The Defence of the Realm (143 page)

Once Rimington had got over the shock of her early encounter with the paparazzi, she began to see her unprecedented public visibility as DG and the media interest in her as a possible advantage to be exploited – a means of helping to ‘blow away' myths about the Service. Without seeking any advice from PR consultants, she and her advisers set out to develop an openness programme. The first step in what she called ‘the Service's debut before the wider public' was the publication of the first ever official booklet on its work with the first official photograph of the DG, which showed a smartly dressed, well-groomed woman who bore no resemblance to the ‘dowdy Englishwoman' previously mocked by the
Evening Standard.
⁴²
Unremarkable though the booklet now appears, its secret gestation caused angst in Whitehall, where every word of the draft text was minutely scrutinized. ‘The process of getting the first edition off the stocks', Rimington recalls, ‘would have made a good episode of
Yes Minister
.' In July
1993, the media were summoned without explanation to the Home Office, where, to their surprise, they were handed copies of the Security Service booklet and briefed by the DG, who also answered questions. Though Rimington took a photocall after the briefing with the Home Secretary and was filmed working at a desk, she was not allowed to speak on camera and the media were forbidden to mention that she had conducted the briefing. These farcical requirements, she believed, derived from ‘the nightmare in Whitehall at the time that if they did not keep a very close rein on me, I would end up answering questions about security policy and usurping the Home Secretary's role'.
⁴³

The impact of the Service booklet and Rimington's briefing was heightened by the almost simultaneous arrest in a London street, following Security Service and MPSB surveillance, of a leading Provisional, Robert ‘Rab' Fryers, who was about to begin a major bombing campaign in the City of London and provincial cities.
⁴⁴
Thereafter Rimington started to accept invitations to lunch with the media and to give off-the-record briefings. Jon Snow of
Channel 4 News
expressed surprise that she was not more like Rosa Klebb, the fearsome female KGB officer in the James Bond film
From Russia with Love.
⁴⁵
The DG reported after a year of such briefings: ‘Silly press speculation can never be removed entirely, but the Service's continuing, controlled contact with senior editors and others is helping to shape a better informed and more considered attitude to the Service in the more responsible quarters of the media.'
⁴⁶

As well as developing contacts with the media, Rimington became the first DG to take part in the weekly Wednesday-morning meetings of permanent under secretaries. In June 1994, with Whitehall apparently no longer fearful that Rimington might upstage the Home Secretary, she was allowed to talk in public for the first time and deliver the annual televised BBC Dimbleby Lecture on ‘Security and Democracy: Is There a Conflict?' As the DG appeared before a hand-picked audience of 340 at Whitehall's Banqueting House, she was probably helped by her long experience of amateur dramatics. (Her memoirs include photographs of her playing Marcelle in
Hotel Paradiso
in 1968 and celebrating her sixty-fourth birthday in 1999 by appearing in Tom Stoppard's
The Fifteen-Minute Hamlet
at a barge theatre in Copenhagen.)
⁴⁷
Though Rimington was, by her own admission, ‘extremely nervous' before giving the Dimbleby Lecture, even the
Guardian
, one of the Security Service's most frequent critics, reported that ‘The first, superficial, impression was of a brilliantly accomplished performance, almost a culture shock.' As usual, Rimington's wardrobe aroused intense media interest:

Commentators, including fashion editors, have dwelt at length on her powerdressing – her rather severe primrose yellow jacket – offset by her body language with the use of large, unblinking, eyes reminiscent of Princess Diana as she paused to drive a point home, or completed a well-rehearsed delivery of a light-hearted anecdote.
⁴⁸

Thereafter, there was a perception in Whitehall that ‘Stella enjoyed being in the limelight' – though she disapproved of all other members of the Service, past or present, making public appearances and vetoed a BBC invitation to her predecessor, Sir Patrick Walker, to appear on
Desert Island Discs
. Late in 1994, Rimington appeared for the first time before the newly established oversight committee of parliamentarians, the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), for whose creation support had been growing since the final years of the Thatcher government. Michael Howard, who had become home secretary earlier in the year, was initially anxious that the Security Service might prove politically inept in its dealings with the ISC, and asked his PUS, Sir Richard Wilson, to spend some time with the DG explaining what the Committee would expect from her. Rimington, however, proved a confident and assured performer.
⁴⁹
At least one of the MPs on the ISC initially believed that the Service was ‘inbred and not open to outside influences'. He and the rest of the Committee seemed reassured by meeting members of staff. ‘You are obviously sane and ordinary people' was one comment, apparently intended as a compliment.
⁵⁰

Rimington believed that one of the major achievements of her term as DG was ‘the demystification of the Service and the creation of a more informed public and media perception'.
⁵¹
Eliza Manningham-Buller, the next female officer to become DG, was struck by Rimington's concern for what she called the Service's ‘shop window'.
⁵²
The Service's new image was epitomized by its move, publicly announced, to a new, light and airy headquarters at Thames House on Millbank where two buildings had been fused into one and skilfully modernized behind the interwar façade. Staff, who had previously been dispersed between Gower Street, Curzon Street and seven other central London offices, linked by a continuous shuttle service ferrying classified files and documents back and forth, were at last able to work together in the same building. Atriums with glass roofs at both ends of the building allowed even those rooms which had no outside window to have a view of the sky. An automated miniature monorail (an improved version of the one used at Curzon Street two decades earlier) brought files up from the basement. The official opening of the Thames House headquarters by the Prime Minister, John Major, on 30 November 1994 provided a further photo-opportunity. Less than forty years earlier
Rab Butler, on becoming home secretary, had had no idea where MI5 headquarters were.
⁵³

The new public profile of the Security Service was part of a more general transformation. The Service changed more during the 1990s than in any previous decade since the Second World War. Change, however, was an uncomfortable process. The end of the Cold War, which had been MI5's chief preoccupation for much of the previous half-century, left an initial sense of disorientation which complicated H Branch's attempt to plan the Service's new role.
¹
H1/0, who was asked in February 1990 by Sir Patrick Walker to prepare a strategic review of the Service's future, noted that when he began his review ‘there was reason to fear that world events might run away from us and that the Service would be left with its role and objectives inadequately defined in radically new international circumstances.'
⁵⁴
H1/0's review, which took almost a year to complete, was, he reported, ‘without precedent in our Service':

Of course, major reorganisation of the Service took place in 1941 following Sir David Petrie's report; and in 1953, following Sir Dick White's appointment as Director General. Very great improvements in management style and policy were introduced by Sir Antony Duff. But, as far as I know, this is the first occasion on which, addressing radical changes in the world, the top management of the Service has sought to formulate a coherent strategy.
⁵⁵

The Service, however, was still unused to strategic thinking. Though H1/0's strategic review drew heavily on discussions with a small circle of fellow enthusiasts, in general he found little enthusiasm within the Service for ‘addressing radical changes', and was disappointed by the lack of imagination shown by many of his colleagues when he discussed the future with them:

We must recognise the fact, unfortunate though it is, that the need for us to respond to the new situation by devising an articulate and coherent strategy is appreciated by few colleagues in the Service . . . For the Service as an institution, a lack of interest in, or a hostility to, demanding strategic thinking will not do. How to overcome these incapacities is a serious question for us.
⁵⁶

The future DG Jonathan Evans, then H1B/1, recalls the initial discussion of H1/0's strategic review by the Management Board as
‘stormy!
' He and
H1/0 wondered whether the Legal Adviser, David Bickford, who had clashed with Walker at the meeting, might resign (though, in the event, he did not do so).
⁵⁷
The controversies aroused by the review helped to produce an important cultural shift. By 1992 it was accepted that:

Strategic planning is the principal role of the Management Board, supported by H1. Board members have corporate, non-partisan responsibilities in this regard in addition to their individual command roles.

. . .

Strategic planning [is] now part of annual resources management cycle of objective setting, planning and performance review. A review of strategy each summer begins the cycle.
⁵⁸

(Along with the Service's increased capacity for strategic thinking went a growing acceptance of jargon – even a belief among some staff that it was expected of them.) Debate on how far the Service should move into new areas of work – countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, supporting the police against organized crime, defending the UK's ‘economic well-being', investigating animal-rights extremists – continued into the mid-1990s.

In March 1992, the Security Service proposed to the Interdepartmental Working Group on Subversion in Public Life (SPL) that it cease keeping a record of ‘rank-and-file members of subversive organisations', once the first assignment of most new graduate entrants. The SPL agreed that ‘this change will not involve any increased risk to national security.' The proportion of subversives detected by the Security Service during vetting had declined from 2.7 per cent of all applicants in 1971 to 0.06 per cent in 1990. ‘This decline', it reported, ‘parallels the national decline in subversive organisations.' Since the 1970s the number of organizations identified as subversive had fallen from over seventy to around forty-five, and their total membership from 55,000 to around 14,000. Only six of the organizations had more than 400 members. None represented any significant threat to national security. The Service had found no evidence in recent years that any subversive group had deliberately set out to obtain classified information.
⁵⁹

The illusion within Whitehall that the ‘peace dividend' produced by the end of the Cold War should extend to the intelligence community as well as to the armed services led to budget cuts for the Security Service (as for SIS and GCHQ) which made necessary the first compulsory redundancies since the Second World War.
⁶⁰
Like Washington and the government machines of other allies, Whitehall failed to grasp that, even though the
threat of thermonuclear war was far lower than it had been for forty years, the increased diversity of potential threats to national security, especially from terrorism, pointed to a need for more, rather than less, intelligence. The culmination of the intelligence budget negotiation was a ‘Star Chamber' in which ministers whose departments were the main intelligence consumers put to the heads of the agencies, as it seemed to Rimington, the most awkward questions their officials could devise:

You knew that whatever you were proposing, you would be given less, and drawing attention to the comparative cost to the country of a successful IRA bomb in the City of London and a few more thousands of pounds spent on counter-terrorism never seemed to work. I came away wondering ruefully why I had put so much effort into stopping them all getting blown up.
⁶¹

In November 1993 the DG announced to staff the depressing news that the Major government had decided, on the recommendation of the PUS Committee, ‘that over the next three financial years we must find the funding for additional work necessary against PIRA from within our own resources, as well as producing some further savings on top of those already presented in our [financial] Plan, as a contribution towards reducing Government expenditure'. In the view of Stephen Lander, who became Director H in 1994,
⁶²
Rimington's negotiating skills within Whitehall helped to ‘fight off the worst cuts'.
⁶³
Over the next two years, however, almost 300 staff were retired early. In all, the Service lost over 400 jobs, nearly 20 per cent of its total strength. As Lander later acknowledged, ‘Our success at handling this painful episode was mixed.'
⁶⁴
Despite Rimington's skill in dealing with Whitehall, she seemed a somewhat remote figure to those in Thames House worried about their jobs. In Manningham-Buller's view, she was ‘better externally than internally as DG, not always comfortable with staff'.
⁶⁵
The painful problems of redundancy were compounded by the travails of moving towards a record-keeping system increasingly based on computerization rather than paper files. When Lander became Director H, the Service used a Unix word-processing system called GIFTED CHILD, which malfunctioned so frequently that it was nicknamed SPOILED BRAT. Lander took the risky but ultimately successful decision to buy Linkworks, which, as well as working with Unix, enabled the Service to switch to PCs and use Microsoft software.
⁶⁶