised Bill Clinton to flatten one of Sudan's few medicine factories, wrongly believing that it made nerve gas. The next year, on the agencies' mistaken advice, an American warplane bombed China's embassy in Belgrade. The two main prompts to reform, how-ever, have been the September nth at-tacks, in which some 3,000 Americans died, and the spooks' hallucinations about Iraq's weapons programmes, which were used to justify a war and bloody peace that have cost tens of thousands of lives. The fallout from Iraq-especially a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee last year, which accused the agencies of "a lack of information-sharing, poor management, and inadequate intelligence collection"-forced George Tenet, the CIA'S second-longest-serving boss, to resign in June. Porter Goss's burdens Under Mr Tenet's successor, Porter Goss, a former Republican congressman and spy, a dozen senior spooks have been sacked and two dozen have quit in fury. Mr Goss's aides-most of whom have had no previous experience of intelligence work-are said to be thuggish managers. Mr Goss is meanwhile finding his job tough. On March 2nd, he said he was "a little amazed at the workload", which was "too much for this mortal". Merely preparing the president's daily intelligence briefing takes him five hours. It was partly to ease this burden that the DNI was created, in a package of reforms passed in December. These were broadly in line with recommendations made by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, whose vivid report into the attacks was a de-served, if unlikely, bestseller last year. (The recommendations were not informed by the foul-up on Iraq; a presidential commission into the pre-war Iraq intelligence is due to report later this month.) The DNI will be charged with co-ordinating all the secret agencies, a job which the CIA'S chief-as the director of central intelligence-has performed only in theory hitherto. The DNI will thus be held accountable for the performance of each agency. Alongside a new multi-agency National Counterterrorism Centre (NcTC)-which will have wider powers than its existing equivalent, and may be the prototype for more specialist centres, focused on China and proliferation issues-the DNI represents the biggest organisational change to America's spy world since 1947. The 9/11 Commission's report told mostly the story of the months and moments leading up to the attacks, with many details of the agencies' bungling. The CIA noticed that two known terrorists had obtained American visas, but failed to inform the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which is responsible for domestic counter-terrorism. Notoriously, certain FBI bosses failed to pick up on a report that a group of Arab men was learning to fly planes, but not to land them. Overall, the commissioners diagnosed a grave reluctance to share information within and among the agencies. Most seriously, they found that the FBI's two main departments, responsible for intelligence and criminal investigations, barely communicated. In part, they were deterred by laws safeguarding Americans from government meddling, though the reach of these laws was often exaggerated. More generally, the commission observed a "failure of imagination" in the agencies' response to the warning signs they did observe. A CIA report filed in 1998 had warned that al-Qaeda might carry out suicide attacks with hijacked planes; but the report's authors later said they could barely remember having included the detail. The problems were only partly organisational. Indeed, the commission noted that, when tipped off that al-Qaeda was planning a range of horrific attacks to mark the end of the last millennium, the agencies performed well; a number of bomb at-tacks on embassies in the Middle East were averted. The commission proposed that a DNI, crudely analogous to the head of the armed forces, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, should be hired to oversee all the agencies and correct what had gone wrong. To lend weight to his admonishments, the DNI was to be given charge of the agencies' combined $40 billion bud-get, though most of that is controlled by the Pentagon. The DNI would be just what the agencies had not been: vigilant, imaginative and single-minded. Devilment in the details Nobody really disputes the idea that America's intelligence system, which was designed in 1947, was out of date, disorganised and had no recognisable chief. Its 15 squabbling baronies, which were set up to deal with conventional enemies, display precious little cohesion (with the Pentagon particularly protective of the agencies it controls). It was thus not surprising that the 9/11 commissioners fastened on the idea of appointing an overall chief to bring the muddle together. The question is whether this new job, without any other structural reform, can actually improve the system. By the time the commission delivered its recommendations, some of the more useful ones were almost three years out of date. The commission's period under investigation ended on September nth 2001; the commission's report was delivered 34 months later. In the intervening time, the war on terror was launched and changes were made. First, under the Patriot Act, many of the inter-agency firewalls protecting Americans' civil liberties were broken down. FBI and other agents were obliged to share intelligence on terrorists within and among the agencies. The director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, was required to at-tend the president's daily intelligence briefing, given by the director of central intelligence (DCI). Huge resources were shifted to counter-terrorism. In January 2003, a multi-agency counter-terrorism think-tank, the Terrorist Threat Integration Centre, was formed in-side the CIA's headquarters. The centre produces a daily briefing on terrorist threats and counter-terrorism operations which the president hears after the D CI'S. When the 9/11 Commission added its own recommendations to the pile, they were accepted rapidly. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, endorsed the report almost before he could have read it. Bereaved relatives of the hijackers' victims rallied behind its recommendations. Reluctantly, and to Mr Rumsfeld's great annoyance, Mr Bush endorsed it too. To general surprise, Mr Bush after his re-election made good on that endorsement, signing into law the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. It was modelled on the commission's recommendations, with a few modifications insisted on by pals of Mr Rumsfeld. For example, in keeping with the commission's demands, the act authorises the DNI to "design and deliver" a unified intelligence budget. But it also says that the authority of the cabinet secretaries should be upheld. This has created confusion over who will, in fact, control the purse-strings. To extricate the defence intelligence budgets from the wider defence budget could take several years and a staff of several hundred experts. It might not even be desirable. America's generals almost always get first dibs on the intelligence assets, such as spy satellites, that they share with civilian agencies, and in wartime they always do. The law similarly gives the DNI control over the agencies' personnel, but here too there is devilment in the detail: in practice, the DNI can veto the appointment of some second-tier officials, but he will not be able to sack agency chiefs. To shore up the DNI's putative powers, Mr Bush has suggested that Mr Negroponte, not Mr Goss, will deliver his morning intelligence briefing. In theory, this should allow Mr Goss to concentrate on managing the CIA. In practice, the briefing is likely still to be prepared by the CIA and Mr Goss will still be required to attend the meetings, with Mr Negroponte appearing as an over-qualified court herald. Alternatively, he too could spend half his working day drafting the briefing. He will exert even less control over what goes into the counter-terrorism briefing that follows it, because although the DNI will be in over-all charge of the NCTC, the agency chiefs retain control of their operations. Yet Mr Negroponte is to be held accountable for their mistakes. These uncertainties have fuelled a noisy and ill-tempered debate about the reforms in a country whose spies have traditionally excited fierce passions, and where national security is a national obsession. Left-wingers loathe the CIA, in particular, for its cold-war habit of plotting to murder left-wing leaders, including Pa-trice Lumumba of Congo and Fidel Castro of Cuba. On the right, the CIA is often considered a nest of liberals, bureaucratic and broken beyond repair, whose salvageable assets should be handed over to the Pentagon. Some hawks justify the policy of pre-emption on the ground that the agencies cannot be trusted to give warning of imminent threats. And, of course, moderate opponents of all the above tend to take the opposite view. A cornucopia of incompetence Such passions lie behind the unerring certainty with which America's politicians and pundits speak of a world that remains, after all, secret. For many right-wingers, the DNI office will prove disastrous, adding an unwanted layer of bureaucracy to an already constipated system. At worst, it will go the way of the Office of Homeland Security, which was created after the September nth attacks with a mandate to co-ordinate agencies such as customs and the coast guard, but which has since proved toothless and wasteful. Others note the few factors in Mr Negroponte's favour. His chosen deputy, Lieut-General Michael Hayden, is a well-respected former head of the NSA. Above all, Mr Negroponte will have daily access to a president who holds him in high regard. The truth is, no one knows how the re-forms will proceed. Mr Negroponte may gain a modicum of control over the agencies. At best, he may ensure that the in-formation channels opened within and between the agencies after the hijack attacks stay open. Yet, on his own at least, he will not be able to fix the agencies' most grievous problems, highlighted by their performance on Iraq. Last year's Senate report into the Iraq debacle found America's spies-and especially the CIA-negligent and incompetent at every stage of the intelligence-collection and analysis process. The CIA had not a single agent in Iraq after the UN'S weapons inspectors were expelled in 1998. They had no fresh intelligence to claim, as they did, that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. Their claim that Iraq was "reconstituting its nuclear programme" was based on the country's import of some aluminium tubes that could have been used for other purposes, and was fiercely contested by most experts across the agencies. They did not, at least, suggest that Iraq was in cahoots with al-Qaeda, although members of the government, notably Dick Cheney, the vice-president, did so often. The key to the agencies' misapprehensions, the committee found, was a predilection to "group-think". In other words, they failed to re-examine received truths-for example, the historical fact that Iraq had prohibited weapons. This was made manifest in numerous ways. The CIA'S analysis was seldom double-checked; detection of dual-purpose materials, that might possibly be used in weapon programmes, was routinely taken as proof that such programmes existed; and ambiguous scraps of intelligence were compiled to reach an unambiguous conclusion, a process known as "layering". These problems, said the report, stemmed "from a broken corporate culture and poor management, and will not be solved by additional funding and personnel." The spies' friends (and Mr Bush's enemies) rebut this. On chemical and biological weapons, they say, the agencies were not all that wrong-the report acknowledged that Iraq had retained the technology to rebuild its stockpiles-and, more-over, no other western intelligence service thought differently. On Iraq's nuclear programme, they say, the government was to blame: under intense pressure to provide the case for a war that Mr Bush had already decided to fight, doubters were muffled and caveats were cut. Another defence is that intelligence, whether human or, far more commonly, electronic, rarely yields the smoking-gun proofs that policymakers may wish for. It is an accumulation of indicators, contradictory and unreliable, which intelligence analysts turn into an estimation of a hid-den reality-or, even more precariously, use to predict the future. Intelligence is inherently faulty. True: but why then did Mr Tenet-in a phrase quoted by Bob Wood-ward, which Mr Tenet has not disputed-describe the case for Iraq having banned weapons as "a slam-dunk"? Mr Negroponte's uses Despite all the recommendations, the rot may be hard to stop. After a decade of cuts-the CIA'S budget was chopped by 23% under Bill Clinton-the agencies are in-deed getting more money and more spies. This year, the CIA will graduate its biggest-ever class of case-officers. With only around 1,200 stationed overseas, more case-officers are needed, but only if they are properly equipped for the latest challenges. Around half of all the CIA'S case-officers are in Baghdad. But with only a handful of them fluent in Arabic, they are mostly confined to the green zone, condemned to interview Iraqi interpreters and watch endless episodes of "Sex and the City" on DVD. Further organisational reform would not eliminate the problem. America's spies do not necessarily need shifting; a good few need sacking. Mr Negroponte is in too lofty and exposed a seat to manage such a programme. But if he can shoulder some of the DCI'S more onerous duties, including the president's briefing and the intelligence budget, he might free a dynamic CIA director to wield the axe for him. There is no time to waste. In a precarious world, the full range of American intelligence and intelligence-gathering on, for example, China's military build-up and Iran's nuclear ambitions needs urgent re-evaluating. But that dynamic director may not be Mr Goss, who sounds awfully tired. The UK Position: Cats’ Eyes in the dark As that shrewd spy-chronicler, John le Carre, noted once, secret services can be most revealing of the deeper character of the countries they protect. A distinguished British practitioner of the craft recently agreed with him, declaring that intelligence work "is the last expression of national identity and sovereignty". Britain is perhaps the prime example. Its secret servants of the state remain tiny in numbers and budgets compared with the United States. The so-called single intelligence account disbursed by the Treasury is £1.3 billion ($2.5 billion). The American government spends roughly five times as much on the bits that are its equivalent of the three British agencies: the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6); the domestic Security Service (M15) and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). And American help is vital. A baffled Edward Heath, when he was prime minister in 1970-74, once asked what Britain was getting in return for making all kinds of facilities available to the Americans. The answer came back that, without the intelligence provided by America, Britain would be instantly reduced to "the same position as other European members of NATO"-in other words, to the second rank of world intelligence powers. But Britain's spy agencies preserve a certain cachet. Some of this, oddly enough, comes from James Bond films, by which the doings of a wildly fictionalised M16 agent have seized the world's imagination. Old M16 hands do not knock Mr Bond; he helps reduce that gap in spending power between the Brits and the Americans. CIA veterans acknowledge that, where they may need a brown envelope stuffed with dollars, an officer from M16 can sometimes rely on brand image alone. A former "c" (as M16 chiefs are traditionally known) has claimed that, after long and careful cultivation of a potential agent, when one of his officers made the final pass, his subject would often "virtually stand to attention, such was the honour". Yet, for all the swash and buckle, Britain's intelligence services have been feeling their limitations lately. Two events, above all, have forced a rethink in the way things are done-and have led to the most substantial reshaping of the intelligence community since 1946-48, when Stalin was ensconced in Moscow and when MI6 did not officially exist. Ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, as a seasoned operator put it, "the community has come together because abroad has come home". Terrorist-related intelligence gathered in a hard and remote area, or by surveillance of a single individual with a particular suitcase in a European hotel room, now has to be passed to the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) beside the Thames, assessed and put on several desks in Whitehall (including, very often, the home secretary's) sometimes within minutes, rather than hours, of its gathering. The secret part of Britain's new "protective state" knows it is pitted now against a threat with no geography, whose consequences (as in Parliament's recent bitter debate on anti-terrorist legislation) often play directly into the political issues of the hour. The nature, provenance, analysis and use of intelligence have never before had such a central or prominent place in British politics. Iraq provided its own extra jolt to the system. Britain's intelligence services, like America's, took an enormous hit when Iraq's expected remaining stock of weapons of mass destruction failed to materialise. They, and the politicians they were advising, seemed to have forgotten the wise remark of Sir Colin McColl, a former chief of M16, that the most intelligence can pro-vide is "cats' eyes in the dark". But that sense of spying's limitations vividly coloured Lord Butler's report, last summer, on WMD, intelligence and Iraq, and has not left the minds of the queen's secret servants since. The failure in Iraq was ever-present in the minds of the Butler implementation group chaired by Sir David Omand, the co-ordinator of security and intelligence, whose report has recently gone before the small group of ministers on Tony Blair's Cabinet Committee on Security and Intelligence. There is no trace, in this report, of a purge mentality driven by politicians or committees seeking to name and shame the "guilty". The British review has been pushed by the very intelligence figures who were in the frame of the Butler report. It recommends: • Full acceptance of the Butler criticisms, especially the need to keep testing key pieces of intelligence-and the assumptions shaping their interpretation-before they are included in assessments sent to ministers and customers in the civil and diplomatic services and the armed forces. And the testing should be more rigorous than it was before the war in Iraq. • To help achieve this, the Cabinet Office's 3o-strong assessment staff will grow by about a third. It will also develop a separate team to challenge assessments, precisely to diminish the risk of "group think" which worried Lord Butler, and to improve longer-term thinking about possible future threats. • Intelligence analysts, whether in the secret agencies, in the Foreign and Common-wealth Office or at the Ministry of De-fence, will become part of a new joint analytical community with its own head of profession and shared training facilities. All in all, the new post-Butler system is intended to give the technical specialists more weight, to engender greater scepticism (including among ministers) about the material gathered, and to licence every member of the British intelligence community, when necessary, to speak truth to power. That, at least, is the hope. Can the post-September nth changes and the prescriptions of the Omand re-port, taken together, achieve what needs to be done? Necessary reforms include ensuring that future politico-military policy does not place a weight upon intelligence that it cannot bear. They must try to draw maximum value from the existing intelligence community, and create a wider picture of current threats from the mosaic of tactical intelligence. They must carve out time and space to consider what some intelligence officers (borrowing the phrase of a French historian, Fernand Braudel) like to call "the thin wisps of tomorrow", from which future anxieties may arise. They also need to protect secrets in circumstances where, within minutes, terrorist-related intelligence has to be both shared with allies and transmitted down the line to the British Transport Police or to traffic wardens in the centre of London. And they have to improve communication with Parliament, press and the public about immediate threats, intelligence capabilities and future anxieties in a world where it is no longer possible or satisfactory to say, simply, "Trust us". A licence to be awkward The first "never again" reform was in place within six months of Lord Butler's team re-porting. m16 restored a separate requirements department after a decade or so in which, for economy reasons, that activity had been blended with operational groups. The new head of what is known colloquially as the "R" function has a licence to be awkward, and is given seniority and independence. His sizeable team is a mixture of seasoned analysts and officers with recent experience in the field. They have almost completed the considerable task of going back and re-evaluating all M16's significant networks, not just those connected with Iraq, and applying new standards of rig-our. So far, the networks have survived. The Cabinet Office, for its part, will shortly be appointing a challenger-in chief to work within the assessments staff to test material at the final stage of processing before it reaches the "high table" of British intelligence, the Joint Intelligence Committee (Iic). The challenge section will also probe existing assumptions, to check that new material is not fitting in too comfortably and readily. As part of the post-Butler guidance, ministers, too, are being asked to raise their game in terms of the scepticism and care with which they approach the "cx" reports (the code indicates it is m16-generated, and is short for "from `c' exclusively"), the Jic's assessments and the whole sheaf-full of intelligence and security material they receive daily and weekly. Perhaps the most significant attempt to maximise the use of intelligence resources took place before the Iraq war, with the creation of the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre. After the September 11th attacks, the Security Service, M15, created its own Counter-Terrorism Analysis Centre, CTAC. But in the summer of 2002, realising something more substantial was needed, it suggested relinquishing some of its traditional turf to create the JTAC. The centre began work on May 1st 2003 and, by the end of that year, was up to its full complement of too officials drawn from a range of agencies, departments and the armed forces. In its first year of life, it analysed and assessed some 60,000 items of intelligence. Roughly speaking, the JTAC now concentrates on what al-Oaeda and its penumbral groups are doing, while the pc works on the implications of this for the wider world. Advocates of the twin system argue that it frees the pc to do more strategic thinking of the sort it did 40 or 50 years ago. Who should know, and how much? The success and work-rate of the JTAC-and the understandable preoccupation of politicians, press and public with this aspect of Britain's intelligence output-have led some insiders to fear a growing "tyranny of the tactical", with insufficient attention paid to the longer-term and deeper meaning of the flood of incoming material. Even before the Omand report, how-ever, the JTAC was increasingly producing longer-term pieces. Now, too, as part of the assessments staff's new "challenge" section, a greater focus is developing on those "thin wisps of tomorrow". Every six months, the prime minister and the small number of ministers on his inner-intelligence loop will receive a "wisp list" of about ten items dealing with potential problems over the horizon up to ten years ahead, such as possible failed or failing states. The prime minister will then be asked if he would like more work done on them. The regular flow of assessments looking six months to a year ahead will not, it is hoped, be diminished, and Lord Butler's strictures about not mixing analysis with policy prescription will be, it is hoped, observed. The JIC's customers will be alerted if the committee's members have failed to reach the consensus for which they traditionally strive. How much of the workings of the new secret state will reach Parliament, press and public? The oversight body, the Intelligence and Security Committee of parliamentarians, operates inside the White-hall ring of secrecy and will be the chief quality-controller reporting to the prime minister (though Parliament will continue to get its 'Sc reports with the sensitive de-tail removed). "Dossiers", of the kind that caused such trouble before and after the Iraq war, are unlikely to re-appear. On the rare occasions when they are used once more, the intelligence analysis will be ruthlessly and clearly kept separate from what ministers make of it or may want to do on the strength of it. It was noticeable last month that the Home Office's background document to its immensely controversial Prevention of Terrorism Bill went out in the name of Charles Clarke, the home secretary, and did not directly quote intelligence material. The document confined itself to declaring that "Our understanding of the threat has advanced both from an increasing intelligence base and through the investigation of both successful and thwarted attacks." An intelligence dossier was considered, but was rejected. Expect more such background papers in future. Whitehall knows that, since Iraq, the threshold of intelligence and security credibility in Britain has been raised to a level probably higher than it has ever been. The detention, without trial, of foreign terrorist suspects in Belmarsh prison has served to keep it there. The problem of secret intelligence activity must always be acute in any open society worthy of its name. Trust depends on clandestine methods being confined to those aspects of domestic or international risk where only secret sources can penetrate to expose, and prevent, potential catastrophe. Much secret intelligence, however, will need to be kept secret. Insiders, especially the old guard, worry a good deal about this. Theirs is traditionally a world of shadows, far removed from oversight, dossiers and inquiries such as Lord Butler's, which quoted chunks of intelligence material and even revealed (to the horror of many officers) the precise number of agents m16 had been running in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Occasionally, you hear a cry for a tough new Official Secrets Act to run alongside the Freedom of Information Act (from which all three secret agencies are exempt), to improve the chances of genuinely sensitive material remaining safe. These days, JTAC's findings can pass within minutes-via the Police International Counter Terrorism Unit, which sits alongside it in M15's headquarters-to the hands of an ordinary officer in a police patrol car. Yet it is still, in intelligence terms, "safe". So-called "tear-line" procedures mean it carries no hint of the secret sources and methods by which it has been de-rived. The same applies to material pooled with those overseas secret services (beyond the old America/Canada/Australia loop) with whom the British agencies have operational links. But there will be no other deeply multilateral arrangements. You will not, for example, find a single serious advocate of a European Union security and intelligence service inside the British agencies. Such relations can flourish only after years of trust-building. No end of a lesson Will the new system work? Insiders certainly hope so. Turf fights and unnecessary demarcations are much diminished, though they have not vanished. The idea of merging Mr6 and M15 into a single security and intelligence service, which was briefly considered in the decade between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the at-tack on the twin towers, is no longer a runner; the certain disruption such a move would cause far outweighs the speculative gains. The new joint analytical community will encourage co-operation, though it will take some bedding in. An IT programme, known as SCOPE, is due to be fully installed by the end of 2006. The idea is to link analysts and customers more swiftly, fully and effectively, while giving the expert a greater capacity to have his or her dissenting view heard, however inconvenient to those higher up the intelligence chain or unwelcome to its top ministerial consumers. The aspiration is there; but will the other ranks truly be convinced the officer class wants to hear? There are many different analytical traditions, too, within the agencies and across the departments. Sending them all for training to the Defence Intelligence Staff's centre at Chick-sands in Bedfordshire maybe neither possible nor genuinely effective in creating an analytical community. The twin shocks of September 11th and Iraq have provided, as Rudyard Kipling said of the Boer war, "no end of a lesson". But will the learning continue if Britain suffers no terrorist outrage in the next few years? Much will depend on the successors to Sir David Omand (who retires next month, to be replaced by the Home Office's Bill Jeffrey) and the current chairman of the William Ehrman, as well as the yet-to-be-appointed head of the analytical profession. A catastrophic event would place great strain on the new arrangements and produce instant pressure for yet another re-think. Parliament might press for a free-standing select committee of the House of Commons to replace the existing Intelligence and Security Committee of Mrs and peers. The press, even without a terrorist outrage to trigger a hunt for the culpable in Whitehall and the secret services, will be pressing for greater transparency and accountability. Even if a trauma is pre-vented, media scepticism of the intelligence feed into policy is unlikely to diminish. And the more skilful journalists and scholarly researchers will find ways of using the Freedom of Information Act to prise material from the Cabinet Office and the Defence Intelligence Staff, which are not exempt from the statute's reach. New methods of recruitment and training may matter a great deal. M16, for example, has been working much more closely with the armed forces recently. Its operators in Afghanistan or Iraq have, in some ways, more in common with the behind the-lines Special Operations Executive (which M,6 absorbed in 1946) than with the crypto-diplomatic spies of old. Such conditions are likely to persist, and a new breed of British intelligence officer could develop to match new requirements. If there is one theme that links all the systemic and human changes in Britain's secret world-and applies to all levels, from the m16 agent in the field to the most senior reader in to Downing Street-it was articulated by Lord Butler. "Intelligence", he said last month during a discussion on the purposes of the business, "is not uniquely worthy of belief. Intelligence is uniquely worthy of scepticism." That, decorated by cats' eyes in the dark, should be emblazoned on the banner of the reformed British intelligence community
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(15) An overview of US and UK Security Services