Speaker 1: Special Operations Cobert Sbiona The Team House with your hosts
Speaker 1: Jack Murphy and David Park.
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, this is episode three hundred and fifty six
Speaker 2: of The Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave and
Speaker 2: our guest on tonight's show is Charles Beaumont. You will
Speaker 2: notice that his identity is concealed. Charles is not his
Speaker 2: real name. That's not just because this gentleman is trying
Speaker 2: to be mysterious. It has to do with the laws,
Speaker 2: the British laws around former and current intelligence officials. And
Speaker 2: Charles is a former member of the Secret Intelligence Service
Speaker 2: better known to the public as I six, served as
Speaker 2: a British intelligence officer, went through the War on Terra
Speaker 2: Era with time.
Speaker 3: Spent in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Speaker 2: And now he does some consulting and you write spy
Speaker 2: novels and we're really excited to have them on the show.
Speaker 2: This is the first time we've had a British intelligence
Speaker 2: official or former official on the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you for joining us, Charles.
Speaker 4: Well, thank you for having me. It's my pleasure.
Speaker 2: Well, before we really jump into it, maybe like could
Speaker 2: I ask you to expand a little bit on that,
Speaker 2: Like the the notion of you know, in the United States,
Speaker 2: when a CIA officer comes out of the service and retires,
Speaker 2: their cover gets rolled back oftentimes and they can appear publicly,
Speaker 2: as many have on this show. What are the what
Speaker 2: are the British laws like these restrictions that really kind
Speaker 2: of prevent you guys from being like public.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, it's it's a it's a good question, because
Speaker 5: you're right. You know, we're quite used to seeing former
Speaker 5: CIA officers. You know, you see their faces, you hear
Speaker 5: their names, you hear about some details of their careers,
Speaker 5: maybe not operational details, but certainly a bit of detail.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: In the UK, the rules are very different for people
Speaker 5: who served in intelligence agencies. The identities and therefore, you know,
Speaker 5: checkable things such as your face remain things that are
Speaker 5: not to be disclosed unless you are given specific authorization to.
Speaker 4: Do so, and that would be very unusual.
Speaker 5: So the one exception, ordinarily is the chief, which is
Speaker 5: what we call our director, that the head of the
Speaker 5: secret Intelligence Service, which is a publicly named and identified person,
Speaker 5: although not much else is known about them.
Speaker 2: Another interesting thing that I just learned personally last week
Speaker 2: was that the term I six is really only used
Speaker 2: in the movies and the spy novels that everyone refers
Speaker 2: to it either SIS or simply as Tame's House.
Speaker 4: Is that correct, Yeah, well so M I six. Yes,
Speaker 4: it's definitely.
Speaker 5: That's a sort of an unofficial nickname for the for
Speaker 5: the service. And yeah, SIS is the formal name which
Speaker 5: stands for the Secret Intelligence Service, and that was a
Speaker 5: it's an organization that was founded if I'm not mistaken
Speaker 5: in nineteen oh twelve, I think as nineteen twelve, so
Speaker 5: you know, a good time ago.
Speaker 4: And it is it is.
Speaker 5: This six name is a nickname that appeared I believe
Speaker 5: during World War Two when there were different the M
Speaker 5: and the I military intelligence.
Speaker 4: There were different sort of bureaus of military intelligence.
Speaker 5: But it's kind of ironic because six is a civilian organization,
Speaker 5: just of course as the CIA is, but I would
Speaker 5: argue it's kind of more civilians.
Speaker 4: It has a less obvious connection with the military world.
Speaker 3: So let's talk a little bit about you.
Speaker 2: You tell us a little bit about yourself, about how
Speaker 2: you grew up and how that sort of like took
Speaker 2: you towards service with the government.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, thank you.
Speaker 5: I mean in a way that my childhood sort of
Speaker 5: wouldn't have taken me there at all. I grew up
Speaker 5: in a in a kind of nice middle class environment
Speaker 5: in the south of England, which for those familiar with England,
Speaker 5: that's kind of my accent. I didn't have any family
Speaker 5: connections to people really in well, certainly in this line
Speaker 5: of work. But actually I would say in the more
Speaker 5: general if we were going to talk about kind of
Speaker 5: military service or or public service, foreign service, that kind
Speaker 5: of thing, I don't I didn't really have people I
Speaker 5: knew well from that that world. But I was somebody
Speaker 5: as a child, I was very curious about the world,
Speaker 5: you know. I read a lot of books about kind
Speaker 5: of foreign adventures.
Speaker 4: I was.
Speaker 5: I was interested in explorers and people who would travel
Speaker 5: to remote places. And I guess, I guess for me
Speaker 5: that there was this idea that there was a kind
Speaker 5: of adventure that was there somehow that you know, somehow.
Speaker 4: My life might lead in that direction.
Speaker 5: But again that the way that the s I recruits
Speaker 5: and the way that you join the organization when I.
Speaker 4: Did, it's different now, but when I did, there was.
Speaker 5: No way in you know, you you might be invited
Speaker 5: to apply, but but it was really so it was
Speaker 5: a series of unexpected you know, pathways that led me
Speaker 5: to it really, but.
Speaker 2: Before you get there, you know, what I read about
Speaker 2: you was, you know, allegedly you studied history at Oxford.
Speaker 5: Yes, that is that is true, and yeah, so Oxford
Speaker 5: is obviously, you know, is one of the kind of
Speaker 5: ancient universities of the UK and it has it has
Speaker 5: a big sort of hold on British culture, I would say,
Speaker 5: So it's obviously, you know, it's a it's a it's
Speaker 5: I guess it's like an Ivy League or something like that.
Speaker 5: But it's got this real hold on books and movies
Speaker 5: and TV shows and also spy stories. So there's this
Speaker 5: sort of sense that in the British system that you
Speaker 5: kind of expect the British spies to have either have
Speaker 5: gone to Oxford or Cambridge University, and those are the
Speaker 5: two kind of ancient universities of the country. Now, of course,
Speaker 5: like all these things, it's a little bit cliched. You know,
Speaker 5: clearly there are plenty of great people who've gone through
Speaker 5: other schools and ended up in sis, but certainly Oxford
Speaker 5: I think, I mean, for example, I think almost every
Speaker 5: single Prime Minister of Britain, even to this date attended
Speaker 5: Oxford University, so it has this kind of weird hold
Speaker 5: on the country.
Speaker 4: And that's true also for the intelligence services.
Speaker 5: And in the era that I was involved, these services
Speaker 5: would recruit by having a network of what they call
Speaker 5: talent spotters, who would identify young people, you know, undergraduates
Speaker 5: or whatever, who they thought might have capability, might show
Speaker 5: some promise, and then those people would be invited to
Speaker 5: apply through indirect means. And so, as I say you,
Speaker 5: you would never have set out thinking that this is
Speaker 5: what I want to do and how do I get there?
Speaker 4: You know, it was something that happened to you.
Speaker 2: Is that how you got recruited, because it sounds like
Speaker 2: you could have been potentially, you know, in academic or
Speaker 2: something of that nature.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And in fact that was what kind of I
Speaker 5: think Originally I thought I might do that.
Speaker 4: I was.
Speaker 5: I was a history major, as you've said, and I
Speaker 5: was I was very interested in that, and I was
Speaker 5: thinking about staying on doing post grad work, maybe you know,
Speaker 5: doctorate or postdoc all that stuff. And then I got
Speaker 5: I got a strange letter one day, and I mean
Speaker 5: it really it's it sounds like something from a book
Speaker 5: or a movie.
Speaker 4: But that's how it would work.
Speaker 5: Then you'd get a letter from it didn't even say
Speaker 5: it was from a government agency or anything. It would
Speaker 5: just say that there are certain positions which exist something
Speaker 5: like outside the normal framework of government recruitment or something.
Speaker 5: And you were invited to and of course it's a
Speaker 5: pre Internet era, no email or anything like that. You're
Speaker 5: invited to respond by writing and sending a resume.
Speaker 4: And I at the time, I thought, well, maybe this
Speaker 4: is just a joke.
Speaker 5: You know, maybe some some mates of mine are just
Speaker 5: trying to wind me up, and you know, and and
Speaker 5: and send a kind of joke letter, because there was
Speaker 5: always this rumor, there was a rumor on campus, you know,
Speaker 5: oh there's one or two people in their recruiting. But
Speaker 5: to be honest, I thought the rumor was a joke,
Speaker 5: and until I got that letter, I didn't believe in it.
Speaker 2: It's so the letter impors you to show up at
Speaker 2: like a recruitment pitch.
Speaker 3: I take it.
Speaker 5: But basically, yeah, it effectively, once you've received this letter,
Speaker 5: you eventually you get invited to London to a to
Speaker 5: a grand anonymous building in central London, quite near Buckingham Palace.
Speaker 4: And again there's no marking there's no you know.
Speaker 5: And and up until that point, I think a lot
Speaker 5: of people think this whole thing is some kind of
Speaker 5: elaborate hopes. And then you go through the door and
Speaker 5: you realize this is real, you know, And there was
Speaker 5: a guard and it was it was not the main building.
Speaker 5: So the main office of the Secret Intelligence Service, as
Speaker 5: is well known from the Bond movies, is a kind
Speaker 5: of quite iconic building on the River Thames in an
Speaker 5: area called Vauxhall. This is in another part of the
Speaker 5: of London, as I mentioned, near Buckham Palace, a very
Speaker 5: kind of smart district of town. And until that moment,
Speaker 5: you don't know what you're doing, and until the moment
Speaker 5: that you're you're sort of summoned into the meeting with
Speaker 5: the recruiter. I mean, obviously at that point I knew
Speaker 5: it was some kind of government entity, but I.
Speaker 4: Really didn't have an understanding of what it was.
Speaker 5: And of course, as you said right at the outset, Jack,
Speaker 5: you know, most people don't know what the Secret Intelligence
Speaker 5: Service is.
Speaker 4: People have heard of m I six.
Speaker 5: So even when the guy said to me, well, this
Speaker 5: is the Secret Intelligence Service, I wasn't one hundred percent
Speaker 5: sure I knew what organization he was talking about.
Speaker 2: And what was that like when you got into the meeting?
Speaker 2: I mean, how do they entice you to sign up?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, it's it.
Speaker 5: It was a very memorable experience because in a way,
Speaker 5: as as you'll be aware, and I'm sure a lot
Speaker 5: of people watching this would be aware, you know that
Speaker 5: we're talking about an agency which is a human intelligence agency,
Speaker 5: So it's about recruiting and running sources. And people who
Speaker 5: are good at that, of course, are people who have
Speaker 5: a certain character, a certain persuasiveness, a perhaps a certain charm,
Speaker 5: And in a way that's what you You know you're
Speaker 5: being recruited in a way a bit like you're you're
Speaker 5: going to be a source for the organization. Of course,
Speaker 5: not you're going to be a full employee, but in
Speaker 5: that sense that you're being drawn in and as a
Speaker 5: mixture of flattery, you know that you're being told that
Speaker 5: you're there because you've been identified to have special qualities
Speaker 5: or have certain skills or attributes. But ultimately, I think,
Speaker 5: as I mentioned, you know that for a young man
Speaker 5: in his early twenties who had had a sort of
Speaker 5: a first for adventure but not really any any particular
Speaker 5: means of pursuing it. You know, I just thought, well,
Speaker 5: this is this is incredible. You know, you'd be mad
Speaker 5: not to do this job. You know, I could be
Speaker 5: sitting in Oxford studying medieval history for ten years, or
Speaker 5: I could be signing up for this, And for me,
Speaker 5: it wasn't a hard sell at all.
Speaker 2: And once you accept was the security checks a pretty
Speaker 2: long drawn out process. I hear people who apply for
Speaker 2: the CIA sometimes spend years in this sort of like
Speaker 2: state of limbo.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I don't think it's quite as I've heard
Speaker 5: those stories with the CIA, but yeah, literally you might
Speaker 5: need to get another job while you're trying to do this.
Speaker 5: It's a little bit quicker, But basically there's a there's
Speaker 5: a series of recruitment. You know, that initial meeting is
Speaker 5: that it is more of a kind of exploratory conversation.
Speaker 5: There's a series of recruitment you can imagine, there's tests,
Speaker 5: written tests and other tests and then eventually a yes,
Speaker 5: quite intrusive security process. One thing that the UK services
Speaker 5: really don't do very often and certainly don't do with
Speaker 5: prospective employees is they don't tend to use polygraphs, and
Speaker 5: that's quite surprising, I think on the American side, because
Speaker 5: I know that you guys do quite a lot of that.
Speaker 5: So the security will be about people interviewing members of
Speaker 5: your family or acquaintances of yours and that kind of thing.
Speaker 5: And obviously, I mean, my own background is very boring. Basically,
Speaker 5: I have, you know, my ancestors all seem to be English,
Speaker 5: and there's not much to discover. I guess for people
Speaker 5: who have a more diverse background than it might.
Speaker 4: Take a bit longer to get through all that.
Speaker 2: So you decided to take the plunge. Before we get
Speaker 2: into like your training and what you went through, let's
Speaker 2: talk a minute about the history of the Secret Intelligence Service,
Speaker 2: which I believe you said goes back to nineteen two.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I did. It's the beginning of the twentieth century.
Speaker 5: And basically this it all begins at a time when
Speaker 5: you have the British Empire, of course, as a as
Speaker 5: a huge global superpower, and it's its kind of main
Speaker 5: global antagonist is is Germany, which of course was rapidly
Speaker 5: catching up, building its navy, expanding its its military and
Speaker 5: so on, and and you know, to give the very
Speaker 5: crude history, and of course I'm sure most people are
Speaker 5: well aware of this. You know, Germany kind of came
Speaker 5: late to the imperial game, and there was that kind
Speaker 5: of resentment and and and there was I think that
Speaker 5: there was there was this idea in Britain that that
Speaker 5: Germany was the newly united country of Germany, was was
Speaker 5: a threat to Britain's naval supremacy. And so the the
Speaker 5: Secret Intelligence Service was established as as an organization whose
Speaker 5: job was to spy overseas, to collect intelligence overseas, and
Speaker 5: as I say, at the beginning very much focused on
Speaker 5: the German threat. But because these are not the first
Speaker 5: spies that have existed in our history. At the time
Speaker 5: of the first Queen Elizabeth, so we're talking you know,
Speaker 5: in the fifteen hundreds, there was there was a guy
Speaker 5: called Francis Walsingham who ran what was a sophisticated intelligence
Speaker 5: service and they were sending agents overseas into France and
Speaker 5: so on at that time. So I guess that there's
Speaker 5: a long history of spying in a country.
Speaker 4: You know, written has a lot of history.
Speaker 5: But the formal organization was founded, I just checked his
Speaker 5: nineteen oh nine is that first foundation. So just in
Speaker 5: the run up to World War One and it's the
Speaker 5: same organization to this day. Obviously changed massively over time,
Speaker 5: but the same structure.
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Speaker 2: And then let's talk a little bit about after you
Speaker 2: put in your application get accepted. What is sort of
Speaker 2: the training process like for a SIS officer.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so, as I mentioned, you know, it's a human
Speaker 5: organization analogous to the CIA, distinct from you know, the
Speaker 5: NSA obviously, which which the equivalent in the UK would
Speaker 5: be g c h Q for the on the sing
Speaker 5: in side. As a human organization, the focus is on
Speaker 5: certainly amongst the sort of intelligence officer case handlers. It's
Speaker 5: about recruiting and running human intelligence sources. So there is
Speaker 5: there is a training induction which which is all about
Speaker 5: those skills. Now, over time, of course, these these training
Speaker 5: programs change change, you know.
Speaker 4: Over history.
Speaker 5: But but I think that the basic ideas about agent motivation,
Speaker 5: about you know what, what are the factors that cause
Speaker 5: people to be willing to be recruited to to spy
Speaker 5: for another country, to betray their country for our country.
Speaker 5: You know, these are these are things that are in
Speaker 5: some sense is universal. You know, the idea of betrayal,
Speaker 5: of espionage, of all these things, we can find it
Speaker 5: in the Bible, you know, we can find it in
Speaker 5: throughout human history. But but equally, you know, these are
Speaker 5: any sort of complex operations to to to organize and
Speaker 5: to run successfully. So there's a lot of emphasis on
Speaker 5: on I guess, the dynamics of of agent relationships. And
Speaker 5: when we talk about agents, I'm talking about sources obviously,
Speaker 5: I'm not.
Speaker 4: Talking about, uh, the the officers of the.
Speaker 5: This there's a lot of a lot of a lot
Speaker 5: of work clearly on security, and I guess if you're
Speaker 5: coming new to that world, the the issues of security
Speaker 5: and protective security, the idea of need to know of
Speaker 5: security of operations, that's all very new if you're coming
Speaker 5: fresh from you know, university or whatever. And then there's
Speaker 5: there is a little bit in the training which is
Speaker 5: about that kind of overlap with the world of special
Speaker 5: operations of covert operations, technical operations, those kinds of things.
Speaker 5: I would say in general that the balance of the
Speaker 5: British services is much more heavily towards the human human
Speaker 5: intelligence sources, whereas clearly you know, the CIA is a
Speaker 5: much bigger organization. It has its covert action, it has
Speaker 5: its paramilitary that sort of thing is it doesn't exist
Speaker 5: really as an equivalent in the UK systems.
Speaker 3: You guys have the says to do all that. Right, Well,
Speaker 3: that's right.
Speaker 5: We've we've got we've got, as you know very well,
Speaker 5: a very very well established special forces community and in
Speaker 5: a way they fulfill that function and it hasn't been
Speaker 5: seen necessary to sort of try and replicate it within
Speaker 5: within the civilian intelligence agencies.
Speaker 8: So out of curiosity, are you familiar with our Title
Speaker 8: ten and Title fifty authorities?
Speaker 4: I'm not. You must enlightened me. I might know when
Speaker 4: you start telling me, they might ring bells.
Speaker 8: So basically, just the idea of the split between intelligence
Speaker 8: operations and military operations, and how you know, like for
Speaker 8: the CIA to sort of have some of those paramilitary
Speaker 8: capabilities for things that don't fall under like the military authorities,
Speaker 8: but you know, for but but may take that kind
Speaker 8: of action. Do you know if you guys have a
Speaker 8: similar I know you don't have like a paramilitary, but
Speaker 8: do you have authorities set out like that? Or is
Speaker 8: your military more like the sas or whatever. Are they
Speaker 8: more free to conduct, say covert or clandestine operations that
Speaker 8: you know, like maybe our military.
Speaker 5: Wouldn't be Yeah, I think actually there might be a
Speaker 5: bit more flexibility. And I think it's partly because obviously
Speaker 5: you guys have a constitution and then the way that
Speaker 5: is interpreted is the sort of basis of how the
Speaker 5: country functions, or at least that's my best understanding of it,
Speaker 5: whereas Britain famously does not have a written constitution. So
Speaker 5: there's this kind of flexibility that exists for the government.
Speaker 5: Typically for both covert operations and espionage operations, there is
Speaker 5: effectively what we would call a submission process, so that
Speaker 5: some government minister on obviously, depending on how the level
Speaker 5: of risk, it might be the Prime Minister, or it
Speaker 5: might be the Foreign Secretary who superintends the intelligence services,
Speaker 5: we'll have signed off on an operational, you know, a
Speaker 5: direction effectively. So I guess, you know, the case study
Speaker 5: might be the war in Ukraine. You know that the
Speaker 5: Prime Minister has almost certainly signed off because of the
Speaker 5: importance of that on the role that might be played
Speaker 5: by special forces or by intelligence services that in that context.
Speaker 5: And then and then that obviously provides that the legal
Speaker 5: framework in which in which these operations are carried out
Speaker 5: very interesting.
Speaker 2: One of the things this sort of does relate to
Speaker 2: your training, I think, but also just larger culturally within
Speaker 2: the sis, do you think the Brits kind of have
Speaker 2: a leg up on this whole human intelligence thing because
Speaker 2: of this long history and intelligence gathering and because of
Speaker 2: this history of colonialism, and I know a lot of
Speaker 2: bad things happen because of that, but nonetheless that experience exists, right, Yeah.
Speaker 5: It's a great question, I think, I think it can
Speaker 5: be valuable. So one thing is that the points of
Speaker 5: connection for Britain with other countries are so numerous, partly
Speaker 5: because of the colonial history. So you know, obviously we
Speaker 5: can talk about India or Sub Saharan Africa, or there
Speaker 5: are many many countries that have a historic link to Britain.
Speaker 5: And as you rightly identify, Jack, that's not always a
Speaker 5: positive story, but it often brings with it positivity.
Speaker 4: Whether it's university links.
Speaker 5: You know, people will come to study at London, Oxford, Cambridge, whatever,
Speaker 5: things like that, sporting links, cultural you know the countries
Speaker 5: that play cricket, you know that those that's a list
Speaker 5: of countries is very specific and all in some way
Speaker 5: linked to Britain. So you have those things that if
Speaker 5: when we what is the task of a human intelligence recruitment,
Speaker 5: it is to find points of connection with someone and
Speaker 5: and and sort of you know, build a relationship where
Speaker 5: you which crosses a national divide and you convince someone
Speaker 5: of the validity of of what your objective is.
Speaker 4: So I think it can be helpful.
Speaker 5: I think it's also there's a possibility that there's a
Speaker 5: slightly British, I would say, a British sort of disease
Speaker 5: of thinking that we were better at everything because we
Speaker 5: might have done it five hundred years ago, and of
Speaker 5: course the world keeps moving forwards, and as a kind
Speaker 5: of British arrogance that goes with that, It doesn't you know,
Speaker 5: the fact that we had spies in fifteen hundred doesn't
Speaker 5: mean that our spies now are necessarily better.
Speaker 4: You know, we always have to keep adapting.
Speaker 5: So I think I think that those are perhaps the
Speaker 5: two tensions that exist in our culture.
Speaker 2: And about how long did the training process last before
Speaker 2: you were qualified to do your job, So.
Speaker 4: It's basically about half a year.
Speaker 5: And I think it's I think it's analogous to I
Speaker 5: know about the CIA have the famous farm and you know,
Speaker 5: and there are similarities to that, so you know, lots
Speaker 5: of sort of role playing and exercises and simulations that
Speaker 5: feel very real, particularly again if if you're a young
Speaker 5: person with no experien of that that world, it can
Speaker 5: feel very real indeed.
Speaker 4: And then at the end of that typically people.
Speaker 5: Would would start off working in in the UK, you know,
Speaker 5: in London in some kind of probably more of a
Speaker 5: desk based role, and of course there's always that tension
Speaker 5: that you you join thinking you're going to travel the
Speaker 5: world and have these big adventures and and the first
Speaker 5: bit of your career you're you're running a desk somewhere
Speaker 5: and you're not earning very much money, and you probably
Speaker 5: have buddies who went to Oxford University are now is
Speaker 5: becoming bankers and lawyers and you know, making big money
Speaker 5: and you're thinking what am I doing? But then you know,
Speaker 5: things change over time and and at a certain point,
Speaker 5: people are likely to go overseas almost always in the
Speaker 5: context of an embassy, you know, where they have a
Speaker 5: diplomatic cover role. And then of course your your your
Speaker 5: your career takes a really different pathway.
Speaker 2: So you can confirm then that Ian Fleming was not
Speaker 2: being entirely truthful about the life of an intelligence officer.
Speaker 5: Well, certainly, you know, the James Bond lifestyle, the Aston Martin,
Speaker 5: you know that the gambling or all the other stuff.
Speaker 5: It certainly was not sustainable on the salary that I
Speaker 5: was turning.
Speaker 4: You know, I was taking the bus.
Speaker 5: To work and you know, living in an unnglamorous part
Speaker 5: of town.
Speaker 4: So there we go.
Speaker 2: So one of the things you had mentioned to me
Speaker 2: before we started the interview was being a part of
Speaker 2: the generation that joins the intelligence service in the nineteen
Speaker 2: nineties sort of an unprecedented era of peace in many ways,
Speaker 2: and then that transition into the Global War on Terror.
Speaker 2: Could you tell us a little bit about that from
Speaker 2: your perspective.
Speaker 5: Yeah, sure, and I think it was it was, you know,
Speaker 5: the transformational event basically of my professional life, because as
Speaker 5: you said, there, you know, you have the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 5: the Cold wars ended the wester as one, and we
Speaker 5: can argue about that, but you know, basically that's what happened.
Speaker 4: Remember that the First Gulf War.
Speaker 5: Again, this kind of this reminder of the power of
Speaker 5: America and its allies.
Speaker 4: Everything is hunky dory.
Speaker 5: And in fact, there was even debates I don't know
Speaker 5: if this happened in the US, but there were certainly
Speaker 5: debates in the YUK about whether we even needed an
Speaker 5: intelligence service. You know, what's what's the point of it.
Speaker 5: We don't have enemies now, we've we've it's the end
Speaker 5: of history. Do you remember that history had ended?
Speaker 4: We had won? And then nine to eleven happened.
Speaker 5: Obviously terrible, terrible event targeting targeting America, of course, but
Speaker 5: but by definition, any any country that allied with America,
Speaker 5: that had a vision of liberal democracy, of a of
Speaker 5: a you know, secular freedoms, freedom of religion, all those
Speaker 5: things just went out of the window overnight, and all
Speaker 5: of a sudden, the need for intelligence agencies became very clear.
Speaker 5: But of course the role being played, and I'm sure
Speaker 5: this was similar in the CIA that of course, yes,
Speaker 5: SIS had a counter terrorism team. Yes, it wasn't that,
Speaker 5: it was it was an unknown capacity, but it was
Speaker 5: it was not the main effort, you know, it was
Speaker 5: not the thing that was seen as the biggest, the
Speaker 5: biggest activity for an intelligence agency. So going very quickly
Speaker 5: from an organization that post Cold Wars, slightly seeking to
Speaker 5: define its role, maybe dabbling in sort of organized crime,
Speaker 5: counter narcotics.
Speaker 4: There was obviously there were wars in the Balkans.
Speaker 5: It's not you know, the nineties were not without conflict,
Speaker 5: but these were kind of small, containable wars and then
Speaker 5: suddenly overnight transitioning to an extraordinary series of events that
Speaker 5: the tragedy of nine to eleven.
Speaker 4: But then the response.
Speaker 5: And of course SIS was very quickly involved with you
Speaker 5: guys in Afghanistan in that field of conflict and then
Speaker 5: subsequently in the war in Iraq as well.
Speaker 3: And could you.
Speaker 2: Talk a little bit about your personal experience of like
Speaker 2: where you were in the Secret Intelligence Service, Like I imagine,
Speaker 2: you know, you're in sub basement five working on a
Speaker 2: computer and then the war happens in your life changed.
Speaker 3: But I mean, what what was it like really for you? Yeah?
Speaker 5: I mean it was, it was, it was really, it was.
Speaker 5: It was dramatic. I was I was on an overseas posting.
Speaker 5: I probably can't say where I was, but let's just
Speaker 5: say I was. I was not near New York or Washington,
Speaker 5: d c uh and and it was it was very disorientating,
Speaker 5: as you can imagine. And then very quickly it was
Speaker 5: clear that that this world was changing rapidly and there
Speaker 5: were there was a call for recruits, uh, you know,
Speaker 5: people who were able to go directly to Afghanistan. I
Speaker 5: wasn't in that in that particular cohort, but you know
Speaker 5: other people who would who quite quickly transition to serve
Speaker 5: in the Middle East, and that's something that I ended
Speaker 5: up doing. So so you you quite quickly move from
Speaker 5: a situation where you're you're you're working on on sort
Speaker 5: of classic political intelligence targeting or maybe running sources in
Speaker 5: that in that framework, and then const rorism, which again
Speaker 5: it was an area I hadn't worked in, but it
Speaker 5: was very clearly you know, this was a priority.
Speaker 4: And of course in those.
Speaker 5: Early days after nine to eleven, we really didn't know.
Speaker 5: People didn't know where bin Laden was, people didn't know
Speaker 5: whether there'll be a series of copycat attacks, whether this
Speaker 5: was the start of a whole, you know, range of
Speaker 5: massive attacks on the nature of nine to eleven, and
Speaker 5: you know that there there was an amazing amount of
Speaker 5: people having to make things up as they went.
Speaker 4: Along in those early phases. And I remember.
Speaker 5: That sense of disorientation, but I admit also, you know,
Speaker 5: excitement and feeling well, actually I wanted to serve my country,
Speaker 5: and up until now, I wasn't sure what I was
Speaker 5: doing was really mattered that much. You know, not that
Speaker 5: it was pointless, but it just didn't didn't necessarily feel.
Speaker 4: Like it was really so important.
Speaker 5: Now we're seeing the feeling I had in you know,
Speaker 5: September two thousand and one was now understand why it matters,
Speaker 5: you know, why it might be doing this stuff?
Speaker 8: Did how how did the sis deal with you know,
Speaker 8: going from like the CIA strategic level intelligence, right embassies, parties,
Speaker 8: uh universities, you know, looking for people with access to
Speaker 8: the things you want, you know, and you might be
Speaker 8: in uh, you know, countries where maybe the foreign service
Speaker 8: or there's a criminal element or a hostel or whatever.
Speaker 8: But then you go to this very narrow, very limited
Speaker 8: environment where you're.
Speaker 4: Inside a base.
Speaker 8: You know, even going out is risky, and and it's
Speaker 8: like it's you're you're not just going to go spot,
Speaker 8: assess and recruit some guy at a party. Now, so like,
Speaker 8: how how does how did the SIS like manage that
Speaker 8: kind of growth?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was a very challenging transition. You're absolutely right.
Speaker 5: And the classic as you say, the classic sort of
Speaker 5: Cold War style intel. You know, you're at the embassy
Speaker 5: cocktail function and you sidle up to the Russian you know,
Speaker 5: attache or whatever.
Speaker 4: All that obviously doesn't work.
Speaker 5: There's no way you're going to meet the al Qaeda
Speaker 5: facilitator that way. I think, you know, I think a lot,
Speaker 5: probably similar to what the CI ended up doing, was
Speaker 5: a lot was through existing agents or recruiting agents who
Speaker 5: were kind of the middlemen, so maybe the sort of
Speaker 5: Arab businessman or someone who had had a foot in
Speaker 5: more than one world. And some of it was actually
Speaker 5: just trial and error and finding ways. And as you say,
Speaker 5: you know, you go from being in an embassy, and
Speaker 5: yes there are risks, and you would you might do
Speaker 5: anti surveillance routes and those sorts of things, but the
Speaker 5: risks are very different from being inside a military base,
Speaker 5: and the times you leave that base in order to
Speaker 5: carry out a debrief or a source meeting are kept
Speaker 5: to a bare minimum, and there's a lot of security
Speaker 5: arrangements go around with it, and so it's yeah, this
Speaker 5: idea that you can sort of cultivate someone taken to
Speaker 5: a bar getting drunk, maybe, you know, taken to a
Speaker 5: you know, find some women somewhere or whatever, you know,
Speaker 5: naughty thing that floats about.
Speaker 4: You know that that kind of stuff was very.
Speaker 5: Difficult to do, but interestingly, I think we learned over time,
Speaker 5: so you would maybe you in the theater of conflict
Speaker 5: you can't do that, but maybe you can find a
Speaker 5: way to get someone to another city in the region
Speaker 5: where security is good, where there are there is nightlife
Speaker 5: where you can and you're both your your guard is
Speaker 5: down a little because you're not you're not fearing that,
Speaker 5: you know, that immediate threat. So I think I think
Speaker 5: there was there was a lot of trial and error
Speaker 5: and gradually, you.
Speaker 4: Know, successes, successes were made.
Speaker 3: And you spent quite a bit of time in the
Speaker 3: Middle East.
Speaker 2: Can you tell us a little bit about that first
Speaker 2: trip and what that experience was like for you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so obviously that you know, the UK.
Speaker 5: Stood alongside the US in in those wars and and
Speaker 5: ended up being involved both in Afghanistan and Iraq. A
Speaker 5: lot of people then sort of passed through those places.
Speaker 5: I think, you know, for someone like myself, going back
Speaker 5: to sort of what I said earlier on being in
Speaker 5: an environment which is a militarized environment, was a completely
Speaker 5: new experience for me. So, you know, SIS is a
Speaker 5: civilian organization and most of its work, particularly before nine
Speaker 5: to eleven, took place either in offices in you know,
Speaker 5: in London or in embassies in capital cities around the world.
Speaker 5: And so deploying to an environment where you arrive in
Speaker 5: a military helicopter, taking evasive maneuvers to avoid you know,
Speaker 5: ground fire or whatever. You know that all those things,
Speaker 5: it's just it's a completely baffling and shocking, you know,
Speaker 5: sort of change of change of scene. Now again, in
Speaker 5: many ways, it was incredibly exciting, very very rewarding. But
Speaker 5: another thing which happens is, of course militaries speak a language.
Speaker 5: You know that that there's there's a terminology, and if
Speaker 5: you've if you've joined as a recruit and you've served
Speaker 5: for years, this is it's a language like French or German.
Speaker 4: You know that.
Speaker 5: And again people would assume that because you come from
Speaker 5: an intelligence service that you understand what they're talking about.
Speaker 5: I remember plenty of times just just not not literally
Speaker 5: not understanding what all these different acronyms meant. So there
Speaker 5: were there, you know, steep learning curve. And of course,
Speaker 5: you you're there to be useful.
Speaker 4: You know, you're not there just to sort of sit
Speaker 4: around and watch what's going on.
Speaker 5: You're there to give to identify target, recruit develop sources,
Speaker 5: provide intelligence that can stop terrorist attacks or you know,
Speaker 5: cause leaders of terror groups to be to be captured,
Speaker 5: or maybe to help you know, hostage rescues, you know,
Speaker 5: in that. And so the other thing is that tempo
Speaker 5: that the classic diplomatic intelligence type recruitment. You know, you've
Speaker 5: got a sort of one year cycle and and at
Speaker 5: the end of it, this guy might might you know,
Speaker 5: give you the briefing docum for the ministerial visit or
Speaker 5: something along those lines, whereas you're here in a we've
Speaker 5: got five days and we've got to get these people
Speaker 5: otherwise they're going to blow something up. And so it's
Speaker 5: a completely different mind frame, and you basically it's sink
Speaker 5: or swim, And I think a lot of people have
Speaker 5: found that quite challenging.
Speaker 2: Any particular stories even if you're able to have to
Speaker 2: be a little vague about exactly where or when they
Speaker 2: took place from that timeframe that you could share.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think a couple. I think there
Speaker 4: were times.
Speaker 5: There were times when we were involved with some of
Speaker 5: the hostage cases, so you know, Westerners working in those environments,
Speaker 5: taken hostage by militant groups. And then obviously you feel
Speaker 5: viscerally that sense of if we succeed, we know.
Speaker 4: What we've done.
Speaker 5: If we fail, that the outcome is horrific. And you know,
Speaker 5: we all recall those awful videos of the decapitations and
Speaker 5: so on, and Mike experience with those.
Speaker 4: You know, some some ended well, some did not.
Speaker 5: The seeing actually the personal effects of a British female
Speaker 5: hostage who sadly did not survive was actually one of
Speaker 5: it's harder than even seeing these videos. There's something about
Speaker 5: seeing someone just their private, mundane possessions, uh, you know,
Speaker 5: and we weren't able to save her. But then you
Speaker 5: know on another occasion that you know, sometimes there's as
Speaker 5: you guys will know, there's a lot of humor in
Speaker 5: this world.
Speaker 4: You know, it's kind of dark humor, but it's.
Speaker 5: There that you you people that maybe this intel that
Speaker 5: you find out that that the people you're working against
Speaker 5: can be quite stupid, can be you know that there's
Speaker 5: a sort of comic aspect to it, which I remember
Speaker 5: there was there was a case where there was this
Speaker 5: sort of intercepted communication which seemed to suggest that that
Speaker 5: two people were planning to move a group of hostages
Speaker 5: from one location to another. So there was a huge
Speaker 5: ramp up to try and intercept this, and then it
Speaker 5: turned out that there'd been a complete mistake in the translation.
Speaker 5: Whoever was you know, intercepted the call and they were
Speaker 5: moving like a truckload of building materials and I guess
Speaker 5: someone thought that that was a code word, but it
Speaker 5: was actually it was actual building materials. And you know,
Speaker 5: half the sas had been sent in to intercept. So that,
Speaker 5: you know, there's a lot of that kind of stuff
Speaker 5: where you're you're you're just constantly trying to stay alert,
Speaker 5: trying to figure out if you know what you're doing.
Speaker 5: You know, another thing that would happen a lot would
Speaker 5: be that the volunteers, so people would come volunteering information
Speaker 5: and and of course you know it's a bit of
Speaker 5: a mug's game, you know, they know that if if
Speaker 5: they can persuade you that their information is good, they're
Speaker 5: going to leave with with with some US dollars in
Speaker 5: their pocket. Inevitably, there'll be people who come with ridiculous stories.
Speaker 5: And you know, I remember a guy claiming that he'd
Speaker 5: had one of the Stinger missiles famously back in the eighties,
Speaker 5: of course that you know, the CIA had had rightly,
Speaker 5: you know, provided Stinger missiles to the Afghans to shoot
Speaker 5: down Russian helicopters. And you'll probably know this that there
Speaker 5: are so many people claim to have Stinger missiles that
Speaker 5: the CIA must have handed out millions of them. And
Speaker 5: this guy, you know, he went back to some forwards
Speaker 5: and he would have the Stinger missile and he'd provide
Speaker 5: it to us for millions of millions of dollars. And eventually,
Speaker 5: you know, we persuaded him, well, we needs to see
Speaker 5: a photo of this thing.
Speaker 4: And it was a.
Speaker 5: Photo of like the oldest, most basic Russian RPG that
Speaker 5: you could pick up for sort of fifty dollars anywhere,
Speaker 5: and you just sort of think.
Speaker 4: Well, why are you wasting you know, what, what was
Speaker 4: your plan? When did you think that this was going
Speaker 4: to turn intillions of dollars.
Speaker 3: Nigerian prince scandal in your email box.
Speaker 5: Basically, it's the same deal. It's the same deal. And
Speaker 5: I guess there's always some u gullible enough, you know.
Speaker 8: How was it for you guys in terms of working environment?
Speaker 8: Were you tied to like the CIA because they had robust,
Speaker 8: you know, a rock back presence out there, or would
Speaker 8: you guys set up your own kind of like small
Speaker 8: elements and.
Speaker 3: You know, secure those on your own and stuff like that.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: No, generally we've tried to sort of do our own thing.
Speaker 5: We'd obviously coordinate a lot with with with the CIA,
Speaker 5: and of course with other allies Australia, Kindada, you know,
Speaker 5: some other European players, depending on who's in theater. But yeah,
Speaker 5: we would generally try to operate as sort of a
Speaker 5: fairly small, kind of low profile and.
Speaker 4: I guess to the extent.
Speaker 5: That if there's a usp you know, the CIA, certainly
Speaker 5: in places like sort of Iraq and Afghanistan would have
Speaker 5: a huge presence of understandably and and we we would
Speaker 5: probably as a British want to feel that we were
Speaker 5: much less kind of obvious, and maybe it gave us
Speaker 5: an ability to be more subtle in some ways, but
Speaker 5: of course that means we had fewer resources, and sometimes
Speaker 5: we would steel or borrow from the CIA, and and
Speaker 5: you know, most of the time it was a productive relationship,
Speaker 5: but of course there's always that competitive thing. Sure, and
Speaker 5: it's not unusual that you're chasing the same target.
Speaker 9: Sure.
Speaker 7: Sure.
Speaker 2: As far as keeping safe over there, I mean, did
Speaker 2: you guys usually have military dudes of security?
Speaker 3: Is that how that works?
Speaker 5: Yeah? So so, and normally that that people came from
Speaker 5: the special forces community, so people who had a prior
Speaker 5: understanding of the intel world and so so that there
Speaker 5: would be that that kind of you know, sort of
Speaker 5: strong strong sense of camaraderie and so on and and
Speaker 5: and as you'll know, you know, these are very unsafe environments,
Speaker 5: particularly if you're if you're trying to do something unnoticed.
Speaker 5: You know, it's one thing to drive out of out
Speaker 5: of say the green zoning Baghdad in armored vehicles, but
Speaker 5: you might not be able to do that if you're
Speaker 5: trying to have a have a source meeting or something
Speaker 5: like that. Right, So, so you had to had to
Speaker 5: find ways to do that subtly and safely, and sometimes
Speaker 5: that was a bit of attention.
Speaker 8: Well, then I would ask because you know, you mentioned
Speaker 8: the Green Zone, and you know, like the the agency,
Speaker 8: by what we've been told, had a difficult time, like
Speaker 8: a lot of their sources were from walkins because when
Speaker 8: they would go out, they were required to go out
Speaker 8: and up armored, you know, two vehicles.
Speaker 3: Things like that.
Speaker 8: So I is it safe to assume that you guys
Speaker 8: were kind of out there and like in thin skins,
Speaker 8: like going low profile, trying not to draw any attention. Yeah,
Speaker 8: what did you think? I mean, did you did you
Speaker 8: look at the CIA and go like, well, that's amateur hour.
Speaker 4: Well I would never.
Speaker 5: Do that because genuinely, not just because I'm trying to
Speaker 5: be polite to you know, Transatlantic colleagues, but I think
Speaker 5: I think a lot of organizations were struggling with the
Speaker 5: challenge of converting themselves from a civilian based organization. Yes,
Speaker 5: of course, there would be you know, military veterans serving
Speaker 5: in a CIA, and then as we both know that
Speaker 5: the the.
Speaker 4: The paramilitary wing.
Speaker 5: But ultimately, you know, your average CIA case officer is
Speaker 5: someone who's probably been to university, might have a master's degree,
Speaker 5: and and there's you know, no more military experience than
Speaker 5: than your postman, you know, and and so in that sense,
Speaker 5: I think it. I think all these organizations were struggling
Speaker 5: to find the way round round those objectives. And yeah,
Speaker 5: at the beginning, probably that there was some amateurism on
Speaker 5: all sides. But I think if you look at the results,
Speaker 5: I mean, if you look at the way that the
Speaker 5: obviously not the CIA on its own, but the CIA
Speaker 5: working with the you know, the sort of Special Operations
Speaker 5: Command and so on. By the time you had like
Speaker 5: General McCrystal in place and that kind of man hunt
Speaker 5: for Zakawi in Iraq, you know, it was clear a
Speaker 5: pretty pretty well well old machine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I mean it sounds like you spent about
Speaker 2: roughly a decade and a half as sort of a
Speaker 2: wartime intelligence officer. It's just curious, like, how did the
Speaker 2: war and how did your job evolve in time? How
Speaker 2: did it change? I mean a lot happened. There is
Speaker 2: seven to seven attacks that been widen made. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of things that happened during that time space.
Speaker 4: Yeah, a lot of things. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So obviously the seven to seven attacks, you know, and
Speaker 5: I was overseas in a theater of war at the time,
Speaker 5: and that was very you know, a very strange experience
Speaker 5: where the war was on the streets of London rather
Speaker 5: than you know, in this Middle Eastern city where I
Speaker 5: was working, you know, So that was odd.
Speaker 4: And yeah, I think a lot involved.
Speaker 5: I think also, you know, we have to be honest
Speaker 5: that I think the perception of of the utility of
Speaker 5: the Iraq War, you know, changed changed rapidly clearly, both
Speaker 5: in the US and in the UK. It became politically
Speaker 5: very toxic, both for Tony Blair, for George W. Bush
Speaker 5: and and after seven seven a lot of people I
Speaker 5: think were not unreasonably asking well, what would this have
Speaker 5: happened if we hadn't joined this war?
Speaker 4: Whose whole basis you know, can be questioned.
Speaker 5: And obviously there was the whole saga of the w
Speaker 5: m D, which again was an intelligence led operation that
Speaker 5: we were promised that the w m D Iraq would
Speaker 5: would this would all be found and of course, as
Speaker 5: we all know, it didn't work out that way. So
Speaker 5: I think, I mean know, for me personally, obviously, there's
Speaker 5: also that process of just becoming older and more experienced,
Speaker 5: and you spend less time in the theater of conflict
Speaker 5: and more time, maybe in a in a sort of
Speaker 5: head office role or in some kind of you know,
Speaker 5: team leader type thing.
Speaker 4: So that so that for me, But towards the end of.
Speaker 5: That period, I mean, I'll admit that I had a
Speaker 5: measure of cynicism about about the whole War on Terror. Clearly,
Speaker 5: you know, the the both the hunt for Zarkari which
Speaker 5: is less well known, but they've bin lad and rated.
Speaker 5: You know, these are spectacularly successful intelligence operations and there's
Speaker 5: no there's no other way to look at those and
Speaker 5: and you know they are they are ones that anyone
Speaker 5: involved with could rightly be proud of.
Speaker 4: But when we look at that sort of long.
Speaker 5: Period of our of our shared history, the US and
Speaker 5: the UK, I think it's.
Speaker 4: Hard hard to conclude sort.
Speaker 5: Of exactly what, you know, what the positive outcomes were.
Speaker 5: And clearly you know that the that they withdrawal from
Speaker 5: Carbell at the end of the Afghan experience, again, you know,
Speaker 5: the costs of that war.
Speaker 4: The numbers are staggering, aren't there.
Speaker 5: You could have given every Afghan is it half a
Speaker 5: million dollars each or something. You know, by the time
Speaker 5: you've spent the crazy sums of money and we haven't
Speaker 5: even talked about the losses of lives.
Speaker 4: And so on.
Speaker 5: So I think it's it's it's an interesting period, but
Speaker 5: it's a difficult period, and I think a lot of
Speaker 5: people from from the community, certainly in the UK and
Speaker 5: I wouldn't suppied in the US, have have their questions about that,
Speaker 5: you know, about what what ultimately were we achieving.
Speaker 2: Tell us a little about your career kind of or
Speaker 2: your intelligence career kind of winding down, what that last
Speaker 2: year or so was like, and what made you decide
Speaker 2: to leave.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, it was partly sort of some of those
Speaker 5: things I've alluded to there, and I think particularly also
Speaker 5: because what happened is that, you know that the war
Speaker 5: on Terror kind of morphed into the Arab spring, and
Speaker 5: in a way, that was a.
Speaker 4: Promise that never delivered.
Speaker 5: You know that, having spent time in the Middle East,
Speaker 5: the idea that these countries could be democracies from their
Speaker 5: own volition, not not because we'd gone in and imposed that,
Speaker 5: but that they find it themselves, and then.
Speaker 4: Seeing that that sort of.
Speaker 5: Promise be snatched away from them, I think that was
Speaker 5: quite difficult to see. And I think I also, you know,
Speaker 5: I make it sound like it was already depressing and on.
Speaker 5: But there's another way, which is just that actually you're
Speaker 5: a young man. You can have incredible experiences. It's exciting,
Speaker 5: you have the adrenaline, there's all those things, but actually,
Speaker 5: really you're pretty hard to sustain a relationship.
Speaker 4: You know, a lot of marriages don't survive.
Speaker 5: That kind of thing. You want to have kids, you
Speaker 5: want to have foundly, you know, all those just normal stuff.
Speaker 5: So I felt that I had i'd had the experiences,
Speaker 5: that I was unlikely ever to sort of have experiences
Speaker 5: of that kind of intensity again, and I would just
Speaker 5: you know, try something else to you know, leave that
Speaker 5: well behind, be very happy that I was part of it,
Speaker 5: feel proud that I did something, you know, for my country.
Speaker 4: But ultimately, you know, there are other things to do
Speaker 4: with your life.
Speaker 2: What was that like, transitioning from this very secret and
Speaker 2: secretive world to becoming a civilian so to speak. Yeah, because,
Speaker 2: as we mentioned earlier, you can't necessarily take your resume
Speaker 2: out there and be like, hey, I was in the sis.
Speaker 5: No, no, So there is that problem and trying to
Speaker 5: sort of explain to people what it was you were
Speaker 5: up to.
Speaker 4: You know, it can be difficult, but I think.
Speaker 5: I you know, I as I think I mentioned earlier. Jack,
Speaker 5: you know, I did some work in consulting and as
Speaker 5: a world which which is again will be familiar to
Speaker 5: people in the US, a world where there's quite a
Speaker 5: lot of people who've come from the world of intel
Speaker 5: or maybe.
Speaker 4: Special ops or or a bit of both.
Speaker 5: So you're you're not You're not just kind of walking
Speaker 5: into the you know, the job center and and and
Speaker 5: sort of just checking out any old job.
Speaker 4: So, you know, I started.
Speaker 5: Out in roles where there were plenty of people who
Speaker 5: kind of had an idea of that world, maybe sometimes
Speaker 5: from a slightly earlier period. And I guess that's a
Speaker 5: sort of It's just like a soft landing, isn't it.
Speaker 5: And so I, yeah, I was sort of security consulting,
Speaker 5: corporate intel, those kinds of those kinds of jobs.
Speaker 2: This is the city of London consulting that you read
Speaker 2: about and like a Frederick Forsyth novel.
Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely, And it's interesting because, yeah, the city of
Speaker 5: London has become this kind of global capital for spo
Speaker 5: for hire basically, and I think there's there's something about,
Speaker 5: you know, Britain does have a sort of high quality
Speaker 5: intelligence agencies, but it also has this culture of the
Speaker 5: kind of.
Speaker 4: Financial services and sort.
Speaker 5: Of old school banking and you know, guys with nice
Speaker 5: tailored suits and all that sort of thing. So I
Speaker 5: think you've sort of meld those two worlds together. And
Speaker 5: you're quite right. It's a world that is familiar from
Speaker 5: the pages of a kind of Frederick ful Scyth novel,
Speaker 5: but actually, you know, in a way quite realistic.
Speaker 2: And so you're in consulting. When does the idea kind
Speaker 2: of come about? And how does it come about that
Speaker 2: you want to try your hand at writing spy novels.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, for me, it was very much the experience
Speaker 5: of COVID actually, which I guess a lot of people
Speaker 5: sort of reexamined their life a bit, and you know,
Speaker 5: forced idleness from not not being in the office every
Speaker 5: day and maybe having having a bit of time off.
Speaker 5: And I'd always I'd always thought I might have a
Speaker 5: novel in me. You know, there's that I obviously lots
Speaker 5: of people think that, but I guess that because of
Speaker 5: that time away from normal work, I thought, right now,
Speaker 5: you know, I've got to give it a go. And
Speaker 5: then a couple of other things sort of inspired me
Speaker 5: or just gave me the impetus. One was actually the
Speaker 5: passing of John Lecarey, who's obviously a great possibly the
Speaker 5: greatest English spywriter, and and you know, just reading his
Speaker 5: obituaries and all of that, he'd sort of achieved as
Speaker 5: a writer, and I thought, well, look, you know, if
Speaker 5: you're ever.
Speaker 4: Going to do this, you've just got to You've just
Speaker 4: got to get on with it.
Speaker 5: You know, you can't, you can't always it's that classic thing,
Speaker 5: you have an ambition. Well if if you always talk
Speaker 5: about it to your mates and never do it, then yeah,
Speaker 5: it's just pointless.
Speaker 4: So so it just gave me that kind of inspiration.
Speaker 5: And the other thing was that, having spent a fair
Speaker 5: bit of time outside the service but experience this world
Speaker 5: of the sort of private spying, I realized that there
Speaker 5: could be a novel to be written where the protagonist
Speaker 5: is not a current government intelligence officer, but that there's somebody.
Speaker 4: On the outside.
Speaker 5: And I quite like that idea of an outsider, as
Speaker 5: opposed to setting an office setting a novel inside you know,
Speaker 5: the government office, which is a sort of more I guess.
Speaker 2: A more classic setting, and your novels are called a
Speaker 2: spy alone and a spy at war. I want to
Speaker 2: tell us a little bit about what they're about.
Speaker 5: Yeah, sure, So that one is a sequel of the other,
Speaker 5: so that it's a series, and I'm currently working on
Speaker 5: the third, so.
Speaker 4: It will be a trilogy.
Speaker 5: So what we have in the first novel, the first
Speaker 5: thing is they're all set in the present day, So
Speaker 5: it's that the events in the Spy alone, I think
Speaker 5: it's unfolded twenty twenty two, so just in the light
Speaker 5: of Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine. And what I
Speaker 5: have is the protagonist is he is a consultant, a
Speaker 5: former intelligence officer, somebody who's working in that kind of
Speaker 5: private intelligence world in London, and he is given a
Speaker 5: commission to investigate a Russian oligarch who wants to give
Speaker 5: a big donation to Oxford University. Now, these are all
Speaker 5: things that are happening all the time in real life,
Speaker 5: and you guys might be very familiar with this London
Speaker 5: grad phenomenon where a lot of dirty Russian money flowed
Speaker 5: through institutions in the UK and you know, in my view,
Speaker 5: quite disgracefully really, both in terms of high end prime
Speaker 5: property central London or like Big manor houses out in
Speaker 5: the countryside. But also, yeah, this kind of this laundering
Speaker 5: of money through institutions, whether it was sort of football clubs,
Speaker 5: university endowments, you know, it's that way that we are.
Speaker 5: We sort of let our institutions be wide open to
Speaker 5: this money. So I have this idea that the protagonists
Speaker 5: starts investigating what he believes is as a purely commercial project,
Speaker 5: and then he starts to imagine that there might be
Speaker 5: something sitting under this and it's more than simply an
Speaker 5: assessment of the you know, the compliance risks of this money,
Speaker 5: but actually that there's a there's an espionage operation. And
Speaker 5: effectively this endowment was a cover for a Russian espionage
Speaker 5: operation targeting the British establishment. So the other thing that
Speaker 5: I tried to do in this novel is is get
Speaker 5: back to a very classic British idea that the sort
Speaker 5: of British establishment had had Russian double agents in it.
Speaker 5: And of course, during the Cold War, you know, we
Speaker 5: had that whole Kim Yeah, Kim Philby the most famous.
Speaker 4: One, but there was others.
Speaker 5: There was Guy Burgess, a guy called Anthony Blunt, with
Speaker 5: the whole series of these guys, and of course Britain
Speaker 5: has this kind of class thing going on, these kind
Speaker 5: of posh guys, privately, privately educated Cambridge and Oxford University,
Speaker 5: and they went into the institutions I six, Foreign Office,
Speaker 5: other government institutions and ended up as Russian spies or
Speaker 5: in fact, they've been recruited as young men. So I
Speaker 5: had this idea that what if the Russians had managed
Speaker 5: to recruit people even in the nineteen nineties at a
Speaker 5: time when we imagine they couldn't recruit anyone because their
Speaker 5: country was collapsing, But you know, there were in a
Speaker 5: kind of post ideological, cynical world that we inhabit, it
Speaker 5: doesn't seem so impossible. And what's kind of interesting is
Speaker 5: the way that on you know, both sides of the Atlantic,
Speaker 5: there are lots of questions about some individuals and their
Speaker 5: relationships with Russia, which perhaps suggests that, you know, maybe
Speaker 5: the Russians have been able to recruit people even up
Speaker 5: to the current time. So that's basically the setting of
Speaker 5: the of the first novel.
Speaker 10: In the second one, Yeah, so the second one is
Speaker 10: a sequel, and it actually most of it takes place
Speaker 10: in Ukraine in the war in Ukraine, and effectively the
Speaker 10: protagonist Simon Sharman is his name.
Speaker 5: He he follows a Chechen assassin to Ukraine, where he
Speaker 5: believes that person was responsible for the death of one
Speaker 5: of his colleagues, as it happens in real life. I've
Speaker 5: spent some time in Ukraine since twenty twenty two, so
Speaker 5: I've got a bit of an understanding of sort of
Speaker 5: what's been.
Speaker 4: Going on there.
Speaker 5: But also I have many friends who've worked there, whether
Speaker 5: they're being journalists or you know, people supporting Ukrainians one
Speaker 5: way or another, driving trucks.
Speaker 4: All kinds of things like that.
Speaker 5: So I did my best to try to give an
Speaker 5: impression of what Ukraine is like at the moment.
Speaker 4: And of course.
Speaker 5: One of the interesting things about it is that you
Speaker 5: can go to Kiev and it's a charming European city,
Speaker 5: you know, and most of the time it feels normal,
Speaker 5: and the restaurants are good and the bars are good,
Speaker 5: and it all feels great, and then the sirens go,
Speaker 5: and of course the Russian drones and missile attacks come in.
Speaker 5: So it's this very strange dichotomy that I think we
Speaker 5: grew up thinking of places at war or being cities
Speaker 5: like Beirut or Bagdad, everything's destroyed and bombed out, whereas
Speaker 5: we're now seeing it happen in a European city that,
Speaker 5: depending which direction you look in, can look charming, like
Speaker 5: a place you take your wife on holiday, and then
Speaker 5: you look the other way and it's devastation. So it's
Speaker 5: a it's a very strange dichotomy, I think.
Speaker 3: And can you tell us anything about the third book?
Speaker 5: Well that, yeah, the third book I have to have
Speaker 5: to write some of it, but it's my hope is
Speaker 5: to kind of to conclude the story and bring it
Speaker 5: back really sort of bring it back to the UK,
Speaker 5: but also to this idea of the kind of the
Speaker 5: hybrid war that Russia's fighting is in a way I've
Speaker 5: written about the kind of the political interference in terms
Speaker 5: of the money flowing through our institutions. I've written about
Speaker 5: the war in Ukraine, and it seems to me that
Speaker 5: where we're going now is these these gray zone operations.
Speaker 4: You know, when when.
Speaker 5: A there's a fire at Heathrow Airport with no no
Speaker 5: one's really sure anymore, are they Is that Russia or
Speaker 5: is it just you know, bad wiring. And so I
Speaker 5: think we're living in this era where there's there's so
Speaker 5: much uncertainty which can be weaponized, and it's weaponized through
Speaker 5: disinformation cynical politicians. But equally, you know, Russia probably would
Speaker 5: like to test NATO, would like to interfere in elections,
Speaker 5: would like to see the kind of cynical opportunists elected.
Speaker 5: So the idea of this novel, it will be set
Speaker 5: in twenty twenty six, so the readers will read it
Speaker 5: in the year that it comes out, and I.
Speaker 4: Hope it will.
Speaker 5: It will give us sense of this kind of very
Speaker 5: uncertain world that we feel we're now living in.
Speaker 2: One other kind of like side topic that you had
Speaker 2: mentioned earlier than what just wanted to come back to,
Speaker 2: is the first female chief of the Supreme Intelligence Service
Speaker 2: was appointed just this week.
Speaker 5: I think that's correct, Yeah, literally just the last few
Speaker 5: day is yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think.
Speaker 5: I mean that's a really historic moment. As we've mentioned,
Speaker 5: you know, this is an organization is more than one
Speaker 5: hundred years old, and inevitably part of this is just
Speaker 5: a function of history at a certain point that there
Speaker 5: were women in the service from early on, but there
Speaker 5: were all kinds of stupid rules about once you got
Speaker 5: married you had to resign or you know, you can
Speaker 5: imagine these kinds of things.
Speaker 4: And obviously most of those rules disappeared probably.
Speaker 5: In the nineteen eighties at the latest, but it still
Speaker 5: took time for then a cadre of really talented operational
Speaker 5: officers to move through the service. Because the thing about
Speaker 5: this is that this is this role is it's a
Speaker 5: political appointment. Yes, of course the Prime Minister makes the appointment,
Speaker 5: but it is almost always a person recruited, has has
Speaker 5: had a career in intelligence, so so blaise matchveli who
Speaker 5: is the appointee, as has been you know, stated publicly,
Speaker 5: has had a lengthy operational career, including most recently in
Speaker 5: in the Q branch because of Q from the Bomb
Speaker 5: movies with all the gadgets, is actually a real a
Speaker 5: real person and a real division. It's a sort of
Speaker 5: technical technical division of of S I S.
Speaker 3: That's pretty interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, anything else, Charles that you know, I failed to
Speaker 2: ask that you'd like to talk about today?
Speaker 5: Well, I was, I was just going to say, I
Speaker 5: think we touched on it a bit before that. There's
Speaker 5: there's this kind of a little bit of a trend
Speaker 5: at the moment for UH former Intel officers to write
Speaker 5: novels and I know that you've had Ilana Berry is
Speaker 5: Berry on on this show a brilliant, brilliant book, The
Speaker 5: Peacock on the Sparrow. I don't need to recommend it
Speaker 5: to all your know it already. And then and then
Speaker 5: of course there's there's also David McCloskey, who again came
Speaker 5: through the c i A. And I think in the
Speaker 5: UK there's there's been a little bit less of that,
Speaker 5: partly because of the funny rules, which is why I
Speaker 5: know one could be my face and all that.
Speaker 4: But I think there is something about how.
Speaker 5: In books, spy books, even when they're fictitious, books can
Speaker 5: be helpful that help us understand the world we're in.
Speaker 5: And you know what, John Lecarey's books were so popular
Speaker 5: during the Cold War because readers started to understand the
Speaker 5: Cold War was a much more complex and kind of
Speaker 5: cynical story than just this kind of you know, simplistic
Speaker 5: good versus evil, East versus West kind of thing. And
Speaker 5: I think in a way, you know, we're living in
Speaker 5: a very confusing and uncertain era and we just think
Speaker 5: the last few days with the conflicts raging Iran Israel,
Speaker 5: the US getting involved, all those kinds of things, it's
Speaker 5: a very very difficult sort of time to get your
Speaker 5: head around, and I feel that spy novels aren't a
Speaker 5: bad way to sort of help help sort of open
Speaker 5: a window onto that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was gonna ask. I mean that brings up
Speaker 2: you know, I have this interesting question. I've I've now
Speaker 2: at this point, met quite a few authors, and I
Speaker 2: noticed that different authors are trying to say different things
Speaker 2: with their books, even in this spy genre. Yeah, I've
Speaker 2: met people who write in this genre, but they're not
Speaker 2: It's almost like they're using espionage as a vehicle to
Speaker 2: say something larger about culture, about these sorts of you know,
Speaker 2: bigger picture, maybe about international politics, whereas people who actually
Speaker 2: served in this position maybe have an opportunity to I
Speaker 2: don't want to use the word reveal, like they're revealing
Speaker 2: a secret, but to you know, reveal something about this
Speaker 2: inner world. But for you, I mean, what are you
Speaker 2: trying to say with your books?
Speaker 5: Yeah, well that's a great question, I guess. I mean,
Speaker 5: I suppose there is something about letting people understand because
Speaker 5: one of the things that the protagonist of my books
Speaker 5: is I've tried very hard to make it normal person,
Speaker 5: you know, so Obviously, you watch a James Bond movie
Speaker 5: or Jason Bourne or whatever. These people are incredible, you know,
Speaker 5: even by the standards of special operations. They can do
Speaker 5: everything that They've never fired a shot that didn't hit
Speaker 5: its target, they've never lost a fight. They can jump
Speaker 5: from buildings and do all these things. And you know,
Speaker 5: I wanted a protagonist who was a kind of regular guy,
Speaker 5: who who might swing a punch and then find that
Speaker 5: his hand hurts and the person these punch is still standing,
Speaker 5: you know, and those sorts of things. And so that
Speaker 5: was one thing about the normality, that you know, normal
Speaker 5: people have these jobs.
Speaker 4: And then the second thing.
Speaker 5: Was that that there is excitement and drama and jeopardy,
Speaker 5: but not not in the sense of Mission Impossible or
Speaker 5: Jason Bourne, but because it's the jeopardy is often emotional,
Speaker 5: you know, it's the drama of not knowing if you
Speaker 5: trust the people around you, that you don't know if
Speaker 5: you're being followed, you don't know if someone's doing the
Speaker 5: double on you. So I think again, it's sort of
Speaker 5: understanding more that a lot of these things take place
Speaker 5: sort of inside your head rather than you know, in
Speaker 5: a kind of action setting. But equally, as you said, Jack,
Speaker 5: you know, there is something what are we saying about
Speaker 5: the world, And certainly for me, I mean I felt
Speaker 5: quite strongly that I think Britain made some bad mistakes,
Speaker 5: particularly with this thing with the sort of allowing Russian
Speaker 5: money and Russian.
Speaker 4: Influence into our country.
Speaker 5: And of course, you know, once the Ukraine War had started,
Speaker 5: I feel that we did the right thing as a
Speaker 5: country that we you know, picked up.
Speaker 4: We've been a very.
Speaker 5: Strong support to Ukraine and and you know, most British
Speaker 5: people it's a very popular thing and Britain people fly
Speaker 5: the flag of Ukraine everywhere. But I think there is
Speaker 5: that thing about how explaining to people why it matters,
Speaker 5: why it's important. So it certainly, particularly in my second book,
Speaker 5: which is you know, set in Ukraine, trying to kind
Speaker 5: of make sure that people understand why it matters that
Speaker 5: we continue to support them.
Speaker 2: There is that book. It was written by a British journalist,
Speaker 2: I believe money Land.
Speaker 4: Oh, yes, that's a great book, very very good book. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I recall the author points out that you know, there's
Speaker 2: the City of London banking and we have this problem
Speaker 2: here in the States too. Not a lot of corrupt
Speaker 2: regimes wander their money through our countries, and we have
Speaker 2: some responsibility for that.
Speaker 4: Absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So so Oliver Bullow is the name of the author,
Speaker 5: and in fact I did an event with him, I
Speaker 5: think it was last year, and it was interesting because
Speaker 5: he had obviously written this very factual, brilliant work of reportage.
Speaker 5: I'd created a very fictitious story, but in a way
Speaker 5: we were telling the same story about this thing of
Speaker 5: how we've we we we took our institutions, and of
Speaker 5: course the people it's this classic thing that they want
Speaker 5: a laund of money and own property in Manhattan or
Speaker 5: central London because then they have the rule of law
Speaker 5: and no one's going to steal it from it. So
Speaker 5: you know, we're kind of that they've stolen the money
Speaker 5: off the citizens of Russia or Kazakhstan or wherever.
Speaker 4: And now that that they're coming to the UK.
Speaker 5: You know, there are so many contradictions and and there's
Speaker 5: there's so much sort of hypocrisy loaded into these things,
Speaker 5: and of course you can see why it drives cynicism.
Speaker 5: You know a lot of people in both of our
Speaker 5: countries feel very cynical about politics, and this is one
Speaker 5: of the reasons. They see this happening, They see that
Speaker 5: the the you know, the fancy parts of of the
Speaker 5: big cities are owned by kleptocratic foreigners. That that doesn't
Speaker 5: make you feel good about where you're living.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's Do we have any questions, Steve,
Speaker 2: We got some questions from our viewership on patreons, right,
Speaker 2: they will bring those up for you.
Speaker 6: Uh, Charles, what's your opinion on the whole Richard Thomlinson
Speaker 6: affair From the inside.
Speaker 7: How does his book look seen?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: So Richard Thomlinson, just for those who aren't familiar, was
Speaker 5: a was an SIS officer whose career began well, he
Speaker 5: was a successful kind of junior officer, and then there
Speaker 5: was a he fell out, you know, in a catastrophic
Speaker 5: way with the organization.
Speaker 4: Uh, he was, he was fired.
Speaker 5: He then released a whole series of names online of.
Speaker 4: Of serving officers.
Speaker 5: So it was a it was a really toxic situation.
Speaker 5: And then and he published a book which the British
Speaker 5: government attempted to block. Ultimately it did it was published,
Speaker 5: which in itself is interesting because it's a reminder that
Speaker 5: governments often, you know, think they can stop something coming
Speaker 5: out and it normally comes out eventually. Now my understanding
Speaker 5: is that Tomlinson is now he's kind of made peace
Speaker 5: literally and and and sort of emotionally with that whole
Speaker 5: period of his life, and he's he's living in France
Speaker 5: and there's no kind of legal cloud over him.
Speaker 4: I mean, clearly it was. It was badly managed.
Speaker 5: I mean, I'm not blaming any one individual, and I
Speaker 5: don't claim to have a direct knowledge, but but you
Speaker 5: can't what seemed to have been like a disagreement of
Speaker 5: almost like a human resources properly turned into an international
Speaker 5: espionage problem. But it's a reminder also that ultimately, you know,
Speaker 5: trust in in these organizations. I mean, I guess we
Speaker 5: could talk about Edward Snowden. People have a huge amount
Speaker 5: of trust placed in them, and sometimes you make mistakes
Speaker 5: and then they have that information and they can't, you know,
Speaker 5: you can't remove it from their brains and if they
Speaker 5: want to go rogue with it, they will.
Speaker 7: Yeah, all right.
Speaker 9: We got a couple more from Tom's curious how the
Speaker 9: am I how am I six views their role between
Speaker 9: SADA and the Palestinian Authorities Intelligence UK seems to have
Speaker 9: more a more supportive stance with the PA than we
Speaker 9: do historically we I'm assuming being America.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think obviously.
Speaker 5: The UK has a historic position there, having been the
Speaker 5: sort of colonial administrator of what was Palestine, out of
Speaker 5: which came the State of Israel and then the Palestinian territories.
Speaker 5: I think there's there's been an attempt by the UK
Speaker 5: to try to maintain positive relationships with both sides. I
Speaker 5: think we have to be blunt, that has been extremely difficult,
Speaker 5: particularly in recent years, and and certainly the the the
Speaker 5: sort of post Gaza it's been. I mean, I know
Speaker 5: it's been politically toxic in the US as well, but certainly,
Speaker 5: you know, things like the way certain communities within our
Speaker 5: country are now voting understandably in my view, in response
Speaker 5: to what they're seeing happening in Gaza.
Speaker 4: I think it's made it very difficult. But in terms of.
Speaker 5: Operationally, my understanding is that, yeah, that they've they've they've
Speaker 5: managed to keep a fairly strong kind of operational coordination going.
Speaker 5: And and but of course you know, we we we work. Obviously,
Speaker 5: Israel has been an ally of the UK for a
Speaker 5: long time. It's sometimes these relationships have can be quite turbulent.
Speaker 5: I guess, and I can imagine there's been some turbulence
Speaker 5: in recent years.
Speaker 2: I just on a side note, I recently read Our
Speaker 2: Agents of Innocence by David Ignatius. Oh yeah, that's and
Speaker 2: it's about the CIA recruiting Palestinians in like the nineteen
Speaker 2: seventies into the eighties. And I've been told that it's
Speaker 2: based on very much a true story.
Speaker 3: It was a good book.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Now I've read that too, and I've also I'd heard
Speaker 5: that that it's based on some sort of real case histories,
Speaker 5: And yeah, I think it's it's a great book. And
Speaker 5: in fact, I think if people are interested in the
Speaker 5: real craft of human intelligence, you know, completely separated from
Speaker 5: special operations, COVID ops and all that, but just the
Speaker 5: thing of who is who is playing, who who is
Speaker 5: running who the complexities, I think it's a really great
Speaker 5: book and I can highly recommend it.
Speaker 7: We got one more from Mark.
Speaker 6: Is it true that the Sis has never once lost
Speaker 6: an officer on the job and what do you attribute
Speaker 6: that to.
Speaker 4: I believe that to be the case. I obviously couldn't
Speaker 4: confirm it.
Speaker 5: I attribute it to I think taking a very serious
Speaker 5: attitude to you know, operational security, but also you know,
Speaker 5: planning and those sorts of things. And I think I
Speaker 5: think the point is that coming back to the sort
Speaker 5: of some of the things we're talking about.
Speaker 4: Right at the beginning that obviously you you might work
Speaker 4: in some very.
Speaker 5: Challenging theaters of operation, but if you know, if, if
Speaker 5: you if you have a very kind of professional approach
Speaker 5: to planning to security, and it's not just about security
Speaker 5: in terms of you know the weapons or the you know,
Speaker 5: the vehicles you're using, but actually how many people know
Speaker 5: the identities?
Speaker 4: What?
Speaker 6: What?
Speaker 5: That kind of protective security and someone so I, you know,
Speaker 5: I think that's that's something that the service has taken
Speaker 5: very seriously.
Speaker 4: And and come be proud of.
Speaker 3: Charles. That's all we got.
Speaker 2: If you stick with us after the show, please, But
Speaker 2: everyone else, we will let you go and we will.
Speaker 3: See you on the next episode.
Speaker 7: Jack, Why don't we let them know why Charles is
Speaker 7: sticking with us?
Speaker 2: Well, because we're gonna have bonus segments on the Patreon
Speaker 2: with many of our guests. So if you are interested,
Speaker 2: look for links down the description to sign up for
Speaker 2: Patreon and support the show and get access to all
Speaker 2: of these episodes ad free.
Speaker 4: When you do that.
Speaker 3: What else am I supposed to tell people about Charles's books?
Speaker 7: Those links will be in the description as well.
Speaker 2: All of Charles's information will be down in the description
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 3: So thank you guys, and we will see you next time. Hey, guys,
Speaker 3: it's Jack.
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