National security took a prominent place in the King’s Speech last week. Home Office security minister Dan Jarvis the next day announced a review of the terror threat level system, implying that the warning might take in hostile states besides Islamist and other terrorism. Numerous commentators and authors, such as the former UK national security adviser Peter Ricketts, have set out that the world is seeing more ‘major disruptions’ (an early phrase in Ricketts’ 20221 book Hard Choices) that both make the world more risky in general, and trickier for the British Isles in particular.
The title of Lord Ricketts’ book is worth dwelling on; for it implies that besides strategic choices by the UK (and willy-nilly by the Republic of Ireland), that citizens have next to no say in, the UK may have to tighten its belt or trade security for liberty and prosperity, that citizens will notice and voice their opinions about. To quote from an official volume in the British state’s history of the second world war, from the series on intelligence – volume four, security and counter-intelligence (1990), ‘success in counter espionage is always more difficult to achieve in peace-time conditions’. If Iran, Russia, China and North Korea are ‘hostile states’, what might security practitioners and citizens have to do differently, to meet their threats?
FIRS
One example already, as mentioned by Dan Jarvis in the national security debate in the House of Commons of May 14, is FIRS (the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme), dating from last year.
The trouble is, set against that, what of the rule of thumb that British business is free to trade with any country we’re not at war with? At least one British video surveillance product manufacturer (long defunct) sold its products to Iran, presumably not used by the regime as home décor. Britain happily did business with apartheid South Africa, and indeed the Russia and its Soviet bloc in the Cold War. National security is a genuine consideration; so is earning a living, and being at liberty (which sets us apart from the dictatorships FIRS was set up to manage).
A case study
A case study is in that official volume; about how before D-Day in 1944, the invasion of Nazi-occupied France from Britain, the British state debated (in secret) how to guard the secret of when and where the invasion would happen. For debate was a ban on citizens visiting most of Britain’s coasts; a ban on service personnel’s leave to (neutral) Ireland; diplomats’ travel out of the country; and newspapers (and needless to say BBC radio) not speculating on the invasion. As the generals, politicians from Prime Minister Winston Churchill down, and civil servants agreed, no-one wanted a lapse in security that could lead to the death of thousands of troops, even (God forbid) the failure of the invasion and a lease of life for Nazism.
But, set against that: Churchill wrote that he didn’t want anything to be ‘irksome’. While a ban on travel to the coasts would help the authorities to spot any enemy agents, and reduce the spread of gossip, was it practical to enforce? Brighton alone had 200,000 visitors a month. Would people resent the interference, and the precautions do more harm than good? And did the threat to security come from elsewhere, such as the Free French in London contacting agents in France, or mail going through Gibraltar, that might give the game away (the authorities had all that covered too). The War Cabinet decided on a visitors ban, that ran from April to August (in other words, long after the actual invasion of June 6; the authorities wanted to keep the Germans guessing).
Explosion
Even in peacetime, some of debate about how to calibrate the response to ‘hostile states’, and what to protect, is necessarily secretive, in case the ‘hostiles’ learn something. But, given the explosion in the amount of data, and outlets for it, the debate has moved on (like the rest of life) greatly since 1944. In the Second World War, as in the 1914-18 war, the state worked mightily to have reasonable (never absolute) assurance that the enemy had ‘uncontrolled’ agents in Britain (‘controlled’ agents double-crossing the enemy, were prized in counter-intelligence). Indeed, the subsea cables, data centres and utilities that make it possible for us to have data at our fingertips have become part of the critical national infrastructure the British state wishes to protect. The security services have had to move on, like the rest of us; to acknowledge, for one thing, that they exist. The UK’s intelligence agency GCHQ now has its name on a bus route from Gloucester to its base in Cheltenham.
What to protect
The national security threat is to intellectual property (IP); not only about the next generation of weapons, or research findings that may enable inventions, but the background of how things are done – the length of procurement chains, for example. In 1944, it turned out that Britain was incubating a threat (as also treated in that official history) of scientists, civil servants, even spies (notoriously from Cambridge, which implied penetration also of the universities) who were either members of the Communist Party or believers in Communism, who put that -ism above their own country and betrayed secrets to Russia (and, in the spying world, maybe condemned people to death).
Other than thugs
Only the perverse would choose now to spy for thuggish regimes like Russia’s. Trouble is, spies or those working on behalf of ‘foreign influence’ are deceitful (they can dress up their offer; hence the UK official campaign to ‘Think before you Link’) and resourceful (they can offer money). And it’s not hard to think of why people might choose to aid ‘hostile states’: to fund a gambling, drug or other addiction.
What next
In his book, Lord Ricketts notes that the response to Islamist terrorism ‘has been a real success’; the Uk response to cyber attack ‘has been one of the most effective in the world’. “But the rise in the threats from Russia and China did not get the attention it deserved from western countries including Britain.” If that were true in the 2010s, what are the threats around in 2026 that we are not alert to?
Perhaps all the answers lie in personnel security; the screening of people – and not only those in positions of power, and ‘influence’, but the less heralded IT engineers, and the security officers and cleaners, with privileged access in the virtual and real world respectively. Yet vetting of employees, contractors and visitors by the state has been chronically slow for decades.
Photo by Mark Rowe: Ranville, Normandy: Commonwealth War Graves.
