The spying world after Brexit

My stories in The Times today: THE HEAD of MI6 is expected to stay in charge of the secret intelligence service beyond his retirement date this year to guarantee continuity during the critical post-Brexit period, The Times has learned. Alex Younger will have completed the normal five-year term in November but if Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary, confirm the extension, he will become the longest-serving MI6 chief since the 1960s. Whitehall sources said it was crucial for key jobs such as the heads of the security and intelligence services to remain unchanged while the country faced unprecedented challenges after leaving the European Union. A security source said no decision had yet been made about Mr Younger’s position. However, Andrew Parker, Mr Younger’s counterpart at MI5, has already agreed to remain as director-general of the security service until 2020. He was appointed in 2013. Security sources revealed he was asked early last year to extend his appointment, “and so it was not Brexit-related”. But with so much uncertainty over the future, his agreement to stay is viewed as a fortuitous decision. MI6 chiefs, known in Whitehall as ‘C’, traditionally serve for a maximum of five years. It’s recognised as a high-powered, intense job, especially today with the demand for intelligence increasing at a rapid rate. “Five years is normally enough for this appointment because of the pressures involved,” one former intelligence official said. However, Brexit has opened up concerns at the highest level about future intelligence and security relations with European partners. Intelligence-sharing has played a key part in preventing terrorist attacks, and close personal working relationships have been formed between individual services and their senior staff, and in particular between the heads of the different European agencies. Brexit negotiations with the EU have included future security arrangements. But there remains a certain ambivalence about how they will work and whether there will be any restrictions on intelligence-sharing once Britain is no longer a member of the EU. Extending Mr Younger’s role as MI6 chief to cover the crucial 12-24 months after Britain has left the EU is not seen in Whitehall as raising any difficulties. “The five-year stint is not set in concrete,” one former senior Whitehall official said. However, Mr Younger’s closest predecessors, Sir John Sawers, Sir John Scarlett and Sir Richard Dearlove, all retired after five years. Sir Dick White appointed in 1956 in the Cold War, is the longest-serving MI6 chief, staying in post until 1968. “Alex [Younger] is regarded as having been successful, he is very good with the troops [his intelligence staff] and has the right touch,” Lord Hennessy of Nimpsfield, professor of contemporary history at Queen Mary, London University and an authority on Whitehall, said. Mr Younger, 55, joined MI6 in 1991 after serving as a captain in the Scots Guards. During his time as an operational intelligence officer overseas he served in Europe and the Middle East and as MI6 station chief in Afghanistan. It is believed an internal candidate, a senior male director, is being groomed to be Mr Younger’s successor when he eventually steps down. “Traditionally the service tries to grow someone internally into succeeding as chief and it would normally be an officer who, for example, has served as director of operations,” the former Whitehall official said. “It could be an outsider, such as a senior diplomat, but there’s a real sense that it’s difficult to appoint an outsider if he or she hasn’t stood on a street corner or sweated in a hotel room waiting for the arrival of an agent,” he said. “In the secret world the shortlist of potential candidates for ‘C’ is always a pretty restricted field,” he said. Sir John Sawers, who was succeeded by Mr Younger in 2014, was appointed from outside the service but he had started his distinguished career with MI6 before going on to become one of Britain’s most accomplished diplomats, including two years as United Nations ambassador. “He was still regarded by the service as ‘one of us’ when he was appointed chief of the secret intelligence service, and his experience at that level was unmatched,” the former official said. BEHIND THE STORY: A former MI6 chief once famously said that the most the secret intelligence service could provide was “cat’s eyes in the dark”. Sir Colin McColl, the first head of MI6 to be officially “outed” by the government of John Major in the early 1990s when the secret intelligence service was placed on the statute books, had a staff of around 2,000. There was no al-Qaeda, no Isis, and Boris Yeltsin was president of the Soviet Union. Today Alex Younger, the chief of the service, has a staff of 3,300 and shares an overall budget of £3 billion with MI5, GCHQ, the government signals intelligence agency, and Whitehall’s national security secretariat. The world of spying has changed dramatically. In the 1990s when MI6 headquarters was housed in a non-descript office block close to Waterloo station, there was a gentleman’s club atmosphere in the secrecy business. The same was the case at MI5’s anonymous headquarters in Gower Street, Bloomsbury. Each service is still located on different sides of the Thames, MI6 at Vauxhall Cross and MI5, with more than 4,000 staff, at Thames House, Millbank. However, the environment is no longer gentleman’s club. Both services are swarming with young men and women and both are ethnically diverse. The buildings are spacious, open plan and business-like. GCHQ, too, in Cheltenham, which employs 6,000 people, is housed in a huge modern circular building known as The Doughnut. The spying game has changed out of all proportion because of the immense daily threat posed by a hostile digitised world. A British spy operating abroad, trying to build a network of agents to provide secret information to meet the government’s set of requirements, is less inclined these days to stand in dark alleys or on street corners to receive intelligence from contacts. It’s more often done by data transfer. But while advanced technology potentially makes spying easier, it also creates greater vulnerabilities. As Mr Younger said in a speech a year after he took over as ‘C’, the same technology in the hands of foreign powers enables them to “see what we are doing and put our people and agents at risk”. Both MI6 and the CIA whose chiefs share one of the closest relationships in the spying world, have significantly expanded what are called “non-official cover” (Nocs) spies. These are salaried members of the two services who operate abroad, not under diplomatic cover but on the staff of companies and organisations, gathering secret intelligence as part of their remit. It’s part of a new and costly development to spread the intelligence-gathering capability beyond the more traditional embassy-based spies disguised as political or trade diplomats. “There had been a gradual shift in this direction but it has expanded dramatically in recent years,” Nigel West, author of intelligence and espionage books, said.