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Intelligence and Security Committee Annual Report for 2008–09 (Cm 7807)

My Lords, if the noble Lord is right, I am not aware of the embargo on journalists. It is amazing quite how often leaks happen—that is probably because we do not chop people’s legs off enough when they do, but that is another issue—but I slightly share the noble Lord’s view. However, that is the letter written by my right honourable friend, and that is where we stand. I am not the Minister responsible for this; it is the Foreign Secretary. There is no basis for the accusations that the Security Service has withheld documents. The agencies co-operate fully with the ISC, and considerable investment has been made and continues to be made in all our agencies to improve IT and record-keeping systems. A noble Lord raised how extraordinary it was that records should not have been kept correctly. I have to say that after many years being involved in Whitehall, with various government departments and in the MoD, it is definitely not a surprise to me that sometimes they are not kept as well as they should be. That is not an excuse; that should be done better. Some departments, though, in my experience over the past 25 years or so, can occasionally be quite shambolic. We have to get better. The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, raised the issue of the fully resilient GCHQ data centre. There is a programme on this tonight, and I will be interested to see if that says anything about it—I have no idea what it is going to say. I will write to the noble Baroness about the detail, if I may; I do not think it is appropriate to go through it here. I know that GCHQ is looking at a number of options, including the increased use of other UK sites and possibly joining in with the Security Service and SIS joint data centre later. That is an option, although there are issues of cost. I touch again on the cyber threat, which is extremely daunting; in fact, it is horrifying. I became aware of this at the end of the 1990s when I was CDI and started trying to do some work on state-on-state issues, to stop some states doing things. That is quite difficult because of attribution. When I came into this post two and a half years ago, I was intent on ensuring that we did something. We now have a cybersecurity strategy. I want to see CSG more and more linked in through CSOC, which will be doing this difficult work. This is a difficult and complex area and we have to do something about it. The number of attacks on a daily basis on all our systems in this country are mind-boggling, and the state-on-state ones are terrifying in terms of both the skill of some of them and what they achieve, particularly in terms of getting intellectual property rights out of very large UK firms. When it comes to serious organised crime, we see only the tip of the iceberg; we are talking about £50 billion a year globally in terms of the money coming from this. This is a big and current issue, which is why, when I set up the OCS and CSOC, I said, "Let us not look at an IOC or an FOC for you chaps. You are to start working today to resolve this". That is what they are doing on a daily basis—tackling these issues. It is interesting to look at the Americans, who have their Cyber Czar, Mr Schmidt. I think that they now have nine people working in the west wing on this issue, which is slightly fewer than us in the OCS. They have even greater problems than us but the Americans are always very good, when they finally get to grips with something, at throwing resources at it. We must be locked in so that when they throw those resources we can get a hike-up, and we must be slightly ahead of them to achieve that. The noble Baroness raised the cross-agency spending review and the joint bid to the Treasury. We are looking at shared services and things like that. It is always amazing how difficult these things seem to be, but it is something that we have to try to achieve. I could not agree more about analytical capability. When I was Chief of Defence Intelligence, I became aware that because of changes in the Foreign Office, I had the largest group of analysts in the United Kingdom. As the noble Baroness said, that is crucial because we need accurate and clever analysis. I am not sure where the professional head of intelligence analysis, the chairman of the JIC, has got to on a number of these areas. There are areas to do with how open source can be analysed and worked on. I shall write to the noble Baroness on that. We reported on the National Security Forum on 22 March in the Written Ministerial Statement about the national security strategy. We have done a huge amount of work. I am pleased because it has achieved more than I thought it would. It has done some very valuable work on nuclear issues, energy supply, space security and the defence Green Paper. It gives us a link to IISS, Chatham House, RUSI, academe and the universities and has been very useful. The noble Baroness said that there is confusion over cybersecurity. I do not think there is. I agree that it is highly complex, but we are getting a focus and moving ahead on it. On the national security strategy and the agencies, the agencies, in a sense, take direction on what they are looking at. RFIs help in terms of the work on the national security strategy, but I shall say a little more about that in a minute. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, talked about US rendition flights via Diego Garcia. We reported them as soon as we became aware of them. We had been assured beforehand by the US that there had been no flights. The US then went through some old records, found them and told us. As soon as we knew, we said it. We make every effort to verify assurances, but we cannot work on the basis that we do not trust our allies. They are aware of how upsetting that was for us and of what a terrible business it was. That is how that occurred. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, is right about languages and expertise. When I was Chief of Defence Intelligence, we did not have numbers of people who could the Balkan languages and we were deeply involved in fighting there. We had lots of very good Russian speakers, and we even had Columbian speakers—people who could speak dialects—because we had been doing stuff in the drug war out there, but no speakers of Balkan languages. When we went into Afghanistan, I had hardly anyone who could speak Pashtun and all the dialects there. The noble Lord is right that we need to look at this carefully in terms of academe, universities and our language training. We need more Farsi speakers. It is always a real problem. The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, talked about remedial teaching of English. All I know about that is that when I was First Sea Lord, we had to institute it at Dartmouth because, believe it or not, we found that some people coming out of universities could not write a proper letter, so it may be that some English remedial work has to go on. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, also touched on terrorist funding. We have done a huge amount with the Terrorist Finance Action Group in looking at this and have had a real effect. The AQ leadership in Fatah is really suffering on funding, partly because some has gone to the Taliban but also because of the huge pressure we have put on. We are keeping this going. I have told the team. We now have a smaller group that looks at this all the time. It is rather like when you are boxing: if a chap has a slight cut on his eye, you keep whacking it. That is what we have to do with these people. Similarly, we are now putting huge pressure on Taliban funding because that can have an impact on our men and women who are at risk on a daily basis in Afghanistan. We can do things such as find ID routes and spares and how items get there by squeezing the funding. It is very important, and we are focusing on it. I touched a little on international co-operation. The US is obliviously the closest and the 5Is community. We talk with the EU a lot. I have been over there a number of times and have talked about cyber. I do not think the EU had realised what a threat it is, but now it does and has asked us to do certain work for it. But sometimes we have difficulties. For example, on the SWIFT issue to do with funding, it does not see things the same way as we do, often because it does not appreciate the risks. I think what is needed is for us to explain these things in more detail, and, of course, we have one-to-one links with others. As an admiral, I was a little shocked to hear the Union Jack story with regard to Menwith Hill. It is called the Union Jack only when it is on the forrard part of a ship; otherwise, it is the Union flag. I had to get that one right. We have never had a national security strategy before and it is good that we have one. Yes, there are flaws in it and things need to be corrected and the second one was a lot better but we look on it in terms of threats to our citizens. It covers the whole mass of threats to our citizens within this country and worldwide, ranging from state on state threats—what are the implications of failing states?—nation building, counterterrorism, and all the spin-offs from that in terms of the CONTEST strategy, cybersecurity, serious organised crime and how that folds into it, all the work that has been done on that, and the whole programme of work we are doing, right down through to the resilience of our national infrastructure and natural disasters, pandemics, and all of that. All of that is now caught in there. We have horizon scanning, looking worldwide and horizon scanning internally and domestically. We are addressing all these issues. Yes, we have a long way to go and we must not be complacent, but, goodness me, we are in a far better place than we were two and a half years ago, and we are looking at all those things in a complex way. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, for giving his background to the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert. When I was CDI, I wondered why he suddenly seemed to parachute in as Minister DP. I now understand exactly what happened and I thank the noble Lord for that. I also understand why he was so very interested in me as Chief of Defence Intelligence during the Kosovo operation. That was very useful and I thank the noble Lord very much for it. I have probably said more than enough. I hope that I have answered most of the questions. If there is anything that I have missed, I shall be very happy to respond after the debate.