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Times
2 days ago
- Politics
- Times
Most state secrets are nothing of the kind
As the double-decker chugged by Lambeth North Tube station, the conductor — this was in the 1970s — would announce the next stop with a chuckle: 'Century House, spies' corner!' The grimy office block housed MI6, which like all Britain's spy agencies then had no official existence. The journalist Duncan Campbell was prosecuted in 1978 for giving the barest outline of the work of GCHQ, Britain's signals intelligence outfit, though neither his scoop nor the bus conductor's joke would have surprised the KGB. During the Cold War it penetrated all our spy agencies. Secrecy is less obsessive now, though the rules — spectacularly breached over Afghan refugees and serving SAS officers — are still strict. The Cabinet Office publishes a helpful manual about definitions and handling of classified information. The DSMA (formerly D-Notice) website lists five topics, such as the storage and transport of nuclear weapons, where the media is asked, sensibly, to restrain its coverage. Real life is much messier. Deliberate leaks, active or merely passive, can serve a useful purpose. It is striking that the US C-17 military transport plane that flew from the US air force's main nuclear weapons storage facility in New Mexico to RAF Lakenheath last week kept its transponder switched on. Online plane-spotters gleefully publicised its flight path. Short of a Pentagon press release that the US was putting nuclear weapons back in Britain for the first time in 17 years, the message could have hardly been clearer. The ban-the-bomb lot may complain but an ostentatious sign that the Trump administration is boosting its commitment to our defence sends a useful warning to the Kremlin. Other leaks stem from shabbier motives. People in all walks of life like to boast. That is why a Grenadier Guards regimental newsletter proudly listed the names of officers now living their best lives with the SAS. Civil servants may be punctiliously tight-lipped but their political masters (and worse, their spin doctors) are easily tempted by the prospect of a favourable headline. Leaks get worse when information is shared between countries. Our American allies can be extraordinarily careless with our secrets, and vice versa. Contractors are even sloppier. The US-based Cyber Intel Systems lists on its website the exact colour shades used for Britain's classification labels: mischief-makers might find that handy. As I was leaving a meeting in spookdom, an official made me tear off the purple 'TOP SECRET' logo from a sheet of paper bearing something entirely innocuous, explaining 'we don't want to see that on the internet'. Even real secrets rarely matter for long. Today's troop movements are tomorrow's irrelevance. The most sizzling political intelligence ('Putin fell over again this morning') rapidly becomes stale: perhaps made redundant by subsequent events, or because it reaches the media. Much more important than the actual information is protecting sources and methods that may provide more nuggets in the future. Any clues to past activity may help enemies to work out current and future doings. Adversaries' ability to spot patterns and anomalies is the hottest topic in the world of secrets right now, and a top preoccupation for the incoming chief of MI6, Blaise Metreweli. The legal revolution of the 1990s, in which our spy agencies gained avowed status and oversight, and later websites and press offices, is dwarfed by the havoc wrought by the digital age on the staples of espionage: tradecraft and cover identities, which conceal secret activity in seemingly inconspicuous behaviour. • MoD hid Afghan leak from MPs For modern-day spies heading to work at our agencies' now far more imposing London headquarters, for example, the worry is not a jocular bus conductor but the CCTV on public transport. Coupled with face-recognition software, and with the other digital clues left in daily life (mobile phone use, electronic payments, credit ratings), and the unlimited availability of computer processing power and storage, this risks making even the most shadowy corners of government an open book. Our enemies can create and search databases to reveal and track our intelligence officers and their military counterparts, and those they work with. (Of course it helps if, as in the case of Afghans seeking refuge here, we create the database ourselves and distribute it by email.) Accountability is flimsy. Our best bet is parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), but past governments have starved it of clout and staff, with a budget frozen since 2013. The ISC issued a blistering protest in May, saying that it in effect had 'no oversight' of the £3 billion we spend annually on spookdom. Despite a judge's recommendation the government sidelined the ISC over the Afghan scandal (which may cost another billion pounds of public money). That was a scandalous breach of the rules: MI6 officers' names were leaked in the database. The ISC is now investigating that, and the government has promised more resources. It has even been able to meet the prime minister, for the first time, shockingly, in more than ten years. But to be truly effective, the ISC should oversee not only intelligence agencies, but other secret bits of government. The special forces, for example, escape regular scrutiny: too secret for parliament's defence committee, and never discussed publicly by ministers. Yet scandals, and self-serving memoirs, abound. Secrecy, like privacy, is essential to our society, economy, legal system and defence. But without proper scrutiny from judges and politicians it spares our decision-makers' blushes, not the victims of their blunders. We all lose out from that.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Campaigners call for Keir Starmer to say if US nuclear weapons are back in UK
Campaigners have called for Keir Starmer to tell parliament whether US nuclear weapons have returned to British soil after a distinctive US air force transport flight was spotted landing at RAF Lakenheath on Friday morning. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and several experts believe that it is highly likely that a number of US B61-12 gravity bombs were delivered to a US air force squadron last week, the first US nuclear deployment in the UK since 2008. Tom Unterrainer, the chair of CND, said it was 'completely inappropriate' for the public to find out 'a major escalation in nuclear danger' via the assessments of military experts and called for the prime minister to update MPs. The head of the campaign group said the prime minister 'must make a public statement about this major change in Britain's security arrangements and allow for a transparent and democratic debate' on the issue. Confirmation of any deployment of nuclear weapons by Starmer or the defence secretary, John Healey, is not expected, however. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence said: 'It remains a long-standing UK and Nato policy to neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons at a given location.' One expert, William Alberque, a former director of Nato's Arms Control, Disarmament and WMD Non-Proliferation Centre, said 'the evidence is overwhelming' to conclude that B-61 nuclear bombs have been transported to RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk. He cited other specialists who had tracked an unusual C-17 transport flight last week from the US air force base at Kirtland, New Mexico, which hosts a repository of an estimated 2,500 nuclear weapons, to Lakenheath. Taking off on Thursday, the transport plane landed in the UK on Friday and flew with its transponders on, meaning its flight was visible. The flight was operated by the 62nd Airlift Wing, the only US air force unit authorised to transport nuclear weapons. Similar flights also took place last week to air bases in Belgium and the Netherlands, home to long established 'nuclear sharing' missions – where American tactical nuclear weapons are stored at European air bases. Though the UK announced at last month's Nato summit that the RAF would purchase F-35A fighter jets, capable of carrying nuclear weapons, the likely transfer to Lakenheath comes several years ahead of that deal being completed. Hans Kristensen, nuclear information project director at the Federation of American Scientists, said he believed it was possible a deployment of nuclear weapons had taken place, and would come after a modernisation of the underground storage facilities at the Lakenheath base. The 'addition of weapons to Lakenheath would mean the number of US tactical nuclear weapons in Europe has been increased for the first time since the cold war' from approximately 100 bombs 'to probably 125-130', Kristensen said. It would also indicate that 'Nato has changed its policy of not responding with new nuclear weapons to Russia's nuclear threats and behaviour', he added. The B61-12 is a relatively simple gravity bomb that must be flown and dropped over its target. It comes in four variants, only one of which is more powerful than the 15kt weapon used to bomb Hiroshima in 1945. It has an explosive yield of 50kt, while the others are 0.3kt, 1.5kt and 10kt. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has prompted a remilitarisation in Europe, and Nato allies agreed last month at the Nato summit to lift core defence spending to 3.5% of GDP by 2035. The weapons are expected to be stored for the US air force 493rd squadron, nicknamed the Grim Reapers, based at Lakenheath. Last week, members of the unit were selling a distinctive commemorative coin at the Royal International Air Tattoo, with a heavyhanded clue that their mission had changed. Photographed by Tony Osborne, a journalist with Aviation Week, the coin comes in the shape of mushroom cloud. One side features a skull, a large missile, and the inscription 'prepare to meet thy maker' – while the other shows an explosion. 'It's quite an overt way of saying yes,' Osborne said. The coin was sold out by the second day of the air show, the journalist added, such was its popularity among those attending the event at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire.
