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British Intelligence - Inrocuction

Although publicly available information is helpful for background purposes, usually the best way to find out about the threat that some organisations and individuals pose is to obtain secret intelligence about their activities. Naturally, people who threaten national security, such as terrorists or spies, are aware that their activities may attract attention and they will do what they can to prevent detecting. Equally, agencies try to gather intelligence without targets realising they are under investigation. This is not just to avoid compromising investigations, but also to protect methods so that they can be used again in the future. Much of the skill of intelligence work lies in finding the right blend of techniques to meet the requirements of an investigation.

The national intelligence machinery has the three Intelligence and Security Agencies, SIS, GCHQ and MI5 at its heart, with important work also carried out by Defence Intelligence and the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre. The machinery at the center of the government plays an important function. These include the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), supported by the Joint Intelligence Organisation (JIO), which assesses raw intelligence gathered by the agencies and presents it to ministers to enable effective policy making, while the strategic management of intelligence policy and the government’s international security agenda is governed by the National Security Advisor who heads the Secretariat for the National Security Council (NSC).

Given that the head of the government enjoys a full security clearance, a former spy who served a staggering 38 years in the intelligence service, suggested it would be somewhat risky to let the Labour have the keys to No. 10. Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, labelled Jeremy Corbyn a threat to national security insisting he is far from being fit to occupy 10 Downing Street.

Writing in the Mail on Sunday 24 NOvember 2019, he said that the Labour leader should never be allowed to access sensitive classified information given his past political background. “Do not even think of taking the risk of handing this politician the keys to No 10", the former long-serving spy warned.

“Corbyn, [Andrew] Murray [a former member of the Communist party] and [Seumas] Milne [who supports the Palestinian cause] have at times each denigrated their own country and embraced the interests of its enemies and opponents [They] are compromised by their past. The political company they have kept has been authoritatively documented", Dearlove noted. He also took a swipe at the Labour leader for “once preferring East Germany’s political and economic model of government".

Sir Richard stressed that none of the aforementioned figures would “ever have been allowed to work in our national security agencies because they would have been disqualified” due to a failure to pass their security vetting. “As a democratically elected leader he would bypass the vetting procedures. Corbyn as prime minister, together with his current advisers, could be a present danger to our country...", Dearlove stressed, before summing up: "When vital national security interests are at stake, the political facts of his past cannot be airbrushed out. Politicians should have to live with their political record, and Corbyn’s, whatever political views he may claim to hold today, rules him out as someone suitable to be our prime minister".