The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 497 - Sir David Omand

Nov. 17, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

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Edition 497 - Sir David Omand

A privilege to speak with former head of the UK's GCHQ "Spy Centre" Sir David Omand who has behind-the-scenes top-level stories of spying and intelligence-gathering from his four-decade career...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is the Unexplained.
	Still mild here in the UK.
	Some horrendous amounts of rain though.
	I can't remember it raining so much in a November ever, but it's been positively monsoonal one way or another.
	But that's the weather report.
	Thank you as ever to Adam, my webmaster, for his hard work, and thank you again to Haley for booking the guests.
	A few emails to deal with before we get into the guest and a very special guest on this edition of The Unexplained, the former head of GCHQ, a man deeply connected with the intelligence community in the UK, Sir David Omond, will be here talking about his life in this field, but also about his new book, which is essentially a guide to the way that spies work.
	But more about that in a moment.
	As I say, a number of emails.
	Dave, first of all, just to put here on the podcast, my deepest sympathies, Dave, the loss of your father, which you told me about, I have been through this.
	And, you know, they say that time is a healer.
	Well, I don't know whether it's a healer, but you learn to cope.
	You learn to accept, I think, over time, but you have to give yourself the time.
	And, you know, as I say, my condolences, and I'm sorry to hear this.
	Jay, thank you for your email.
	And I'm very sorry to hear of the death of Dr. Patricia Ann Strutt, who was involved in the labeled release experiment on Mars back in the 70s, when they may or may not have discovered the foundations of biological life there.
	You have to go back to, I think it's edition 431 or thereabouts to hear my recent conversation.
	Very sad to hear that this remarkable scientist, this pioneering woman, Dr. Patricia Ann Stratt, has left us at the age, I think, of 85 after a long battle with cancer.
	Liz, thank you very much for your email.
	Liz listens while walking the dogs in America.
	Kind words, Liz.
	And Dan, thank you very much for your email.
	I will look at this ghost image, or what appears might be, when I get the chance to do that.
	I just had a quick look at it.
	It does seem strange.
	Dan, thank you.
	And also the listener whose name I forget, I'm really sorry, who told me about the staircase in the desert.
	I've got to go back to my emails to check, but thank you very much.
	That's a fascinating story and a fascinating image of something that appears to be almost not quite an escalator, but a staircase in the desert, in Egypt.
	Remarkable stuff.
	Right, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained is Sir David Omond.
	He was a former head of GCHQ, the so-called spy center in Cheltenham in the United Kingdom, and also, as you will hear in this conversation, a man deeply at the heart of security matters in the United Kingdom and connecting with the entire world.
	It is an amazing life that he's had.
	It is a fascinating topic, a fascinating subject, and something that I can't even begin to imagine what it must have been like to be part of this.
	You have to think on so many different planes and levels, and you have to be at all times careful and cautious and do the right thing.
	Sir David Omond, coming soon.
	If you want to get in touch with me, please go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
	Follow the link, and you can send me an email from there.
	And I think that's probably all I have to say for now.
	This is an extended, slightly extended version of the radio conversation that I had recently with Sir David Omond.
	So, Sir David, thank you very much for coming on.
	A pleasure.
	There was always a mystique about GCHQ, which you had it for how many years?
	Back in the mid-90s.
	It seems another age ago.
	Well, it was at one time always in the newspapers.
	It isn't quite so much now.
	But there is a public fascination, I think, about spies and spying.
	Yes, I mean, I joined GCHQ in 1969 when I left university.
	And in those days, nobody, the government did not admit that it was an intelligence agency.
	There was a cover story to tell your parents where you were going to work.
	The secrecy surrounding that kind of activity was intense.
	And that was a carry-on, carry-through of what had started at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, where thousands of staff helped decipher German communications, helped shorten the war.
	And after the war, none of them talked about it.
	Today, of course, as you say, you drive past, there are big signs up saying this is GCHQ's headquarters.
	It's a nice modern building.
	It's got a website.
	I strongly recommend people to go and have a browse through the website and the website of part of GCHQ, which is now really important, which is the National Cyber Security Center in CSC, in terms of practical advice for how we keep ourselves safe as people, as individuals, as companies, in a world in which there are a lot of people out there who mean us harm.
	Now, in this day and age, of course, we even know the name of the head of MI5.
	But I wonder, and I'm sure a number of people listening to this would also wonder, what's the point of having a secret spy center when you tell people all about it?
	Because it's working on behalf of the public to help keep the public safe.
	And it requires a license to operate, which is effectively given by Parliament on our behalf.
	Because some of the things that intelligence agencies have to do are really quite unusual and they carry ethical risk.
	And you wouldn't want everyone doing it, such as intruding into somebody's privacy.
	If you've got a terrorist group planning an attack or a serious criminal group or a cyber hackers or you've got an autocrat overseas like President Putin, you have to find out what their intentions are.
	You've got to kind of find out what secrets they have, of how they intend to try and harm us.
	And of course, they will go to almost any lengths, violent lengths, to prevent you getting their secrets.
	So, overcoming their will, persuading the secrets out of them, essentially means stealing the secrets.
	So, you might have to recruit an agent inside the terrorist group.
	You might have to try and listen in on their communications.
	Even perhaps place a little piece of malware on their computer so that you can actually follow what they're up to.
	That's modern secret intelligence.
	And if you want secret intelligence, and I would argue very strongly that it's helped to keep us safe, it frustrates terrorist attacks and uncovers criminal plots and all the rest of it.
	If you want that as society, then you've got to give a license to your intelligence agencies to do these really rather unusual things.
	The problem is that we have to trust them, don't we?
	I mean, this is a broader topic, really, than this conversation allows, but we then have to trust the people in whom we give that power, that they will use it for our benefit, use it for our safety, and they won't abuse it.
	In other words, use it on us.
	Yes.
	President Reagan was very fond of an old Russian proverb, trust but verify.
	So, yes, we trust them, they regulate themselves, but they are also subject to the law.
	So there are specific laws on intelligence gathering, domestic laws, and they're subject to both judicial oversight from a very senior former retired judge and parliamentary oversight from a specially comprised committee of parliamentarians, the Intelligence and Security Committee.
	So they don't have a free hand.
	They're constrained in that way.
	And that's a good thing from a democratic point of view.
	It is a good thing, but of course, if it is happening in secrecy, if it's happening undercover, then the chances for somebody to object and seek judicial review or whatever would seem to be restricted.
	I mean, this is just something that's always fascinated me, that if you don't know a thing is happening, how can you do anything about it?
	No, you can't know.
	And if you did know, then it frustrates the whole business of the enterprise because the criminals and the terrorists simply dodge if they know exactly which sources and methods are being used to try and obtain their secrets.
	So you can't let the public in the front door and you can't tell people in general either you are or are not subject to some investigation.
	So what you have to do is society has to give that approval collectively and you do that through Parliament.
	We're a parliamentary democracy, so Parliament has to argue out what powers are we prepared to give the intelligence agencies, what oversight arrangements will we impose to make sure that we have confidence that nothing's going wrong.
	And it took Parliament, what, 18 months of very vigorous debate to come up with an act in 2016, the Investigatory Powers Act, to regulate some of the most sensitive kinds of intelligence gathering where GCHQ has access to bulk data,
	to large quantities of data flowing along fiber optic cables, for example, and uses very smart algorithms to select out information which may be relevant to investigations.
	And that's heavily regulated.
	You have to get a warrant to conduct this kind of activity.
	And so I think it's right because of the power of those techniques to have that balance, checks and balances, the oversight.
	If you look at a country like China, where the same technology is available and is used effectively to help control the population, we don't want to get down that road.
	Well, we don't, so we have to have safeguards, which I'm assuming you believe we have.
	Oh, yes, we certainly have.
	And they're surprisingly open.
	You know, you get reports from the commissioner, the retired senior judge, and the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which is a court, hears complaints, both from civil liberties organizations and from individuals, where there's a belief that they're overstepping the mark, the agencies are overstepping the mark.
	And all of that, the judgments they reach and the reasoning are all online.
	So we probably, I think, are world leading in having the combination of very powerful intelligence tools in the hands of very responsible intelligence agencies, but subject to some quite stringent checks and balances.
	Some would argue too stringent.
	But when you talk these days to members of the British intelligence community, they'd say, we'd rather be regulated in this way and know that the public supports our work, which really is important for keeping us safe and advancing the interests of the country.
	They'd rather have that than, if you like, the situation you might have found 500 years ago where none of this was subject to law.
	And this is terribly important.
	And I think you would find if you were to survey the public that most people would concur entirely with what you've just said.
	Of course, errors are made, aren't they?
	And I'm sure everybody who's spoken with you always refers to the case for the, you know, the operation against Saddam Hussein and the weapons of mass destruction and the amount of time that he may have had to launch said weapons if he indeed had them, which it turned out he didn't.
	So it's not an infallible thing, is it?
	No, I mean, if you take the run-up to the war in Iraq, of course, the intelligence, there were significant Problems with the intelligence.
	Some of it was straight wrong.
	We were taken in by a certain amount of deception, deliberate deception.
	But the background.
	By whom?
	Who was deceiving?
	The most famous example, codenamed Curveball, was an Iraqi engineer.
	The German intelligence service found this guy in a refugee camp.
	He had been a chemical engineer working for Saddam on biological warfare when Saddam did have these programs.
	We've got to remember that, of course, he did have chemical weapons.
	He did have biological weapons and he had ambitions for a nuclear program.
	The Curveball provided a lot of intelligence about the biological warfare programs.
	He exaggerated it.
	Some of it he made up.
	But of course, he was in a position to do that because he worked on the program in the past.
	After the war was over, journalists tracked him down, interviewed him, and he said, yes, I wanted the Americans to invade, so I provided this intelligence which would encourage them to invade.
	That's just an example of where, with the best will in the world, you can actually be deceived.
	But most of the problem came from the prior assumption which was made that Saddam still had what he used to have.
	And he'd taken a tactical decision to stop those programs.
	But he hadn't told very many people of that because he wanted his military still to believe he did have the weapons so he could intimidate Iran and intimidate his own population.
	Well, indeed, I mean, you know, throughout the complex bluff that he was trying to pull off.
	Which ultimately severely backfired.
	Yes, very severely.
	But that, you know, we should have, you know, with hindsight, you can easily see that we should have read his intentions rather better than we did.
	But it's not easy to see into the mind of a very close society.
	And, of course, he had a track record of deception himself, of trying to hoodwink foreign intelligence agencies, trying to find out what he was up to.
	So even information that showed he probably didn't have was treated as, well, that's probably deception.
	He probably wants us.
	It's a double bar.
	He wants us to believe that.
	But those sort of circumstances are, thankfully, very rare.
	You could contrast that with the Colonel Gaddafi's programs, advanced program to build a nuclear weapon, which was uncovered by British intelligence and back-channel diplomacy by the MI6 succeeded in persuading him that he couldn't get away with it.
	And he gave it up.
	Are you aware from your time of cases, I guess you must be, but are you aware of cases where there may have been very severe terror attacks on the UK mainland that were headed off because of intelligence gained by GCHQ?
	Oh, yes.
	I mean, I don't want to get into details of which agency contracted what.
	And the fight against terrorism has been spearheaded in intelligence terms by the Security Service.
	And they should get their credit, if you like, for their work in frustrating a number of terrorist serious attempts by terrorists.
	But they work in partnership with Scotland Yard, the Special Operations Department in Scotland Yard, and with the active support of the other agencies.
	So it's a team sport, and the UK is extremely good at it.
	There's one, what was called by the media the liquid bomb plot that uncovered the plot to blow up aeroplanes, US airlines, blow up a number of aircraft over mid-Atlantic that would have resulted in the deaths of more American citizens than 9-11.
	And that was a plot spearheaded from Britain, from terrorists here, incited and supported by facilitators overseas.
	Had that plot succeeded, then I think transatlantic relations would have been severely affected.
	It's the reason why we haven't been allowed to take liquids on aeroplanes, because what came out in court, they're all serving long sentences, was their plan was to take soft drink bottles, bore a little hole in the bottom, fill it with liquid explosives, seal the hole.
	Top was still intact, so you just pass through screening with no difficulty and explode it using a modified throwaway camera, one of those disposable cameras.
	Very simple.
	It would have worked.
	It would certainly have worked.
	And it would have killed a very large number of people.
	Now that plot was uncovered, including getting across the communications of the group.
	That plot was uncovered.
	Evidence was gathered.
	Covert recordings were taken, including of the suicide videos of the wannabe suicide bombers.
	And all of this was presented in court, and they were convicted and given long sentences.
	But without intelligence, that plot would have taken place.
	And thank goodness for the intelligence services in that case.
	Is it an urban myth?
	And just finally in this segment, and thank you for having this initial conversation about it all.
	We're going to get into, of course, the specifics of the book soon.
	But just to close out this segment, is it an urban myth or is it true that GCHQ was well ahead of the curve around 9-11 And GCHQ had detected things that it attempted to tell the Americans or did tell the Americans that perhaps they didn't act on with the alacrity they should.
	No, putting it that way, you know, that's urban myth.
	I think ground truth was pretty well established by the Commission of Inquiry that the United States Congress set up.
	And what they uncovered was, in a sense, what you would have expected, pieces of the jigsaw that were not put together.
	There were warnings.
	The US Director of Central Intelligence indeed was warning the White House that al-Qaeda was likely to conduct a major strike against the US interests, but it was thought more likely to take place overseas, like the embassy bombings that had taken place in East Africa, rather than in the United States itself.
	And there were little clues.
	The group that were trying to learn how to fly, but appeared to be more interested in knowing how to take off than how to land.
	And that was picked up in a jokey reference, but was not associated with other intelligence that showed that some people who should have rung alarm bells had crossed into the United States.
	So it's that putting together the picture.
	But of course, with hindsight, you can always put the picture together.
	What is very hard is to do it in advance.
	I mean, it's been described as trying to put together a complicated jigsaw puzzle where you haven't got the picture on the lid, and several puzzles have their pieces mixed up together.
	Now try and put it together.
	That's a wonderful way of putting it.
	It's genuinely hard.
	Let me put it this way.
	It's not a job that I think I would be equipped for.
	Rather notoriously, the Commission of Inquiry, which got to the bottom of all of this, used the phrase, I think, they failed to join the dots, which is a slightly misleading way of looking at it, because if you give me a pattern of dots, I can join them up to make virtually anything out of it.
	So there has to be some careful analysis to test out the hypothesis.
	Perhaps there's a group that's planning to hijack aeroplanes and use them as flying bombs.
	There was some precedent for that because a group in the Far East had also thought of conducting that kind of attack.
	But sadly, tragically, the pieces were not put together in time.
	From this, a lot of lessons were learned about, which we can talk about after the break, about how you go about analysis.
	Indeed.
	And you've got 10 steps in your book, How Spies Think, which I was going through today that I feel we need to be getting into in some detail.
	How did you get recruited if you did, or did you apply to join the service that you joined?
	I applied.
	The University Appointments Board after I'd been arguing with them for some time over possible things I might do.
	I had a research grant to doctorate, do doctoral research, but I decided in the end that I'd better get a job and I wanted to work in the public service.
	I didn't want to go into the private sector.
	Right, you were at Cambridge, we have to say.
	Yeah.
	And eventually they said, well, there are always these people.
	You could try them.
	But bear in mind that GCHQ was not avowed as an intelligence agency.
	It had a cover story of research into communications.
	The way in was through a ferocious examination, much the hardest exam I've ever taken in my life, which included being handed a sheet of five-figure cipher and paper and some pencils and said, can you make anything of this?
	So it was that sort of examination.
	That's very Bletchley Park.
	Did you have an idea?
	I mean, look, not to put too fine a point on it, Cambridge, of course, from all sides, has a long and in some cases, distinguished record in secret service, and in a few cases, not so distinguished records in secret service on the other side.
	But did you have a clue as to what you were really applying for?
	In very general terms, yes.
	But it was extremely general and quite what the boundaries of Signals Intelligence were.
	I'd never heard of Bletchley Park.
	I discovered when I became director, and it was in the newspapers, my aunt popped up in Glasgow and said, I can now tell you where I spent the war.
	Wow.
	She'd studied German at Glasgow University and had immediately been conscripted into the Wrens.
	She was a Wren officer.
	And she spent her war in Bletchley Park.
	And she showed me proudly her certificate that they were all given at the end of the war, thanking them for all their efforts.
	But they'd also drummed into them.
	You will not talk to anyone ever about what you did.
	So without even knowing it, you were following a family tradition.
	That's one way of putting it.
	A noble family tradition.
	Okay, the book.
	What gave you the idea of writing a book, How Spies Think?
	You could have written a book about my life and times, as far as you'd be allowed to, at GCHQ, or the global security situation as analyzed by a man with your unique experience, but you wrote this book, How Spies Think.
	Well, it's my third book, and the first book, Securing the State, was really about how in a liberal democracy do you balance the interests of security against freedom and values such as privacy.
	The second book was Actually, directly about the ethics of intelligence called principled spying.
	Can you have principled spying or does it have to be a free-for-all?
	And that sort of led naturally on to this third book.
	But it was during the Brexit referendum and then the 2016 US presidential election and watching the way that social media was covering containing information about these events that was emotionally manipulative, sometimes contradictory, sometimes clearly false.
	Well, some information, a lot of mis and disinformation.
	Yes.
	And I was getting quite angry at this, which is associated with the sort of conspiracy stories that flourish on social media.
	And I thought this is a trend which is truly dangerous for democracy.
	And indeed, there are nations like Russia that have taken advantage of this to try and interfere with the democratic process.
	Do you think Putin is interfering?
	Do you think Russia is interfering with the political situation that we find ourselves in the UK now?
	I don't know the answer to that, and I'm not sure anyone really knows the answer to that.
	But given the past few years' track record, would it be a fair assumption to think that they might be?
	I think they would certainly be following the situation in major nations, Germany, France, United Kingdom, United States, other nations, very closely.
	They can see the cracks in our society.
	They can see the divisions which there are.
	And it's using social media, using the power that the internet gives to send, to target messages.
	You can widen those divisions.
	And this is what they were doing in the United States in 2016 on issues like gun control or racial justice.
	They were feeding information, incendiary information, to both sides of the argument to try and widen the debate and make it more hostile.
	And in that way, they directly are subverting democracy.
	It looks as if in the US case, their initial objective was to prevent Hillary Clinton becoming president by trying to persuade the Bernie Sanders voters not to turn out to vote for her and by starting all sorts of absurd rumors and scandals about her and her campaign and of course hacking into her campaign, stealing emails, releasing them.
	And then it looks as if they switched more to directly backing the Trump campaign when they saw that he had a reasonable prospect of winning the election.
	And this included fake websites, propaganda of all sorts, even organizing political rallies using Russians posing as Americans, which American supporters would turn up to, not knowing that the whole thing was staged by a foreign power.
	All of this has been documented.
	It's all now published.
	There have been suspicions as to how far in the Brexit referendum there was interference, because getting the United Kingdom to leave the European Union would be a major victory for Russia.
	They would see huge advantage in that.
	It weakens the European Union, and in their eyes, it would certainly have weakened the United Kingdom.
	I say in their eyes because I don't want to get into domestic controversy about whether it was a good thing or not.
	It's happened and we've got to make the best of it.
	But these are examples of where it's in the very nature of social media, the business model of the Internet, if you like, that it makes this sort of interference much easier than it would ever have been possible in the pre-internet days.
	So I thought, well, is it what you do about this?
	And the thought process was basically the disciplined way in which intelligence analysts go about examining data, then trying to explain it, the way in which they don't rush to judgments about what will happen next.
	They work it out, they model it very carefully.
	These actually gave us some very good clues as to how we should approach decision-making in this internet age.
	And the more I thought about it, the more I thought that actually these methods, if you like house-weis think these methods are applicable to all of us when we have big decisions to take.
	Or indeed, if we're reading things on social media, that was one great impression I got from the entire book, which I skimmed through quickly today.
	But, you know, lesson one, for example, is situational awareness.
	And you say our knowledge of the world is always fragmentary and incomplete and is sometimes wrong, as we've discussed.
	If you bear that in mind, then you're going to be a little cautious on the stances and stands that you take.
	Lesson two, explanation.
	Facts need to be explained.
	And the dangers of letting, as you say in the book, machines do that kind of intelligence crunching.
	People have to use their grey matter for those things.
	So before you get into the business of spying and espionage, you have to first of all assess where you are.
	Yes, and there are lots of traps for the unwary.
	If you're not careful subconsciously, unconsciously, you go looking for information, for evidence, which will support what it is you're trying to prove.
	And this is very Dangerous.
	I sometimes used to joke that some of the evidence-based policy of government was government saying we've got the policy, you go and find some evidence to support it.
	That's not how you establish objective facts.
	So you've got to be careful you don't skew the whole thing by looking in the wrong place or just piling up information in favor of your favoured theory.
	Now, because you but you're using and you're employing people who are human beings, everybody, even those who say they have no particular political affiliations or feelings, everybody does to some extent.
	We all have core values if we have an education, if we think about the world.
	So is it possible to do those things you've just been talking about when you're employing human beings?
	Yes, it is.
	When you've got a decision to take, you have to hold in your mind two different kinds of thinking.
	And at some point, you have to bring them together.
	One is the rational, dispassionate analysis of what's going on, the facts on the ground, your explanation for them.
	It's all measured, it's impartial.
	It's the sort of analysis that the SAGE group of scientists and doctors provide on COVID.
	But on the other side, you've got why were you wanting to take a decision in the first place?
	What do you want to achieve?
	And that's passionate.
	That's where you are bringing out why it is you want to achieve some change, you want to take a decision, or maybe it's something you fear and you hope the decision will help avoid the worst happening.
	And the decisions are taken in government, in the end, by the politicians.
	They have the democratic mandate to take those decisions.
	They've got big ambitions.
	They want to do the best for the country.
	But on the other side of the brain is the measured analysis saying it's going to take a year to do this.
	It's going to take a lot of resources.
	We haven't got the trained people to do it.
	So somehow you've got to bring the two together.
	If it goes wrong, then the most likely thing to happen is what I call magical thinking.
	You make the bold announcement of some new policy or initiative, but you haven't done the hard work of rational analysis to work out how much is it going to cost, are the people there to do it, how long is it going to take?
	And you're then disappointed because it doesn't actually happen the way it was supposed to.
	So that's, and that happens all over.
	You know, it's so easy to fall into that trap.
	On the other hand, you do need the passion.
	You do need to have some ambition.
	You want to achieve something.
	Just think about you decide you want to move out of the city center and move to somewhere closer to countryside.
	And that's a sort of passionate, that's a values-laden ambition that you have to better your way of life.
	But then you've got all the rational analysis of how much can I afford to spend?
	What are property prices in different areas?
	You could be deceived because the estate agents may not come entirely clean about why is this house significantly cheaper than the other houses.
	And indeed, your view of the bucolic rural idyll may not be correct.
	Well, that's right.
	Have you been there on a hot day to smell it?
	Is it underneath the new flight path for the nearby?
	Or is it about to be bulldozed by HS2, indeed?
	Yeah.
	So you need both.
	You need to be clear.
	And one of the lessons in the book is, I put it this way, it's our own demons that are most likely to mislead us.
	There is deception by other people, but it's mostly our own.
	We don't know our own minds well enough.
	We haven't sort of been clear enough about why do we want to make this move or take this decision.
	And subconsciously, perhaps we've slanted the evidence and our understanding of the evidence to support what we wanted to do.
	And that way, of course, lies potentially heartbreak.
	The book begins with a discussion of the Falklands War and a word that I haven't heard used in a long time, junter, the government, the military government of Argentina at the time who decided to walk into the Falklands when they had no right to and our decision to do what we did, send a task force and deal with the problem, which, again, we did.
	Are memories of that period still fresh in your mind now?
	They're very fresh.
	It was a long time ago now.
	I was the principal private secretary to John Knott, the Defense Secretary, and we were in the House of Commons in John's room working on an important speech when a runner came down from Whitehall with a locked pouch.
	In the pouch were three intercepts that GCHQ had achieved and decrypted of Argentine naval communications.
	And they showed there'd been a covert beach reconnaissance that a task force, an invasion fleet, had already set sail with a VIP on board.
	You put them together and there was really only one conclusion.
	The invasion fleet had already sailed.
	That was the Tuesday.
	So by the end of the week, they would have arrived on the Falklands and there was nothing on the Falklands to stop them.
	And submarines had been sent to the South Atlantic, but they hadn't arrived yet.
	The lead time to reinforce is very long.
	So we looked at each other and decided the Prime Minister must be told at once.
	So we rushed down the corridor and burst in on her and said, you know, Prime Minister, you better see this.
	And Margaret Thatcher was very good, she's very calm, and she looked up and said, This is very serious, isn't it?
	To which the only answer is, Yes, Prime Minister, said without a smile.
	And then started that extraordinary meeting in her room in the House of Commons as people began to arrive, including the first sea lord in his full uniform, because he'd been presenting the prizes somewhere.
	He finally arrived.
	And that's when the task force, the idea of sending a task force to the South Atlantic to recapture the islands, was born.
	And those three intercepts, it didn't stop the invasion.
	The government was powerless to stop the invasion.
	But it probably saved Margaret Thatcher's premiership, because if she'd woken up on the Saturday morning, along with everyone else, to discover they were on the island, the reaction, I think, from her own party would have been ferocious, asleep on the job.
	Why didn't you know this?
	David, I want to ask you one more.
	Sorry.
	You were saying?
	I was just going to say that as it was, she could stand up on the Saturday and announce the task force was already being assembled.
	I will not forget telephoning the Ministry of Defence, the duty commander, from her room to relay the instruction, you know, ready the fleet for sea.
	Wow.
	So that's why you remember these things.
	I've got one more thing to ask you about that.
	In just a moment, we have to take some commercials here.
	Sir David Omond is here, the man who used to run GCHQ.
	He has a new book out about the way that spies think and about the, as you can hear, the whole process of intelligence gathering and intelligence usage.
	So David, just to finish off this segment about the Falklands War, because my working life began then, so I have vivid recollections of the whole period and how unusual, how I'd never experienced anything like it.
	There was one memorable occasion that you will recall in the whole nation, I think anybody who was around at that time will recall.
	Mrs. Thatcher went on national television on a program called Nationwide to be questioned by viewers.
	And one particular woman, I think she was in Bristol, kept on hammering home a point about the sinking of the Argentine warship, the Belgrano.
	You know, things became very bad.
	Of course, they sank the Sagalahad with terrible consequences.
	We sank the Belgrano.
	And that was when the whole thing was coming to a head, clearly.
	But this woman, I've forgotten her name, pressed Margaret Thatcher and was basically trying to get her to admit that the Belgrano didn't have to be sunk because it was heading away.
	And the Prime Minister turned to the camera and said, you have to appreciate that I have intelligence and had intelligence at that time, which I cannot divulge to you, but that is why I made my decision.
	You will have to accept that.
	Would she have been, would Mrs. Thatcher have been apprised of information that GCHQ had supplied that bolstered that decision to sink the Belgrano?
	Yes, and the story is now officially out in the open.
	Professor John Ferris has just published last week the authorized history of GCHQ, in which he gives a really detailed account of this.
	But GCHQ intercepted a battle order for essentially setting in train an attack on the Royal Navy's task force.
	And it was a pincer movement by one group towards the north and one group to the south.
	The north led by the carrier, the Argentine carrier, the one to the south led by the Belgrano with accompanying warships.
	And so this was, as it were, a clear sign that the Argentine junta had decided to move from, as it were, diplomacy into straightforward armed conflict.
	And the rules of engagement were changed and the Belgrana, as we know, was sunk.
	Which way it was pointing at the time is completely irrelevant.
	It was a legitimate act of war.
	The problem came when John Knott, who rightly felt that Parliament must be told at once, we rushed down to the House of Commons and I was still scribbling out the bits of the statement as we were driving to the House of Commons in the official car.
	And the problem we had was we couldn't admit to having this intelligence because that would have alerted the Argentine junta to the fact that high-level signals were being read.
	But we had to give the impression, the correct impression to the House of Commons that this was an offensive act by the Argentine junta, to which we were responding as we are entitled to under international law, under military law.
	So the phrase was hit on that the Belgrano was closing on elements of the task force.
	And that was intended to convey correctly the hostile intent, but without revealing that we were reading the Argentine messages.
	The problem was, and that was fine at the time, the problem was afterwards, for reasons I don't really understand, the government was not prepared to stand up and simply say, well, we took the right decision at the right time, but we couldn't explain it fully at the time.
	We can now.
	And so it was many, many years later, when official history of the Falklands campaign was written by Professor Laurie Friedman, that the true, this full story came out.
	And it's now been repeated by Professor Ferris in his history of GCHQ.
	The conspiracy theories swirled around.
	It was sunk to scupper the peace process because it was heading away rather than towards, which was, of course, not known at London.
	London at the time had no idea which way it was heading and it was irrelevant anyway because ships can turn around.
	The order to attack stood.
	It's just they had decided that that was not the afternoon they were going to do it for operational reasons.
	Can you imagine all of that happening now when there would be enormous background chatter on social media and in other places where everybody's connected, where news will be coming out of Buenos Aires, it will be coming out of the Falkland Islands, it will be coming out of this country, the U.S., everywhere.
	It would make it all more difficult.
	And at the end of the, or towards the end of the book, you start to talk about security and intelligence in a digital era.
	And in lesson 10 of your 10 lessons, you have subversion and sedition are now digital, which indeed they are.
	That's right.
	And it's sometimes called the grey zone, that you have continuous conflict.
	It's all below the threshold of armed conflict.
	And it's trying to position yourself to get more advantage for your nation rather than another nation or disrupt somebody's activities, sway an election, all of that, but done digitally.
	And we've got to wake up and you can protect yourself against this.
	And the United States appears to have done this quite successfully, starting with the midterm elections and now in the most recent presidential election, to get into cyberspace themselves and make sure that the incoming social media posts, the fake news and so on, get stopped.
	The internet companies have now started to police a lot of the material that passes through their networks and to remove it.
	And certainly we need that on terrorism, we need it on child abuse images and so on.
	And we need a little more of that on fake news itself, but not to the point where you start to disturb freedom of speech or satirists can't operate because somebody pulls the plug on their material.
	We're a free society.
	We have freedom of speech.
	But not when it's harming other people.
	And finally, in 2020, 2021 of the years that succeed us, we're about to have a new president, Biden, in the U.S., many things may change.
	But the potential threat or the potential situation with ourselves vis-à-vis China is something that we can't ignore.
	How, with our resources, say here in the United Kingdom, how are we going to be able to keep effective tabs on China when they have resources that are bound to be much more massive, much more comprehensive than we would ever be able to afford, especially now?
	Well, we have to make the best of what we have.
	And we have world-class intelligence services.
	We've got a world-class diplomatic service.
	So you've got to continue to invest in those.
	You've got to be quite selective about what it is you decide to do with these capabilities.
	Our armed forces are pretty stretched, but they're of very high quality.
	We've got first-class quality special forces, for example.
	But again, what we can actually do is limited.
	And so we have to do things not in isolation.
	We've got to do it with allies and partners.
	In that way, you've got this multiplier effect.
	NATO has done that very successfully over the Cold War period and now into the new world of the grey zone.
	The United States will remain our principal ally, but we have Australia and Canada and New Zealand very closely bound in with us.
	And that's a source of strength.
	And finally, we really must deepen our bilateral relationships with our European partners.
	We may no longer be part of the European Union, but national security is not a European Union responsibility.
	It's a national responsibility.
	So we've got to work with the principal countries, our principal partners in Europe, ever more closely.
	If we do that, then we have the mass to stand up when necessary to even the largest country.
	Even though there are friends, we are, of course, leaving the European Union at the end of this year, which will have, we are told, many consequences, and it's all still being planned out at this moment, which is faintly worrying, but we tend to muddle through things, don't we?
	Will we be spying on to a greater extent?
	Will we be keeping an eye on eavesdropping on our European neighbours more, do you think, since we won't be bound up with them in the EU?
	That's one of those questions you just don't answer.
	The answer is, of course, no, we won't be doing that.
	But we will reserve the right, and we would always reserve the right as a sovereign nation to say if our interests turned out unexpectedly to be severely prejudiced by another country, we would have to defend ourselves.
	It's natural self-defense.
	President Obama gave the same answer in the directive he gave the American intelligence services, which was you're not allowed to spy on foreign-friendly foreign leaders, comma, unless there's an overriding national security interest in doing so.
	And that's the nature of the world we're in.
	But we really have to regard ourselves still, we're part of Europe.
	We may not be in the political European Union, but we're geographically, we're part of Europe.
	We're part of NATO.
	These are our partners, and we've got to maintain our relationships with them.
	Right.
	So we have to be friendly, but there always has to be just a little bit of a spine of slight suspicion there with everybody.
	No, I wouldn't put it that way.
	I mean, we are excited.
	No, I think, you know, they have to respect us as a sovereign nation, and we have to respect Them as sovereign nations.
	We have so much in common in a world which is quite hostile to liberal democracies that this will bind us together.
	I've got no qualms, no problems.
	I think our intelligence relationships with France and Germany and the Netherlands and Sweden and so on, those will go on being extremely strong.
	We will see what the future holds.
	Last question, and I could talk with you for another hour, but sadly this one is coming to an end, David.
	When you joined GCHQ and in those early years, into the 70s and towards the 80s, when life was more secretive, perhaps than it is now, and we didn't know the name of the person who ran MI5 and we didn't quite understand entirely what GCHQ was there to do, when people asked you in those early days what you did for a living, and you must have been asked the question a zillion times, what would you reply?
	Well, in those days, the reply was, I'm a civil servant, which is truthful because the civilians working at GCHQ are civil servants.
	So you start by saying, I'm a civil servant.
	Oh, where?
	And then you eventually say, well, I work in Cheltenham.
	Oh, where's, you know?
	And then, well, it's part of the Foreign Office.
	And by then, you hope you've been sufficiently boring to have turned off the direction.
	Life became a little easier when I moved from GCHQ to the Ministry of Defence.
	And then you could say, I work in the Ministry of Defence.
	I could tell you nothing.
	And I can tell you nothing, absolutely.
	But at least you could say you worked there.
	And in all the years, you know, looking back on it now, is there one thing that you could tell me about that you are proudest of that you achieved?
	It's no, it's not about individuals.
	It's not about what you achieved.
	I'm very proud of things that the team achieved.
	Sometimes I was a junior member of the team and I basked in the glory of the team.
	Sometimes I was leading the team later on in my career.
	The United Kingdom has a world-leading counter-terrorism strategy we've had since just after 9-11, which I led that effort as the security and intelligence coordinator in the Cabinet Office.
	And that strategy called Contest is still in force all those years later because it's robustly built and it helps keep us safe.
	And you think, well, that was a good piece of work, but it was a team effort.
	Thank you very much for speaking with me.
	I have learned a lot both by looking at your book, How Spies Think, 10 Lessons in Intelligence by Sir David Omond, and also in this conversation.
	Thank you for allowing me to range over so many things, David.
	Many, many thanks.
	It's been a pleasure.
	Sir David Omond, what a fascinating conversation about things that are deeply, in their nature, secret.
	I hope you enjoyed that.
	And his book is called How Spies Think, 10 Lessons in Intelligence.
	David Omond, Sir David Omond, was the guest on this edition of The Unexplained.
	More great guests in the pipeline as we come up to the end of this year.
	And the 500th edition of The Unexplained coming soon, too, with a very special guest.
	More about that soon.
	So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
	I am in London.
	This has been The Unexplained Online.
	And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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