The designated location is Gustoso, a modest Italian restaurant in Pimlico, central London. The booking is under my name. Security: light to invisible. I savour the moment ahead of the first on-the-record interview with the Chief of MI6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
Gustoso is suspiciously thin on customers and the cheesy Italian music is a distraction. Sir John Sawers slips almost undetected into a wooden chair to my right. Britain’s spymaster is tall and trim, a sporty 59-year-old blessed with a full head of black hair, a few grey flecks and Ealing studio looks.
More flashy Pierce Brosnan than world-weary Alec Guinness. After a brief exchange about our summer holidays (his interrupted by the beheadings of two American hostages by Islamist jihadis), I ask the obvious question: why are you having lunch with me on the record? I thought SIS was supposed to be secret.
“It is secret,” replies Sir John. “But it is important that people understand a bit more about why intelligence is necessary ... There always used to be a presumption that the intelligence services were on our side but things like Snowden [Edward Snowden, the renegade American national security agency contractor now in hiding in Russia] have led some people to question that. I still think there’s overwhelming support for us but there’s also a louder voice of criticism, a questioning, ‘Are we really necessary?’”
We will go on to talk about Snowden and how he turned the world of espionage upside down with his revelations about the scale of surveillance in the western world but, at the moment, we are still warming up.
I suggest Sir John likes to live a little dangerously, on and off the slopes. (In 1996 he came within an inch of his carotid artery being severed in a skiing accident in West Virginia.)
The spy chief chuckles. “I would not have taken this job if I weren’t prepared to deal in risk, personal and professional. MI6 is in the risk business.”
Spies, he continues, are “normal human beings, public servants doing the best possible job we can for our country”. Sir John comes across as reassuringly normal, in fact. He is wearing a dark suit, blue and white striped shirt, and a burgundy-blue tie (a gift, he later reveals, from India’s Intelligence Bureau). The diction is confident but classless. His father worked for Rolls-Royce and Sir John went to a grammar school in Bath and studied physics and philosophy at Nottingham University. Until his appointment in 2009, most of his predecessors had been Oxbridge recruits.
Sir John says he was tapped on the shoulder at Nottingham, having been offered a job at the Foreign Office. “I think it was because I happened to know the MI6 contacts because I was secretary of the Students’ Union for a year.”
Is that par for the course?
“The union had contacts with the university, and so you knew all the senior people. Of course, you’d never think that any of them would have a contact with MI6 ... I was quite surprised.”
His first undercover posting was in 1980 in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital. It was his last. Hanging around in dingy hotel rooms waiting for a contact or a drop was not quite what a twentysomething in a hurry had in mind. “I discovered what I really liked was not so much operations as ideas, politics and policy, and there’s risk involved in each of them. I found my footing in the diplomatic service.”
He left MI6, joined the Foreign Office and rose rapidly, serving in Damascus, South Africa, Washington, Baghdad and New York, latterly as UN ambassador (2007-2009). Backroom stints in London, notably as Tony Blair’s foreign policy private secretary between 1999-2001, ensured he caught the eye of his political masters.
Then, in 2009, he received another tap on the shoulder, this time from David Miliband, then a youthful foreign secretary. Miliband recommended his appointment as “C”, the title MI6 insiders like to use for their boss. Traditionalists, including a former C, were unhappy that an outsider had bagged the top job and, off-the-record, said so.
A waitress hovers: Sir John orders aubergine with Parmesan, followed by sea bream and spinach. I opt for potato soup with croutons, followed by swordfish. We pass on the wine and order a jug of tap water.
How did he feel about the sniping? “I expected some reservations from past officers ... some of the response was, ‘We don’t want the Foreign Office taking over MI6.’ Of course, the response from the Foreign Office was, ‘Now we’re going to have MI6 taking over the Foreign Office ...’ I think part of the problem was that MI6 had a very strong culture and that culture was a strength.”
Sir John is being diplomatic. When he took charge, MI6 was still recovering from its worst crisis since the traitor Kim Philby defected to Moscow at the height of the Cold War.
The service, under Sir Richard Dearlove, had been accused of serving up bogus intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to support the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. The agency was then further criticised for being complicit in the torture of suspected terrorists by American interrogators, including the CIA — a charge vigorously contested.
“[MI6] had been disadvantaged because it was not porous enough. It was a bit defensive towards outsiders,” Sir John says now. Over the past five years he has created a more modern organisation. One of his first moves was to order open-plan office space at MI6’s headquarters in the postmodernist green building, known as “Legoland”, on the Thames at Vauxhall.
He also continued the work of his immediate predecessor Sir John Scarlett, who brought non-executive directors to the SIS board. Separately, two former High Court judges oversee MI6 as well as MI5, the domestic spy service, and GCHQ, the UK’s super-secret eavesdropping agency. These intelligence commissioners regularly monitor the use of interception, intelligence and the use of data, and have access to all files.
Sir John, in full managerial flow, has barely touched his aubergine but when the waitress attempts to take it away, she receives a polite but firm, “Not just yet”. She removes my empty bowl of soup. We resume the theme of accountability. Has Snowden brought in a box-ticking approach rather than the more freewheeling, cloak-and-dagger methods associated with the spy business?
Not at all, he insists. “If you don’t get those things right, then you’re going to get into trouble later on, and that can close down your operating space. I see compliance as a fundamental enabler.”
MI6, he says, is now able to work much more seamlessly with MI5 and GCHQ. SIS and MI5 agents can work at home and abroad. Intelligence is shared, despite the absolute need to protect assets and maintain secrecy. “It’s required a culture change and a mindset change at the top of the agencies.”
Snowden’s revelations have, however, made life much harder. The terrorist threat in the UK has gone up while “some” of the service’s capabilities have gone down now the enemy knows better how they are being tracked, he says.
In November last year, Sir John, flanked by the heads of MI5 and GCHQ, in their first public hearing before MPs in Westminster, declared: “It is clear our adversaries are rubbing their hands with glee. Al Qaida is lapping it up.”
Ten months on, he takes comfort that the British public remains generally supportive of the intelligence services, more so than the Americans who seem more disturbed about breaches of privacy. The fiction of James Bond and John le Carré evidently captures the public imagination and Britain’s actually quite good at intelligence work but why?
“You get into deep cultural issues there but ...”
You’re a man of culture, I say. He shares with Shelley, his wife of more than 30 years, a love of theatre. Recent favourites include “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, “Wolf Hall” and “The Book of Mormon” (“sacrilegious but a belly-laugh all the way through”).
Less appealing was Great Britain, Richard Bean’s play about phone-hacking. “It was a bit rushed, a bit close to caricature of real-life individuals. I don’t really like plays that become agitprop.”
In truth, Sir John is a bit of a showman. He likes the mystique of the secret service but he is not above a sly joke. Last Christmas, friends received a card showing a line of Father Christmas figures, one, a “secret Santa”, in dark glasses. The card was signed in green ink, a trademark flourish of all Cs going back to 1909 when SIS was founded by Captain Sir George Mansfield Smith-Cumming.
The waitress arrives with the fish. My swordfish is just the right balance between juicy and meaty. Sir John’s sea bream looks very white and appetisingly fresh. I ask whether it is true that a portrait of John Thurloe, Oliver Cromwell’s spymaster, hangs in his office.
“There is one, and, actually, my predecessor John Scarlett used to revere that particular picture. His office ... had all sorts of historical artefacts and letters up on the wall. My style is rather modernistic. I have modern art on the walls and modern furniture to keep the clutter down to a minimum.”
Just like your former ambassadorial residence in New York, I venture, omitting to mention the Warhol-like portrait of the Queen borrowed from the Foreign Office collection.
“That’s very good,” says Sir John, complimenting me on my own intelligence-gathering operation.
He says he is a good delegator but also a believer in what the veteran Labour politician Denis Healey called “hinterland”. Family (two sons, one daughter), sport (he likes cycling and possesses two Cannondale bikes) and theatre are all important. “You have to have other things to do in life to bring a different perspective to your job. I do work 65, 70 hours a week, I have done for the last 20 years — longer at times ... You could drive yourself to work 90 or 100 hours a week but I don’t think that is good for you or the organisation.”
We turn to policy. The man with the secrets has the network and the self-confidence to rank as a Whitehall heavyweight, close to the US. His voice counts on the newly formed National Security Council and he prides himself on his own early warning system.
In 2003, while on secondment to Baghdad, just after the US-led invasion, he wrote a cable to London — later leaked — warning that Iraq was collapsing into chaos. Late last year, at a private dinner, he warned about the threat of a Yes vote on Scottish independence. In 2010 he spoke out against the centrality of Afghanistan in the so-called war on terror. The queen was on the wrong part of the chess board, he declared, even as the US and UK were pursuing a military surge against the Taliban.
Four years on, he does not demur. “Terrorists were bobbing up elsewhere in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia and so on, and they weren’t getting anything like the attention that the terrorist threat from Afghanistan was.”
In future, he says, he wants MI6 to be more agile in response to threats but not at the expense of abandoning the military in theatre. The lesson of the past decade — when billions have been spent in Afghanistan and Iraq — is that a government can be toppled in months but it takes years to rebuild the country. Then again, “if you decide not to [rebuild], as we did in Libya, partly because of the scars from Iraq, then you topple the government and you end up having nothing in its place. And if you don’t intervene at all, you end up with a situation like you have in Syria. These are real dilemmas.”
The restaurant music suddenly seems a lot louder. Sir John summons the waitress and asks — politely — if it can be turned down. Much fiddling of controls follows, to no discernible effect. Is someone, somewhere, seeking to jam our conversation?
Sir John, who was British ambassador in Cairo between 2001 and 2003, says the Arab spring shows that revolutionary change is impossible to manage and will normally end up worse for western interests and values. “We saw it in Tehran in 1979, and we’ve seen it in Egypt over the past few years.”
We dispense with desserts and order a cappuccino for me and a mint tea for C. I ask him about his career highlights. Among the most satisfying he counts securing Chinese and Russian support for UN sanctions against Iran’s nuclear programme. He credits sanctions for a change in politics in Iran. Today there is a possibility of reaching “some form of accommodation” with Tehran, not least because of the chaos in neighbouring Iraq and Syria.
He singles out the Chinese as outstanding diplomats, knowing their strengths and weaknesses and what they want. “They attract the highest quality people, they give them the highest quality of skills and they’re very skilful negotiators who know when to cut a deal ... The Russians have good people but are tightly controlled by Moscow and, sometimes, obliged to lie for their country which isn’t actually very appetising.”
I ask if he has ever lied for his country. “Not knowingly,” says Sir John, “not told a blatant lie for my country. I’ve sometimes had to dissemble.”
Later this year Sir John is stepping down as SIS chief. This is his last job in government, “for now”; the private sector beckons. We both check the bill. Real value for money, I say. Sir John laughs and offers me a ride in his car to my next destination, a meeting at the Tate.
As we step into the bright autumn sunshine, a burly figure ushers me into the official car, a foreign model as it happens. We weave through the backstreets at speed. Within minutes, I am outside the art gallery. I step out of the car, reach for my mobile phone and look back. C has long since vanished.
–Financial Times
