Why British intelligence is not as good as it could be - Public Service: "Why British intelligence is not as good as it could be
Thursday, January 21, 2010
MI6 headquarters
A reluctance to share intelligence with our EU partners is hampering the battle against terrorism and means our security services are not as good as they should be, writes Professor Anthony Glees, director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence studies at the University of Buckingham
The UK urgently needs better intelligence-led policy, produced more cost-effectively and our intelligence community must be greatly improved if we are not to lose the fight against national and international terrorism. This means, undeniably, that our domestic security now lies in ever closer intelligence cooperation with our EU partners.
Yes, an element of intelligence cooperation with our EU partners already exists. EU intelligence chiefs meet for a chat four times a year. We can call on Europol (led by a Briton, Rob Wainwright), the European Joint Situation Centre, known as SitCen (led by another Briton, William Shapcott) or ESA, the EU's geospatial intelligence agency. But Britain does not cooperate properly with Europol; like others we deny SitCen diplomatic or intelligence-derived reporting and consequently it remains an analysis unit not an operational one. Whilst we receive satellite imagery from ESA, we give it none in return.
The Treaty of Lisbon (which came into force on 1 December 2009) attempts to improve matters. It even speaks of establishing yet another institution to promote intelligence sharing for counter-terrorism purposes. The Spanish presidency of the EU is currently pushing to give form to this and several EU states including Britain are said (by the Spanish) to be ready to participate. Yet proper and effective intelligence sharing remains largely aspirational even when states want it badly -- which the UK does not.
If this is to be remedied much practical work must be done. Britain has much to contribute as well as gain. But work can start only if there is a political will that it should do so. This is, of course, something that is wholly lacking both within the government but also, and more severely within the Conservative opposition (which may be weeks away from government).
The latter's new green paper ('A Resilient Nation') makes the case, convincingly, for tougher and more pervasive domestic counter-terrorism policies which, ironically, reflect current European Centre-Right thinking.
There is a call, too, for 'EU cooperation' which Conservatives say (tellingly) is merely a 'fundamental continuity...at the heart of bi-partisan policy over many years'. But they do say it now must be developed to provide 'more effective European policies on security issues'.
Sadly but unsurprisingly, the phrase 'intelligence sharing' (which could generate these policies) is nowhere to be found in the Conservative paper. But there is also no recognition that the party's mindless destruction of its relationship with the European Centre-Right prevents a Conservative government from developing the better European security policy it claims to crave. It denies David Cameron the opportunity to work with the ruling parties of states with some of the best intelligence capacity in the world.
Centre-Right politicians in the EU possess more experience of counter-terrorism policy (both in government and, like the Spanish PP, outside of it) than the current Opposition front bench has ever had.
Without being pushed by government into better cooperation, the UK's intelligence community will do nothing much. For 100 years it has regarded its work as the essence of Britain's national sovereignty and identity. In 2005 the then head of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller expressed her opposition to what she called 'forced intelligence sharing' which, she claimed, would 'soon' mean there was little intelligence to share.
The general reluctance to engage with the EU (actually most evident within MI6) was a serious error. This is partly because the major security threat we face in the UK today, Al Qaeda-inspired Islamism or Jihadism, is a threat common to most if not all of our EU partners. It combines domestic and overseas inputs because Islamists are found both within Europe and beyond its shores. 'Domestic' and 'foreign' no longer have any real security meaning. Al Qaeda will strike anywhere. It is obvious that for this reason if for no other, Britain's mindset must be changed.
Effective policy requires the best intelligence and the best analysis available. Neither comes cheap and it is precisely because the institutional and financial resources needed to counter Islamism are so vast (the UK spends almost £2bn on its intelligence agencies) that sharing intelligence and pooling resources makes perfect sense.
But there are other reasons for suggesting British intelligence must work more far more closely with the other members of the 'big' EU Five (Germany, France, Spain and Italy). Shared intelligence collection and, above all analysis, will produce better intelligence. Our agencies are not as good as they should be. Although Britain's intelligence successes should not be forgotten, our intelligence failures are major ones.
The most recent was the attempted attack on an American airliner on Christmas Day by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. We know from the Home Secretary's statement on 5 January 2010 that 'during 2005-2008 Abdulmutallab was known to the Security Service but not as a violent extremist' (though not as someone who had almost certainly been recruited by Al Qaeda) and that in May 2009 his application to return to the UK was rejected (but because he had applied to a bogus college not because he was suspect). MI5 missed yet another potential suicide bomber even if his explosives training took place in Yemen.
A more serious failure was MI6's intelligence assessment that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD which became the casus belli for Britain in 2003 (and the subject of a sixth official inquiry). We know, thanks to Lord Butler, that MI6 lacked the resources to evaluate Iraq's weaponry properly. It had too few agents, too few officers and because it had not enough funds, those who collected the intelligence also evaluated it (a classic intelligence error because ownership of data makes its objective assessment almost impossible).
Although it has become a national obsession, the belief that the WMD fiasco was simply the result of Blair having ordered MI6 to 'invent' intelligence seems complete nonsense. But if it were the case, that would be an equally damning verdict on MI6's capacity and professionalism.
Full intelligence-sharing with our EU partners would have refined both the collection and interpretation of the data coming out of Iraq. Britain (and Blair) would have benefited from the best analysts in Europe working on our intelligence-led policy. Now is the time to learn the lessons of past failures, to forget obsessions with Blair and non-existent super-states and decide to develop European intelligence cooperation."
