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The Rest Is Politics: Leading
175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming)
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Welcome to the Restless Quality Leading with
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me, Alistair Campbell and with me, Rory Stewart. And we are very excited to have somebody who is one of my personal heroes. So, Jeremy Fleming. Jeremy Fleming was the head of gchq, which is the government Signals Intelligence Agency, the equivalent of the National Security Agency in the us. Before that, though, he was a member of the Security Service, MI5, domestic intelligence. And he's part of a series that we're now doing with some of the great intelligence chiefs from the UK and the us The US We've done two heads of the CIA, done David Petraeus and Mike Pompeo. And from the uk, we have done Alex Younger, we have done John Soares, and we have done Eliza Manningham Buller from MI5. But this is the first time we've interviewed the head of gchq. We're very happy to have you. Thank you for coming on.
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C
Well, thank you. It's nice to be here. And that sounds like some daunting company.
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A
Yeah. Well, listen, I don't know if you listen to our podcast, Jeremy, of course you do. But you will know that we tend to start our interviews by trying to delve into a little bit into the. Into the past of an interviewee and starting right at the beginning. So what was your background and what was it in you that led you down the path that ultimately has defined your life, which is spying intelligence.
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C
Well, I was an accidental spy and I won't bore you with all the details. Grew up in Hampshire, single mum, three boys, state schools, comprehensive education, sixth form college and then university. Read history, mainly because it was five hours a week. And I came out of that thinking, well, what am I going to do with my life? And after a bit of traveling, I decided I better get a Proper qualification. I went into the City, I trained as a chartered accountant, which, you know, whilst the stereotype has been useful for me in avoiding conversations in my career afterwards, actually I really enjoyed that environment.
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A
And do you mean by that as a sort of training to be boring?
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C
Well, it's a training to put people off asking you extra questions. My mother always used to say that I sit next to the most boring person in the world who's talking about little Johnny, who's a merchant banker, excuse me, merchant bankers. And I have to say, you're an accountant. And that usually makes them turn away. So I trained as an accountant, actually. I really enjoyed that and I ended up doing some work. This is the end of the 80s, early 90s, some work in government. There was a mini recession and I found a whole world of challenge and scale that I had no idea about, having worked in the private sector, with private sector clients, and I thought, I'm going to stick around here for a bit. So I applied for a second run to the Ministry of Defense and more or less, not quite, but more or less. When I turned up, I found out it was MI5. So careers are about serendipity, if you ask me. And that was one of those sliding door moments. And I went into Mi5 and after a year, the then Director General said, why don't you stay and do a proper job? And I was offended, actually.
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B
And who was your boss at that time?
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C
Well, my boss at that time was Stephen Lander and before that, Stella Remington. It was around that period. And so I thought, you don't get this chance very often. And so I suddenly found myself going down the intelligence.
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A
So you literally were accidentally. You had no idea when you applied for the job that you were.
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C
I had no. When I applied, I had no idea, more or less. When I walked in the door, I had. I had little idea. And it was quite a culture shock, if I'm honest with you. You know, going from very smart offices not far away from here, very modern, open plan even then, people with laptops, you know, technology everywhere, into an environment with, you know, sort of yellowing bomb curtains and technology that definitely felt out of date.
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A
It wasn't James Bond, was it?
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C
It wasn't James Bond, but it was fantastic. People doing important things that mattered. And 25 years later, I was deputy head of the place and then went to gchq.
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B
It's a very odd time to be joining the security service because the early 90s, Berlin walls come down in 89, Soviet unions collapsed in the early 90s and Britain's really scratching its head trying to work out what its intelligence and security services are for. Big Al Qaeda style terrorism doesn't really get going till 2001. The Russians are no longer 10ft tall. What was going on during that 10 years as people tried to work out where the threats were coming from and what the purpose of the whole thing?
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C
Yeah, but remember, MI5 is an investigative service and it exists to disrupt threats to the nation's national security, protect its economic well being. And whilst that's often personified in big state actors and you know, the 10 foot tall China, Russia, you have the, the list too. It's often closer to home. You know, it's about domestic terrorism, it's about subversion, it's about espionage. And at that point, for the first time, it was also about serious, serious crime. And so that period actually was a really busy period. It was a transitional period. The service took on responsibility for intelligence in Northern Ireland and played a fundamental part in the things that you were central to, Alistair. And of course at that point we could start to see Islamist inspired terrorism coming through too. This was when that phenomenon started to shape. So it was a transitional period. I don't think it was an odd time to join. It was a transitional period and it felt like it was a period when the old guard were moving, new threats were coming into play and new possibility as well.
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B
And then a huge change with 9 11. I mean presumably an enormous change in terms of mindset resourcing, because there in 2001, presumably an enormous shift to trying to deal with international terrorism.
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C
It was a huge moment. It's one of those we all remember where we were moments, although I note that by the time I left the intelligence agencies, people were joining who weren't born on 9 11. And that was quite sobering in lots of ways, not least about my age, but also about how people perceive the threat. But for my generation of people coming through the system, it was completely seminal.
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B
And how did it change things? What was the big change?
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C
Well, actually the change in the UK was slower than it was in America. And my first exposure to this was I was involved in the 911 Commission around data and intelligence. And so I was exposed to a side of corporate America, if you like, big tech in its very early days, but also thinking seriously about data and intelligence. And I came back from that experience and with a number of other officers in MI5 said we need to be a technology and a data business. And we started the transformation then. But the resources and the real difference in Organization, organisation nationally didn't really happen until 7 7. There was quite a slow ramp up on that. And then 7 7, the attacks in London, four or five years later, that's when the change really happened.
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And then you suddenly saw much more
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money, much more focus, more money, a regional understanding, you know, a security service that had bases around the United Kingdom and investment in technology and a whole range of different partnerships.
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A
You mentioned 9, 11 there. I mean, I can remember where I was because I was with Tony Blair in Brighton. And we came back and we'd asked for a meeting of all the kind of relevant bodies to come in. So all of the kind of main agencies were at this meeting. When that sort of thing happens, how much sort of competition is there between MI5, MI6 and GCHQ? Are you all. Is there a pecking order? Are you all at the same level? And how easy is it to kind of combine your forces when something like that happens and you suddenly have to.
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C
Well, I probably disappoint you a bit by saying that for most of my career, it felt incredibly collaborative. The way in which the agencies work together now is completely collaborative, hand in glove. A point at which I left shared technology, shared people and corporate systems, a shared approach to understanding of threats. And so it didn't feel competitive in that way, certainly, but not by the end. Of course, there are periods when there's friction, as there are with any close partnerships. But international terrorism was a really good spur for that sort of collaboration, because you can't have agencies when you've got the threat as live as it was on the streets of the United Kingdom. You can't have agencies who are not joined up. So MI6 understood that their intelligence collection, largely overseas, largely human intelligence collection, had to be in accordance with the threats that were most serious here in the United Kingdom and the things that MI5 were leading on investigating. Similarly, GCHQ had to predicate its intelligence collection around those threats because otherwise bombs go off on the streets.
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A
And you mentioned that you were part of the team that kind of brought MI5 much more into a kind of public facing arena. I always got the sense that there were tensions within that process as well, that, you know, because that happened a lot on our watch, where you sense that the intelligence agencies were coming to terms with something very new and very different. Just describe that process and where you think it started and where you think we are with it now.
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C
I think it started in the end of the 80s and it started quite properly with getting the agencies properly avowed in Parliament. I Mean, it is ridiculous now for me to say that when I arrived and I took over the money at MI5, all of the funding for the agencies was hidden in Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence votes and the vote holders in those organizations had no idea what this money was for. I mean, it's ridiculous. And so making that properly visible to Parliament and this Lear Committee of Parliament, making the agencies on a statutory footing, ensuring that the powers were properly recorded and had statutory. This is incredibly important and it allows me to say what I've said a lot in public and I still really believe, which is that the agencies have to earn their license to operate. We shouldn't take for granted that the public trusts us or that Parliament trusts us, or that we should be able to do the incredibly intrusive things we do. We have to earn that. And part of that is, is being accountable and transparent in public and also speaking in public.
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Do you ever feel at a disadvantage to those countries whose agencies genuinely are secret Service agencies?
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C
No, no, I don't think we're trying to play by the same rules as some of those countries you might be referring to. I think we have managed to walk a really difficult tightrope, particularly in the last 10 years, which is to talk about capabilities without giving up secret sources. And that is I incredibly important.
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You mentioned three parts of your career, Northern Ireland, Islamism and 77. What's the difference in what the role of the intelligence services were are in those three different contexts?
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I think. Can you just allow me to do a brief explainer, if you don't mind?
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Oh, yeah, we love to explain.
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So MI5, known as the Domestic Security Service, is responsible for disrupting threats to national security and safeguarding economic well being. So it is an investigative service. It mounts investigations with the purpose of disrupting and it does that often with law enforcement and through a whole range of other things. The other two agencies are largely intelligence collection agencies. So MI6 does that through human intelligence, largely. GCHQ does that through signals intelligence, through collection of electronic data. Both of those agencies are mostly focused overseas. So when you sort of. You'll forgive me for explaining like that, but when you put them together, they do have different, different purposes. And for each of those threats that you talked about, they. They bring those unique purposes and approaches and capabilities to the things that are most important for national security at that day, at that time.
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I listened again this morning to a speech you made at RUSI Royal United Services Institute a few years ago, and it seemed to me that you felt maybe that we, as A country had not quite woken up to the speed with which technology is changing your world, our world. So I guess what I meant by my question was whether in the Northern Ireland context, human intelligence was maybe much more necessary, much more relevant than what I see is up to now.
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C
I think the balance changes depending on the exact priority at the time. But I think it's harder to say, you know, that one is more important than or less important at a particular time. You know, human intelligence brings you intent in a way that other sorts of intelligence rarely do. You know, a relationship between an agent and someone telling you something enables you to understand much more than the exact thing that they're telling you. And that remains critically important. Signals intelligence, data, cyber intelligence has become more important and more prominent because of the technology world in which, in which we, in which we live. But it's also increased the challenge of, you know, of getting, if you like the, you know, the wheat from the chaff, just a much, it's a much bigger thing. And then in all of that, MI5 still has to perform its role, which is to disrupt the major threat. So I think the balance changes depending on the threat. But the overall need for the three services, the three agencies, remains as strong now as it did back in the 90s when I joined.
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B
Okay, so let's try to jump forward for a second and bring us into the current day. You're sitting at National Security Council at the moment, or if you were, what would you say the big challenges facing Britain are over the next five years and over the next 10 years?
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C
Well, I'm going to start by saying that, you know, I was there when I was there, I was there with the other agency heads and I'm, I'm trying to wreck my memory as to whether we ever had that sort of conversation. I think it's pretty rare to have that sort of conversation really. And I think that that is, that is probably one of the things that, you know, we need to do, do better at. But if I was sat here today and I was thinking about the threats ranged, ranged ahead of us, obviously we are in a world where geopolitics has been turned upside down, where we have a multipolar superpower situation with, with China approaching a peer level superpower to America and exercising its power in a different way, and where we have a range of threats coming at us in ways that we probably thought unimaginable even a few years ago. Multi domain, from space right down to old fashioned spying, from cyber threats right across to extortion and fraud. On a scale that I think is actually a national security issue now. So you'd want to set the piece about how the threat environment has changed and then you'd want to highlight some priorities. And this is the really hard thing, you know, how do you prioritize the work, the critical work we're doing in support of Ukraine against say, a, you know, a ransomware actor who is happens to be extorting hundreds of millions of pounds that's affecting our economic wellbeing. It's a really hard thing to do. And it is a choice that ministers are faced with. I'd start with talking about state actors. I think we are still talking about the same list of state actors. I think we have been shy in talking about China as a threat, but we need to talk about China as a threat. Russia's proximate threat because of Ukraine and its actions is incredibly obvious. It's on our back door. We have to keep focusing on that. And then Iran and North Korea. But 80 states now have offensive cyber capability. This is a much broader canvas than it was in the past.
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Just before we get into the weeds of where the threat's coming from, what the world's going to look like, you said something very interesting there about what we do and don't talk about National Security Council and ministers making decisions. So my experience sitting on that council was that we could waste an enormous amount of time talking about, frankly, issues which, before I joined the government, seeing American equivalents would have been decided by a two star American general. There was absolutely no reason for us to be spending half an hour, 40 minutes talking about things which were sometimes quite tactical. The second thing that I thought is that even in the Cabinet and even sitting at the nsc, the idea that we as ministers were really making decisions on these things didn't reflect the way in which our weeks worked and what we actually spent our day doing. What are we actually spending our day doing? As ministers, you're trying to worry about what's hitting the headlines next morning. You might be putting leaflets through a door because you're campaigning. You might be making a speech in the House of Commons. You're getting through 14 meetings a day in your diary. There's not a great deal of space and the people making the decisions are themselves often not professionals in this area. Right. They haven't been trained to think strategically in that way or engage in that way. So there's a fundamental problem, I think, right at the heart of the situation, which is we set up. I remember, for example, being called by One of your colleagues being asked to make a decision in whatever it was, I don't know, a few minutes on doing something internationally. And I remember saying, this is quite late at night. Listen, you know, I don't know anything about it. You're telling me that we need to do this. You're telling me this is the stuff that has to happen immediately. If it makes you happier to feel that a Minister has made the decision, that's fine, but just be clear about what's actually happening here. How little I know, how little qualifications I have, how little time I have to dig into this decision.
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A
What Rory seems to be saying is that ministers have a lot less power than the spooks do.
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Well, maybe it's just Rory. I'm a fan of the National Security Council. I started to get in and around it when David Cameron created it. But it's fair to say that when you look at the span of the Council, depending on who's interested in its operation and how the top group of ministers work together, depends very strongly on how effective it is and what it does. And you won't draw me on examples, but it has gone through peaks and troughs of effectiveness.
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But.
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C
But the point is, you are bringing together senior ministers under the Prime Minister to be able to take national security questions, and, you know, that has to be a function which is. Which is important. Now, I can't recall which bit of that history you were around the table for, Rory, so forgive me. What sits under it is a whole superstructure of assessment, of intelligence, collection of discussion that brings together the agencies and Whitehall in a way which is just necessary to make the machine work. I mean, yes, it's about briefing the Prime Minister and Ministers, but the process is not just a Council meeting. It is a necessary process that brings together.
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B
It's an incredibly weird process. And what I'm trying to get to, it can be, you're right, the thing is articulated.
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C
But you and I have both been away from this for a while now.
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B
Sure, sure. But this lovely language of.
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A
It's much better with the Labour government.
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B
Love this language of accountability structures and then small groups and all this kind of stuff. Sounds fine in theory, but in practice, the sausage is really weird. And a lot of the things that we tell ourselves in, when we talk about the Constitution don't really reflect the reality of where the knowledge lies, how the power works, how decisions are made, how transparent they are. And this becomes problematic when you get into optimism bias, when you get into groupthinking. But again, the things that I saw really directly. And you would have seen too, the catastrophic decision making around an Afghan war where the US and its allies spent nearly $2 trillion and literally invaded to get rid of the Taliban and then at the end of the 20 years handed the country back to the Taliban again. At no point in that period did I feel that our institutions were remotely adequate to the strategic conversation around what was a $2 trillion screw up. Right. So I want to push back at you because you got so used to defending the system and you're missing that.
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C
I'm not defending the system in. And I agree with you that big strategic decisions that go beyond, you know, political life spans are really, really hard to manage. You know, this is, this is. Government has a problem with long range continuity and strategy. I mean, not, not just because of change of party. You know, that's a, that's baked into the system too. So I, I think it is slightly, I'm not accusing you of this, but I think it's slightly. When I hear thinking that is constantly blaming the system, I feel that's slightly lazy because it's not all about that.
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B
What is it about?
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C
Well, partly it's because we've set it up with those sorts of tensions, partly it's because of the longevity of those who are in senior positions. But it has to be about where the incentives are in the system. When I went to gsehq, I went around the place. It's incredibly complicated. I thought I'd worked very, very closely with it for 20 years, 25 years, and yet when I arrived there, I'm not the foggiest. And what I found was a, was a system of systems, incredibly complex, very, very careful, very, very clever, motivated, values driven, people doing the right thing all over the place. But in the heart of them, there was a small professional cadre of people called systems engineers. And I thought, well, I better go and see them. I've seen everyone else and they said to me, you know how this place works? It works all on incentives. I was expecting a detailed plan of how this thing fits together. Complex systems work on where incentives are in the systems. And it's the same for government, it's the same for big business, the same for intelligence agencies. So it goes wrong because you haven't got the incentives in the right place.
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A
You mentioned China and the speech I mentioned that you made four years ago now was very much focused on China to some extent, on Russia, Ukraine. But China was your big, your big point. Roy and I did an event earlier this week where we asked an audience of Business people, financiers also quite a large group of people who they saw as the bigger threat to global security right now, the USA or China. And by a large majority, they said the usa. Now first of all, what's your reaction to that? These were quite bright wealthy business people in the uk. What's your reaction to that and what's the danger in that?
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C
Yeah, well, I find this quite hard to talk about actually in a way because you know, if you've, if you've grown up in a system where you've understood where all the, you know, the values driven institutions sit, you know, what the stakes are in the ground for the international system, then it does feel like a lot of that has been thrown up in the air. When I, when I hear you say that, I'm so, I'm, you know, appalled
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A
as, and slightly horrified that they common reaction right now.
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C
I can understand it because of the turmoil and I can understand it because of the way in which the current debate is upending so many of those things that we hold dear. But I mean, it's simply not true. So if I was on that stage, I'd be saying, of course some of the actions we've seen recently we find very difficult to deal with. Of course we're very worried about where this goes. But the reality is comparing China and America through a threat lens, that's just not tenable at all. One is a communist driven.
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A
Back to Roy's point about systems. If you sort of wander around gchq, you don't have to be there long to be hearing American accents. And we're very, very dependent on the Americans. So therefore we have an inbuilt desire to believe in the system and what we're saying. Rory and I were both in Davos and seeing Trump and his entourage, it's quite hard to believe in it right now.
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C
I have lots of sympathy with that. I have real problems with the tone of the administration. I have problems with some of the actions, as I think we all do. But I think comparing America to China from a threat perspective is just completely wrong.
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A
What about the five eyes? The five eyes?
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C
Well, let me go back to your swarming with, with Americans point. I mean, that's not true either. But it is true that there are lots of Americans inside gchq. There are also a lot of Brits inside the National Security Agency in America. And so the systems have grown up together over 80 years in a way which has kept us both safe and I'm sure will continue to keep us safe. But to Think of it as a partnership. That is, I mean, so the UK is a junior partner. No doubt at all, but it is a partner. It's not just a recipient here. America's security has been dependent on its UK allies at particular points in the past. And what America thinks about intelligence and how. I'm sure it's still reporting intelligence in its daily brief to the President, which he doesn't read, will include UK intelligence. So, so I, I just, you know, push back a bit. Yeah, I think that's important. Five eyes. I mean, so I. Yeah, funny enough, I always feel quite protective about this. So it's five eyes.
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A
Canada, uk.
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C
Yes.
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A
Australia, New Zealand.
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C
Thank you.
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A
I'm not explaining to you. I've explained to the listeners.
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C
No, no. Well, if you were operating to me, we're in trouble. Yeah. So Five Eyes, nearly 80 years long, came out of the corporation, Signals Intelligence Corporation, during World War II. And, and, and it later expanded as a sort of moniker for, for all sorts of intelligence collaboration and then defense collaboration. And then, you know, we, even, in my time, we even had five eyes, you know, home office style. It became a much bigger thing than its original intent. It's not an organization with a, you know, a charter and an organogram and a. And a whole load of, you know, objectives and, you know, funding lines. It doesn't work like that. It's an alliance built on trust. It's an alliance built on trust, but it's also an alliance that is where the geometry varies over time. And it is not the case that everything we do in the UK is shared with the Americans. It's certainly not the case in the other. In the other direction. There have always been.
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A
Do you worry that their services are being more politicized and does that worry you about the relationship at the leadership level?
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C
Yes, I worry about that. I mean, my, my successor. I've been out of, out of the intelligence world for nearly three years now. My successor has had four heads of the NSA in that, or will have had four heads with the appointment of the current one. And I think it is a very worrying signal when the heads of these agencies are being moved on, apparently because of the politics. So, yeah, I am concerned about that, Jeremy.
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B
My understanding is when you're saying you can't compare the China to the us you're saying one of them is a aggressive communist country, another one is a liberal democratic country and a strong ally. But when you look at threat, it's not simply a question of intent, it's also a question of capability. And Probability and probability. The U.S. leverage over us is far beyond any kind of leverage that China can exercise. Entire cloud computing, probably the future of all the AI systems that will underwrite all of our public services, economy, defence and security nukes, our nuclear weapons, the dollar and these dependencies are being weaponized. And this is something the European Commission is very, very conscious of. And we saw it, just got a glimpse of it over Greenland. You can see Trump being tempted to do in Europe what traditionally America did in countries which were not like us. He's currently telling one country who it can and can't have in its cabinet. He's telling another country who it can't and can't prosecute. He's able to use tariffs going up and down to do this. Surely if you're looking at a threat assessment in five, 10 years, you need to think about resilience, you need to think about diversification and you need to ask yourself whether you can in the long term be that vulnerable to this kind of activity.
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C
Well, I think you're right to bring this down to resilience. And I think we all realize that across defense, across Europe, we have for far too long relied on a generous American security umbrella. I think that's. The UK is in a slightly different
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B
way of putting it. That's the very DOD way of putting it. Right. For too long we've been feeding off the American teeth. I'm saying we are not resilient because their ability to weaponize vulnerability, their ability to use our vulnerability to extort concessions, to throw us off balance is extremely. Why did we not deal with that over 10 years? Why not deal with 50 years? Why have we allowed a system to emerge, including when you were in charge, that allowed America to have quite so much of a stranglehold on almost everything. So much so that many people in Britain and Europe will say there's nothing we can do, it's too late, they own us, we can't actually diversify.
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C
Yeah, well, I mean, I took it to the resilience and the defence point for Europe. I was going to put the UK in a slightly different position to that because we have fulfilled a different position and historically we've played much more of a role on security and we still do on intelligence, by the way, we massively punch above our weight in comparison to Europe and as a partner to America. So that is the fact. If you're asking me how we've created this, this system over the post war period, that's, that's probably beyond probably. Think back to me as A, as a historian, but, but the answer is we've done it because it's been in our national self interest to do so, because that, in that context, a globalized world with America as a superpower, with the only superpower following the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the 80s, it was, it was in our interests. And, and with the benefit of hindsight, 2020 hindsight, I think we can say, yeah, we have created too many dependencies across Europe and we haven't paid enough attention to our resilience. It's not just an America thing. I mean, Covid taught us all sorts of lessons around resilience. It comes from a massively interconnected world with technology at its core and a global trading system that's meant our supply chains we've taken for granted. So yes, I would, with 2020 hindsight, yeah, I sort of agree with you. The context of the time and our interest at the time meant that those decisions would have been really hard decisions to take.
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A
I think you mentioned the role of the agencies as defending our economic interests. Do you think we were too lax and too slow to see the damage that was being done to us as a country, as an economy, as a society, by Russian money? And I also, if you listen to the podcast, you may know I'm slightly obsessed with Brexit. And my sense is that the line on whether the Russians interfered in Brexit is basically we don't really know because we never looked for the evidence. Is that a fair characterization? Because you weren't told to look for the evidence, you weren't asked to look for the evidence.
- [31:04]
C
How to get into that as a question? I don't need to listen to the podcast to know you're interested in Brexit. If you were to look back to that time and you were to think about our understanding of how misinformation could start to be exercised at scale, then I think you could say, yeah, there was some catching up to do at that point. And of course that most dramatically is illustrated by the way in which the Russians interfered in the US Presidential election. Actually, I'm trying to think how much is in the public domain, but the agencies certainly were not blind to that sort of threat and certainly were asked about it, including through the Intelligence Oversight Committee in, in Parliament. And you know, look pretty hard to, to see if there were there was
- [31:51]
A
any politics, any break on it, as it were.
- [31:54]
C
No, absolutely not. I mean, and that's what you need
- [31:56]
A
to remind in the public space and you're doing the work, but we're not, we're not told about it because it didn't sound politics.
- [32:01]
C
Well, so, no, the. No, I don't think that you should conclude that from what I've said. But come back to the role of the agencies. I mean, the agencies is to look at for threats to national security. Doesn't matter where they come from. They need to look for them. And so, you know, looking, looking for a state, a state level misinformation campaign that could have undermined our, our security is absolutely in the wheelhouse of the agencies. And I think you should, you should have expected them to have taken that seriously.
- [32:29]
A
What about the Russians just flooding the place with money and their people and the battle of the oligarchs in our courts, the takeover of our media.
- [32:36]
B
Today we've got Abramovich accounts at Deutsche bank with the federal German government sweeping, going through seven years of money laundering and we let this guy buy Chelsea football club.
- [32:47]
C
I'm not sure I'm right to focus on the football. Alistair has more to say about that than me. I mean, I think you have to think back to the context of the time. If you look back and say clearly it wasn't in our interest to have so little understanding of how the money had arrived here. I think that's probably fair to say.
- [33:03]
B
We knew Abramovich was basically of clear gangster.
- [33:05]
C
I'm not going to talk about a particular no, but we knew these guys.
- [33:09]
B
We knew, we knew. I mean, look, nobody was ignorant about how the oligarchs made their money.
- [33:13]
C
It's already obvious that some of the, some of the ways in which Russian society and oligarch competition play out were happening on the streets of London. You could see that and you know, the police could see that, we could see that.
- [33:23]
A
But also how much you guys have felt when Lebedeff, son of a KGB guy, comes in and starts buying up our media. Did that not. Were you not ringing alarm bells all over Whitehall at that time?
- [33:34]
C
There are processes in place to help understand, you know, where beneficial ownership sits and to try and make a decision on that and to warn people about that. Now, there wasn't legislation that enabled anyone in government to do anything about that at that time.
- [33:49]
A
And on China, we're talking around the time that Keir Starmer's been to see Xi Jinping in Beijing and a lot of focus on this Chinese embassy. And both Roy and I have said on the podcast we can't quite see what the fuss is about. Can I have your take on whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that the Chinese have got this mega embassy being built.
- [34:09]
C
So I, I always react to the mega and the super. I don't understand why we describe it like that. I mean it's a, it's a reasonable sized building slightly outside the center of London.
- [34:19]
A
Look.
- [34:19]
C
So my view, my view is that there's a lot of noise around this and probably doesn't deserve that.
- [34:23]
A
Yeah.
- [34:24]
C
And so we, because the decision about where to locate it and how to make sure that doesn't pose an additional threat to national security would have been thought through very seriously. And indeed two of the heads of the agencies have written to ministers now to explain what those processes are and made it public. That's, that's pretty unprecedented actually. So, so I think, I think we, as an ex intelligence chief, then you can expect me to go to the real politics bits around all of this. Of course the Chinese have an embassy here, you know, and the fact that it's in one place and it's not in five places around London is probably a good thing. I thought the cable stuff was a load of nonsense.
- [35:00]
B
Just quickly, for listeners who don't get that reference, what Jeremy's saying there is that famously a fiber optic cable runs quite close to the new site of the Chinese embassy. And the British media and some MPs have got very excited about the fact that this is a real reason why the embassy can't be built because they're going to be getting into that fiber optic cable.
- [35:18]
A
Just tell us why it's nonsense.
- [35:19]
C
Oh, given that we know where the cables are and what they carry. I don't, you know, if, if, if, if, if the Chinese decided by some long stretch of the imagination they were going to, you know, bring in a, a tunneling machine and go to them and tap them, we might notice that. I mean, I think it's a good thing in that it, it highlights what, what is the, what is the situation which is. There is a, there is significant Chinese espionage activity in this country and we, we need to make sure we've got that properly covered. But it won't be happening from the embassy particularly. This is a much broader question here.
- [35:52]
B
Okay, Alistair, Jeremy, quick break and then back for more.
- [35:57]
C
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up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com specialoffer. So how do you think thoughtfully through these kind of choices? So again today, Octopus Energy has said they want to buy Chinese wind turbines, which they think are 30% cheaper and much more efficient. Canada's allowing in Chinese electric vehicles much, much cheaper than Tesla. You and I were in government when we were all discussing Huawei. My memory basically of that was sitting around tables where for a long time the experts were saying, it's okay, we're not that worried about Huawei. And then suddenly we were so worried about Huawei, Huawei was all booted out and it probably cost us a couple of billion quid. How does one work our way through this? Because again, and the way I've just described that doesn't make me hugely confident about what these processes are and how they operate and how one thinks reasonably and logically about what is a threat, what's the risk and how to manage it.
- [37:19]
C
Well, you know as well as I do that there are many aspects of those sorts of decisions and there are pure security driven aspects of it. And then there are economic and there are political and there are diplomatic. So they all came.
- [37:31]
B
What would your framework, though, be, hypothetically, how would you think through what sort of things should a policymaker think about if they're trying to think in the future about becoming very dependent on China or Russia or the US in some sector of their economy?
- [37:44]
C
Well, I think the first thing to do is to try and understand the importance of the sector to the nation. What is the thing that we most care about that is most important for our economy, for jobs and our security, and take a view on that. Because as well as a defensive posture, that also gives us the opportunity to, you know, architect things which are important to us as a country upon which our future prosperity is going to rely. And the old fashioned way of putting that was our industrial policy. So there are sort of two sides. So what are the things that we really care about?
- [38:15]
B
And they could be energy tech.
- [38:17]
C
Yeah, energy tech, bioscience. Actually, the government has eight of them in the industrial strategy. It's a pretty good articulation of where the UK can be important and where it will get its future, future prosperity from. So if you're looking at something like the winter, you've decided that energy is important to you, you've decided that you want to spend on offshore energy for a whole range of policy decisions as well as economic decisions and then you've got to look at, well, what are the vulnerabilities that you introduce into the ecosystem by doing that, and what is the opportunity for having a safe trading relationship with China or indeed any other partner on this? Or is this an opportunity to try and do things in a more sovereign way? And so there is a step through on all of these. I don't automatically assume that China equals bad or China equals threat. From a security perspective, it's still really hard to switch things off. The sort of the sci fi. There's a big button somewhere that someone is going to hit and the lights are going to go off everywhere. It just doesn't work like that. It can't work like that.
- [39:21]
A
Give us some examples of the sort of. When we talk about cyber attacks, what sort of things are we talking about and how do they operate and how do we detect them? And when we fail to detect them, what's the worst that can happen?
- [39:31]
C
Well, I'm glad you've come on to this. 600,000 businesses in the UK had some sort of cyber attack last year. If you're an individual, the crime you're most likely to suffer is a cyber crime. If you took the economic benefits to cyber criminal actors and put them all together, together, they would be the same as one of our most important trading partners in terms of scale. So this is a massive thing and I'm amazed that there's not more politics around it, because if you're an individual, if your mum is being hit by a cyber attack, or if you're a business, you're losing money, or if you're a big business in the UK and you're systemically challenged. This is what happened with Jaguar Landroom. These are massive things that we need to take really seriously. The National Cybersecurity center said last year that the number of cyber attacks that they were seeing in total had come down slightly, but the number of nationally significant ones had increased dramatically over 200 nationally significant. And by that they mean it could have a fundamental impact on our economy or on jobs or our ability to deliver service.
- [40:39]
A
Take juggielandra. Just for somebody who doesn't get this world, what happened there and why did that end up damaging Jaguar Land Rover and therefore the economy more broadly?
- [40:50]
C
So what happened there was a cyber criminal attacker found a vulnerability in some of Jaguar Land Rover's computing systems, quite far out, not very central to their systems, and then found a way to put some malware into those systems such that they couldn't, couldn't operate and they couldn't critically, they couldn't operate their supply chain effectively. And so what that does in a just in time industrial manufacturing process is, is to bring the whole thing to a halt. And with, with Jaguar Land Rover, for weeks on end we didn't see cars come off the, the production.
- [41:24]
A
And why is it so hard to catch the criminals that are doing that?
- [41:26]
C
Well, let me just finish the. Yeah, it, I think Jaguar Land Rover's estimate, I think is it costs nearly £2 billion. So this is, this is, this is not a, sort of a niche sport. This is something that has gone systemic and strategic. You know, how do you stop this happening? Well, you pardon your defenses. It's actually a really hard thing to go after people after the event. So what you want to try and do is to make yourself as hard to attack as possible. And you know, that is, that is hard, but it really is not as hard as dealing with the mess afterwards.
- [41:58]
A
And what sort of person is making what sort of money in essentially malware ing, blackmailing these companies? How do they make money and why can't we find them?
- [42:08]
C
A large proportion of the, of the criminal actors are in places where we don't have any law enforcement reach. And that shorthand for many of them are Russian speaking. Not just Russian speaking. North Korea, some North Korean, Iran. Iran actually. I mean North Korea is a, is a cyber state. It funds a significant proportion, some people think over a third and maybe as much as a half of its budgets from cyber fraud and extortion. And it's got really good at doing it in the financial services business. So going after banks or cryptocurrency exchanges or it's doing really well at that. But there are also English speaking cyber criminals in America and Europe, including in the uk and we can go after those. But if you compare my 600,000 businesses last year in the, in the UK there were 200 prosecutions under the Computer Misuse Act. You know, there's a big, there's a, there's, there is a structural mismatch here and you can't, I mean one of the conversations with ministers and maybe it plays to your previous point, Rory. Whenever you have a cyber attack, the. I think it is, it's natural that ministers say, well, how can go after them, hit them back with cyber. But that, that, it doesn't work like that, you can't do it that way. You have to pursue all sorts of other means. But crucially you have to harden your defences. You have to make yourself less easy to attack.
- [43:25]
A
And when you say Russian speaking, although there is a word criminals. Are they essentially state actors? Are they operating on behalf of.
- [43:32]
C
Some of them are affiliated to the Russian state because as you know, in that society it's quite hard to do things completely freelance. So I wouldn't say they were 100% state actors.
- [43:42]
B
One interesting question is around the fact that we didn't actually set up the, the proper regulation and guardrails around cyber in the way that ultimately we had to around banking regulation and many of the other international agreements since 1989. And one of the reasons some people suggest why we didn't do this is because countries like America and Britain felt they benefited more from the porosity of these things, their ability to access these systems. And they would have benefited from a very tight regulatory system. So is it another example along with your letting in Russian money, waving off globalization, where the short term benefit meant that we didn't actually take the measures that we could have taken over 15, 20 years to regulate this properly internationally?
- [44:29]
C
No, I don't think so. That was never a reason, as far as I understood it, for seeking to have less secure technology than we could have. In fact, you know, that would have been, I think, criminally negligent to have allowed that to happen. You know, I used to say in gchq, you know, our responsibility was for making the UK the safest place to live and do business online. You get much more advantage for making tech secure for most of the people most of the time than you would do from, you know, in theory, leaving some sort of loophole. So the problems we have with international regulation were that we didn't agree internationally on how to approach it, but we
- [45:06]
B
also didn't, we didn't, even with the US companies, we didn't set up the standards and the regulation tightly enough from the beginning. All these systems. I mean, the ability of Russian hackers, half associated with the Russian government to get into our systems is partly to do with the way that we allowed these systems to be designed.
- [45:21]
C
Well, I agree with you that we didn't do a very good job of designing the Internet in a secure way. And actually we're doing the same again with artificial intelligence. And it's back to my point about incentives. It's not just about regulation. In fact, regulation and, and legislation I think is, you know, that's the last resort. That's what happens when, when things go wrong. But standard setting and, and international agreements and collaboration on these sorts of things, we ought to do a much better job at that. And you know, we are still suffering from poor decisions about Internet protocols that were designed 30 years ago and they're still all over the Internet. But to suggest that we'd sort of left them there now, I, I would completely disagree with that.
- [46:01]
A
Presumably you worry, as I do, that artificial intelligence essentially is absolutely dominated by the two. The two superpowers.
- [46:10]
C
I mean, if that is the reality for aspects of artificial intelligence. I mean, I hate the term. It's none of these term things. Maybe it's a bureaucrat in me. I mean, artificial intelligence covers such a wide range of things, and when we're, when we're talking about it now, then we're largely talking about the large language models which have become so prevalent.
- [46:26]
A
And you talk about the next stage of technological development, but the next.
- [46:29]
C
So I think when you, when you put it like that, I, I agree with that. There is no doubt that America and China have, are dominating that bit of AI, but, but they don't have it all their own way. And, and certainly when you. I know you've been talking a lot to Matt Clifford, if you, if you talk to him about where the UK has advantage. There are places where we have advantage. But is it, is it right for us to think that as a nation we can go out and recreate OpenAI or anthropic, or. No, of course not. We're not going to do that. We shouldn't waste our time doing that. In fact, my view is that we should spend the marginal pound on making sure that we adopt AI properly and we adapt.
- [47:05]
A
Europe needs to compete in that space. You think it's gone beyond.
- [47:08]
C
I don't think that Europe can compete exactly on those terms, but the AI that will be the next generation of AI isn't exactly the same as this one. And many people think that as they get more capable, there are going to have to be new ways of doing it. And more people think that actually you can build on the back of what has been happening there and still have a credible offer. So I don't assume that sovereignty means that we have to have all of it, a whole stack that is purely European at every point in the cycle.
- [47:40]
B
I was at a dinner last week with a couple of people who'd been playing around with some of the new open models. One of them had run an experiment from a university where they'd sent an email inviting people to speak on a conference. You had to click on a link. And they'd also used AI to generate a voice conversation to follow up the phone call. They managed to get 80% of people to click on this link, and these were smart people they were targeting because the voice call, follow up, another person at the dinner was talking about how increasingly plausible it seemed that you could create some pretty significant bioweapons. What does this mean in the way that you think about security threats, AI regulations, standards?
- [48:21]
C
Well, as AI is an opportunity, it's also a threat and it needs to be secured. And at your dinner, I'm not surprised that you're starting to hear those sorts of conversations. I mean, the reality is that just at this period of time, then AI is an accelerant for the sorts of threats that we already see. So AI is enabling bad state actors, or is enabling criminals to do more of the same sorts of things that they've done in the past, to do it more effectively, more convincingly and in different languages. I mean, one of the. I do quite a lot of work in Japan. What's really interesting there is how large language models are allowing cyber attackers to be much more obvious in Japan than they were a few years ago, when their language did quite a good job of insulating them from some aspects of the cyber threat. So you need to, I think the way the framing at the moment is to think of it as an accelerant, but what's not far around the corner is hyper personalization, which is the sort of thing you're talking about. I mean, I used to use this story quite a bit, but I used to say if I had come here from, I stayed last night with my friend Bob and if Bob just now got a text from me saying, I've lost my wallet, send me 50 quid, he'd probably think, yeah, I'm not going to do that. But if Bob got a thing saying, I had an awful journey in from Teddington and when I got here, you know, Alistair asked me some really tricky questions, I was a bit grumpy and on the way out I was at my wallet stolen, I really can't get home, send me 500 quid from my text number. You know, you probably think twice. That's actually quite trivial if you've got access to my diary and you know, you've got access to other sort of data about me, which is probably out there, maybe better protected, but probably out there, there. And so hyper personalization at a population scale, I think, isn't that far off. And for me, whilst we like to go to the chem weapons, the bioweapons are switching the whole. The lights off. The much more proximate and worrying threats are all about population scale, harm, crime, Fraud. And I don't think actually we're focusing enough of the conversation on that. We like going to the sci fi end of the spectrum. That said, we need to worry about Chembio. We need to make sure that we are looking at those tail end risks. And that's why we have a security institute here in the UK and in America and elsewhere to try and think about that.
- [50:43]
A
How has this tech revolution changed the war in Ukraine, including during the period of the war, I mean, I get the sense just from reading about it, talking to people that the war that we had when it started almost four years ago, it's being fought in a very, very different way now. How much is that is about the
- [51:01]
C
technological, that's completely different. But the change started before the invasion four years ago. I mean, the change started when Ukraine started to take its security, its cyber security really seriously after Crimea. And it did some pretty extraordinary things at that time, including taking its government into the cloud, really thinking very seriously about how it brings the new technology into its defense. And that has accelerated since, of course, Russia as an adversary has learned from that too. And what you see as you do, I would say in any war in history, you're seeing a technology arms race as each party tries to bring technology to bear. Well, I mean, I think you'd have to say that if you were thinking about the match at the beginning of this conflict, a vastly small, smaller country, less rich, fewer people, less armed, and to say that four years later they'd still be holding Russia, Russia creeping forward, you know, a percent of Ukraine territory in the last year, you'd have to say that Ukraine has done a really good job here and one that many people didn't expect it to be able to do. And, and part of that is because it's brought technology to bear more effectively, more quickly than it has.
- [52:13]
A
And who in your assessment has the greater resilience?
- [52:16]
C
Well, wars are always about, you know, the will to fight, as my military colleagues tell me. And for the time being, I think Ukraine is showing extraordinary resilience. But the losses, you know, the losses are significant on both sides. But there will come a point when the losses become really significant for Russia, as it has done in, at times in its past too. And if you, over a million, over a million men now are dead from, or dead or badly injured from the Russian side. And you know, that despite their system, despite the repression and the surveillance, everything else we know about Russia, that those sorts of losses, I don't believe that Russia can continue to take over the long Term.
- [52:58]
B
Jeremy, tell us about the threat from China because we hear about it a lot and obviously it's absolutely central to the whole American discourse. What is the threat from China if you're trying to explain it to an ordinary person in Britain? And why should we be worried?
- [53:08]
C
This is the, you know, the, the diplomat in me, I mean, I'd start by saying that, of course you'd expect me to say that. You know, China is a, is a superpower and it's a, it's a country we need to have a relationship with and we need to have an economic relationship with it and there are opportunities from that in the future. And, but the, but the balance is, is always a difficult one with, you know, what sort of, what's the cost of that relationship and what sort of threat does China pose? I think if I was starting explaining it to a minister now, I'd be using examples of what we found them doing. And so in the last five years we found them not only amounting a significant number of cyber attacks, of stealing secrets, of going after ip, but also of attempting to control the diaspora here in the uk, of creating unofficial police stations that are trying to make sure that the Chinese diaspora stay in line. And I think you can point to areas where they're clearly not acting in our interest overseas, including supporting Russia in its fight in Ukraine. So I don't think it's very hard to paint the threat picture. The difficulty and where we always have a problem is in making the balance. And it's not not, you know, prosperity and security are not trade offs. You know, this is, it's not a zero sum game. You can have a trading relationship, you can have a grown up intelligence, diplomatic and political relationship. But, but you, you've also got to be very clear eyed that, you know, in some circumstances China poses a threat and when, when they pose a threat and when we catch them at it, we call them out.
- [54:49]
A
And what's their, if you add all those things together, what's their strategic goal in doing all these individual things? How do they see what is the threat that they want to impose upon us?
- [54:59]
C
Their goal is the long term security of the party, the continuation of the state. That's where you start any conversation on the PRC and Chinese government. And it's how President Xi thinks about the world. And so their goal in trying to mount espionage here or pose a threat to us here is to collect intelligence. It's to gain access to things which will make them more economically successful in the future. It's to undermine criticism of Them as a regime, it's to reduce in their minds the threats that they see, you know, either the diaspora here posing or the country posing to their longer term interests. So it's, I don't think it's very complicated to see why they do these things.
- [55:43]
B
But a different sort of threat from the threat posed by Russia.
- [55:46]
C
Yes, it is a different type of threat.
- [55:47]
B
Could you explain?
- [55:48]
C
Well, I mean, Russia's threat is much more proximate. Russia is much more in our, our back door militarily. It poses a threat in the way that China hasn't posed a threat to us yet. And, and we, and we know because we've deeply understand Putin's mindset because he's told us about it for the last 20 years, how he thinks about Russia and it's near abroad. So this is, this is a, it is at the moment a different type of debt, a threat. It's sophisticated in a different way and that means that it's different to counter as well. There isn't a one size.
- [56:21]
B
Some of the things we might say about difference in Russia and China's threat challenge me. I mean, some people would say, okay, one difference is Russia's genuine expansionist power. He makes no secret that he wants to add new bits of territory which will be Russian, not just influence them, but have them. He wants to really shatter NATO. He wants to divide Europe off from the US In a very dramatic way. I mean, are there other ways of kind of explaining the different nature of the threat, Russia and China?
- [56:46]
C
Well, I'd agree with that. I'd also say that the thresholds in the way he takes action are completely different level. I mean, we have seen inside Europe over the last four years increasing levels of violence, of boldness in what Russia is prepared to do in, in Europe and you know, everything from, you know, intimidation through to, you know, killing and beyond to, from going after supply chains of what they perceive to be supporting the Ukrainian effort to, you know, taking, taking steps to get inside critical and top secret systems in NATO and allied countries. So, yeah, I mean, it does pose a very real threat and it's on our back door, strategically. Honestly. You were good enough to say that you'd listened to a very old speech of mine. I haven't listened to it recently, but I remember, I think, I remember talking about the threat and talking about it as the long term threat. And I still think we should be approaching it with at least that in mind as we pursue a broader relationship.
- [57:52]
A
Listen, Jeremy, thanks for all your time. Just my final question. If somebody was applying for a job not via the Ministry of Defence, but saying straight, I want to work for the security service today. What in the modern age makes a good intelligence officer? Do you have to be very tech savvy? Do you have to have an understanding of the way that this modern economy works, modern technology works? Or is it still really about kind of human analysis and connection?
- [58:20]
C
Well, let me answer that question from a GCHQ perspective because it's where I spent the end of my career. So gchq, you know, the biggest intelligence agency, thousands of people and a very broad range of professions inside it. You know, analysts, scientists, mathematicians, linguists, people who look after the, the accommodation, the environment, the estate, people who are making sure that when we're deployed overseas we're safe. And, and, and so it's a, it's an incredibly broad range of people required to make an intelligence agency work. The happy reality is that you apply online now to publicly available job adverts and if you are going for an intelligence officer or an intelligence analysis role, then that will be a more tech heavy role than it was at the time at which I joined. But we're looking for the same things. We're looking for people who deeply care about the mission, who have very strong values, who can meet a security threshold and you can be vetted and you know, frankly want to be part of something which I found throughout my career to be, you know, always energizing, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately, you know, a career well spent. So if you're, if you're up for that and you're listening to this, then you know, it's still worth doing.
- [59:36]
B
What do you think we're missing about tech and tech policy in, I don't know, the world? What sort of things worry you that you think people aren't talking about enough?
- [59:44]
C
That's a really hard question after the, after the softer Alistair one. So I would answer that too, two ways, and you've touched on it already. We have got to get around global governance for AI. We really have to get our heads around what that means and whether we do that with an alliance of like minded countries or we do that through some sort of established multilateral partnership, less likely. Or if we do that starting with just a few nations, we have to get our head around this because at some time we will see something we don't like from this technology and we'll be rushing to catch up. So the first thing around tech is we, we have to find a way of having a, a global governance. You know, I'm deliberately Not saying regulation here. It might be. That might be an aspect of it.
- [60:28]
B
Is that because you're working for tech companies?
- [60:29]
C
Yeah, I'm working for tech.
- [60:31]
A
You're a quantum physicist.
- [60:34]
C
So. So I think we're, we're definitely missing that. I think. I think inside the, the uk, we, we're.
- [60:39]
A
We.
- [60:39]
C
We need to do much more of the education stuff that. I know the government's made some announcements this week, and I really welcome that. But we have to prepare population for the pace at which this is coming, and it is coming in years, not decades. And that means really upping our efforts to help adjust, help the population adjust. I forget who said this, but this thought of, we have always evolved alongside technology. We have to evolve really quickly alongside this technology.
- [61:09]
A
Well, thank you.
- [61:10]
B
Thank you, Jeremy, very much. Thank you for coming on.
- [61:15]
A
God, your questions were long, Rory.
- [61:17]
C
Yeah, they were.
- [61:18]
B
They were terrible. Let me just sort of reflect on everything. So I think what I. Maybe I'm sharing too much with you and the public here. Jeremy, in private, is the most incredibly funny, quirky, outspoken person. And of course, I was reminded suddenly
- [61:35]
A
here that he's a spy.
- [61:38]
B
And he's also very conscious that, you know, he doesn't want, as the former head of gchq, to be causing problems for his successors, for the government, etc. So he is a little bit more cautious in the podcast than he is one on one. And I guess my incredibly convoluted question's a way of trying to say, come on, Jeremy, I know you really believe this. How am I going to get you to say what I think you believe?
- [61:58]
A
Yeah, but listen, Rory, you can just, for those who are watching rather than listening, just look at the guy's face when he's listening. You're not going to get anything out of him. He doesn't want to give. Yeah, I mean, you know, he's been trained.
- [62:07]
B
He's been trained, but he listened.
- [62:09]
A
I thought he was. I thought he was really interesting and very thoughtful, and I think he is. Look, he obviously doesn't want to criticize his own services and he doesn't want to criticize the government, past or present, but I think he is kind of alerting us and warning us of. Of threats and of technological developments that he thinks we're somewhat behind the gate.
- [62:28]
B
So he doesn't want to come with me on saying there's something wrong with our institutions, our bureaucracy. Our establishment is a bit reluctant to do that. But the fact is, you mentioned one thing that we really screwed up on, which was Russian money. There's another thing we talked about, which is our complete failure to really create secure Internet, which we're now struggling with 40 years later. I talked about the Afghan war and I saw a lot of stuff where I do not. And he said it himself, we're not good at 5, 10 year planning.
- [62:56]
A
Yeah, that was a remarkable thing to say, that we didn't really have those sorts of discussions. I think we did back in the day.
- [63:01]
B
And of course, you know, he would say it's not just structure, it's personality. I mean, maybe Tony, obviously, he's got a mind and Gordon likes that kind of big picture stuff. I think, though, it is a problem. And I was sad I couldn't quite bring him with me because I came out of government really feeling we'd made mistakes again and again and again and again, and there should be a much more urgent drive to reform. I was also obviously hoping that he'd come closer to me on seeing the fact that actually our vulnerabilities to the US are very, very significant.
- [63:35]
A
Yeah, but it's very hard. I mean, I think partly the systemic thing, if you spent your whole life hand in glove with the Americans, as he has, then it's quite hard to kind of. But I thought he acknowledged, at least acknowledged why we were worried about it, why that audience that I told him about were worried, although he was horrified as he said that people genuinely think America is now a bigger threat than China. And it's interesting when he talked about Stephen Lander, who was. He was one of our. I don't think it was he. The first.
- [64:03]
B
Probably your first. Yeah. When you arrived. Yeah.
- [64:07]
A
You know, so we had all sorts of interaction with the. The heads of the agencies. And I think what does happen is that. And I don't know whether this is the case with Keir Starmer, who would have known a lot of these people anyway through his work in the DPP and what have you. But certainly when we got in in 1997 and Tony was Prime Minister, you do kind of have a sense that these guys really know what they're talking about, you know, and I think there's a. And there's also a desire to work with them, to cooperate with them. And essentially he mentioned that the head of GCHQ has seen four heads of the nsa. They have all seen this relentless churn of Prime Minister, foreign Minister, Home Secretary over the last decade under the Tories, and that gives them an awful lot more power.
- [64:48]
B
Absolutely.
- [64:49]
A
I'm not suggesting that they want to run the country, but why wouldn't they exploit that for their own advantage?
- [64:54]
B
Absolutely. And they will understandably think we have a very, very clear idea about what we're doing. I mean, I spent many, many months trying to, as a minister, fight government policy over Syria, and I never quite got to the bottom of it, but it was quite clear the system disagreed with me on Syria and they weren't going to shift. And a lot of the time when I pushed, they'd say, that's secret, you can't see that, or there's a meeting here that you can't go to, or there's a small group there, or as a message meeting. And it's understandable because they're thinking, who the hell is this minister? Why the hell should Rory be telling us what to do in Syria? And I'm saying, well, I'm the minister, right? This is my job. So it's a really interesting question, and it's something, you know, you'll tease me about because you'll say, this is just because they're disagreeing with me. Time getting wound up. But I wish people were a bit more honest about it because they can't have it both ways. They can't both be like, actually, we know what's going on, the minister doesn't. And also keep saying, of course, minister of accountability, Minister society, all that stuff.
- [65:51]
A
Yeah, it does give them a pretty. They have their cake and eat it and doing that. Yeah. But anyway, listen, I think the other thing that's really interesting about these guys, and of course, you know, back when I was a journalist, you weren't even allowed to ask questions about the security services. You weren't allowed to say they existed. It was the. It was totally absurd. And so he's come through that incredible change culturally for them. And actually, I think. I think it's a good thing now that people, him are out there talking and John Soares and Alex Younger and
- [66:20]
B
these guys, there will be some people listening who will say, we should have challenged a little bit more on the transparent legality stuff. So Jeremy, absolutely, sincerely, like John Soares, very much believes we're in a much, much better world because we've become much more transparent, much more legal. There are bits, the British system, and a hell of a lot of bits, the American system, who think that we've lost the loss of capacity by doing it now. He'd deny it. He'd say, you just get stronger by becoming more legal and more transparent. But there are many people who say, well, in this operation in Syria, this operation in Iraq, this thing that we tried to ask them to do. Suddenly we're meeting a lot of lawyers saying, I'm sorry, the Brits or this part of the British state can't join you in that. It is a question. And he said, you know, we don't want to be one of those agencies, but lawyers are increasingly important. And of course, they, as the bosses, have to keep saying to their staff, we have to remember the law.
- [67:08]
A
Yeah, they can't drop people off balconies.
- [67:10]
B
They certainly can't drop it. And I'm not in favor of dropping people off balconies.
- [67:13]
C
No.
- [67:13]
A
But that was what I was asking. Do the Russians and the Chinese and the North Korean, do they have. Are they operating at an advantage?
- [67:18]
B
The Americans in some areas have much more latitude than we do. The French certainly have much more latitude than we do. The Israelis have a latitude well, well, well beyond. And our risk assessments will be different, and who we're prepared to talk to, who we're prepared to work with, even governments. So one problem, again, we didn't get into is that there are some governments that we've effectively had to stop working with that many of our other partners work with, because we're just like, these people are too crazy, and we take too much legal risk collaborating with them.
- [67:49]
A
Anyway, there we are. Another spook.
- [67:51]
B
Another spook. Thank you very much indeed. And I think he's wonderful, and I really would recommend that people engage with him. He's wonderfully bright.