Francesco Subiaco interviews Sir David Omand<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The Great Game of espionage is no longer played solely in embassies, diplomatic drawing rooms, or the shadows of imperial capitals. Today, it unfolds through algorithms, satellites, hybrid warfare, and the invisible frontiers of cyberspace. Yet beneath the technological transformation of espionage, the ancient riddle of power endures: how to discern an adversary\u2019s intentions without becoming captive to one’s own illusions. In John le Carr\u00e9\u2019s novels, the truth almost always arrives in disguise, concealed among half-confessions, calculated silences, and negotiable loyalties. For a spy, the greatest danger is not merely believing the enemy\u2019s lies, but coming to believe one’s own.<\/p>\n From Kipling to Graham Greene, literature has portrayed espionage as a theatre of uncertain identities and moral compromises. Reality is less romantic: incomplete reports, ambiguous clues, and decisions made in the dark.<\/p>\n Sir David Omand<\/p><\/div>\n Sir David Omand<\/strong> knows this world from the inside. A former Director<\/a> of the Government Communications Headquarters – <\/strong>GCHQ<\/a>, the British intelligence, security, and cyber agency; and Coordinator of Intelligence and Security<\/strong>, the UK’s top national security and intelligence coordination role led by the National Security Adviser (NSA)<\/strong>, supported by the Cabinet Office’s National Security Secretariat (NSS)<\/strong> and the Joint Intelligence Organisation (JIO).<\/strong> \u00a0He belongs to that rare breed of men who have witnessed history from behind the scenes, where government decisions intersect with information destined to remain classified for decades. His experience spans the end of the Cold War, September 11, and the return of great-power rivalry.<\/p>\n \u00a0Professor<\/strong>\u00a0Omand<\/strong> has honored the Italian Institute of Strategic Studies \u201cNiccol\u00f2 Machiavelli\u201d by offering his unique intellectual contribution and support as Member<\/a> of the International Advisory Council<\/strong>, since the constitution of our think tank, in 2010. His distinguished curricula and exceptional determination in defending democratic values during his unique career, have incredibly enhanced the ethics, culture and ideals of our organization.<\/p>\n In his books, from How Spies Think<\/a> to How to Survive a Crisis<\/a>, intelligence becomes a discipline of uncertainty: distinguishing truth from plausibility, signal from noise, intentions from appearances. Gathering secrets is not enough; they must be interpreted without yielding to the most reassuring explanations. The finest intelligence analyst knows to distrust conclusions that align too neatly with the wishes of those in power.<\/p>\n You have served as Director of GCHQ and as the UK Government\u2019s Security and Intelligence Coordinator. What did those experiences teach you about the world of intelligence? And, to borrow the title of one of your best seller books, how do spies really think?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Banner MI5 MI6 and GCHQ<\/p><\/div>\n I gave my book \u201cHow Spies Think\u201d the subtitle \u201810 lessons in intelligence\u2019<\/em> because I wanted to share at least some of what I had learned \u2013 not just from within the world of secret intelligence but from close contact with that world as a policy maker and customer for intelligence assessments. The first lesson to learn about intelligence is that our knowledge of the world is always fragmentary and incomplete, and is sometimes wrong. That applies whether we are talking about the huge amount of open-source information available these days or about the much smaller set of information obtained from deeply secret sources. These caveats about intelligence have important policy implications. You cannot rely on always having the reliable picture of what is going on that, ideally, you would want before important decisions are taken. Do not therefore base security policy on the assumption that you will always have advance warning from secret intelligence in time to take action to neutralise a threat.<\/p>\n How should intelligence information be collected, assessed, and presented to policymakers to prevent them from being misled or deceived by adversaries?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>In my book I summarise the approach with the acronym SEES<\/strong>: S<\/strong>ituational awareness, E<\/strong>xplanation, E<\/strong>stimation and S<\/strong>trategic notice. These are the types of information most useful to the policy maker or operational commander. The first type, situational awareness, is answering questions about what is going on: what, where and when. Being careful to test reliability of sources and watching out for deliberate deception in the sign and signals we have picked up. Explanation of why we believe we are seeing this situation is crucial. And hard, especially if we are trying to attribute actions where an adversary wants their hand to be hidden and is denying responsibility. That is a major problem today, both with Russian grey zone sabotages and other covert operations and with criminal cyber-attacks. Different explanations of events are likely to lead to different estimates over how matters may unfold and in the modelling of how an adversary may respond to any actions we take in response. Finally, I think it is important that policy makers are given what I call strategic notice of emerging longer-term developments and threats at the earliest possible opportunity, when a trend becomes apparent or there are technological developments forecast that may generate future threats. Such strategic notice is usually of long-term developments and therefore more likely to come from careful studies of open sources than from any particular type of secret intelligence.<\/p>\n I am impressed by the emphasis you give to this innovative explanatory approach to the intelligence cycle. Can you explain this process with a case study?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n I should have added that in most cases explanation should emerge from all-source assessment of all the available information, including the historical record of the groups and nations that may be involved, rather than analysis of a single source of reporting. An example from the UK may help. In 2018, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC<\/a>) in London concluded that it was a covert assassination operation by Russian military intelligence officers<\/a>, that was responsible for the use of the banned nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury in an attack on the former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal<\/strong> and his daughter. The attack resulted in the death of a British citizen. That attribution followed a careful all-source JIC assessment that ended up ruling out all the possible alternative explanations, including many outrageous suggestions made by the Russian authorities to try to muddy the waters. The Prime Minister acted on the JIC attribution and expelled 23 Russian diplomats, followed by mass expulsions by 20 other countries who accepted the British attribution. So, the consequences of explanation can be significant. As of course would be the consequences of getting it wrong. For example, when we interpreted Saddam Hussein\u2019s obstruction of international WMD inspectors (weapons of mass destruction) as further evidence of his trying to hide prohibited wmd activities.<\/p>\n Book Cover How Spies Think<\/p><\/div>\n In \u201cHow Spies Think\u201d, you emphasize that a central problem of intelligence is not simply gathering information, but interpreting them. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n I would argue that interpretation is central to making sense of all our interactions with the world. After all, we do not (yet) have telepathic powers. We can only know about the world through information our brain processes after it has come to us through one or more of our senses. And we have plenty of evidence from careful psychological experiments over the last century that should persuade us that there are times when our senses can deceive us. In the case of well-known optical illusions, the data we have from the patterns of light reflected from the page, are interpreted by the brain as representing something they are not. The data, in that case the frequency and intensity of the light waves reflected off the image, is what it is. But its interpretation by our brain is ambiguous. I use the analogy of prosecution and defence lawyers seeking to convince a jury of their alternative narratives over the interpretation of the forensic evidence in a criminal case. For example, a young man is before the Court, with the prosecution alleging he threw an incendiary bottle (Molotov cocktail) during a demonstration on the basis that his fingerprints are on the fragments of the bottle. There is no dispute that these are his fingerprints. But the defence explains this by claiming that the bottle was in the recycling bin outside his home and was snatched up by the mob as they passed. The lesson is that the analyst must formulate alternative explanations and test them carefully. Usually, it is best to put forward the explanation that you believe is less inconsistent with the available evidence \u2013 remembering if you try hard enough you can always find some \u201cevidence\u201d apparently supporting even outrageous ideas. You have also to look for disconfirming data. But the preferred explanation is always of the nature of a provisional hypothesis and we have to be prepared to check our thinking if new information arrives.<\/p>\n Going back to your description of intelligence as \u201cincomplete, fragmentary and sometimes wrong\u201d, if it cannot always be relied upon, how then would you describe the value of intelligence<\/em><\/strong>?\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n There is a case to be made that the remarkable evolutionary advances our species has developed in its human intelligence, is because they delivered exceptional value in the changing environments in which humans have had to survive. Intelligence must have improved the quality of our ancestors\u2019 decisions on where to find food and water, how to evade the many predators, all the threats and hazards they would have encountered. I sum that up today by saying that the purpose of intelligence is still to help us make sounder decisions by reducing our ignorance of what we face. Even if sometimes it fails us, it still confers over time an overall advantage. Imagine a fund manager in the financial district. On any one day they may have done some bad trades. But if they are any good, over time they deliver alpha returns. Intelligence used sensibly and systematically has survival value. The purpose of secret <\/em>intelligence of course is to help deliver that value in respect of the information that our adversaries, those who mean us harm, really do not want us to have, and may go to very violent lengths to prevent us acquiring.<\/p>\n Are there dangers when governments demand political loyalty from the Intelligence Community, as President Trump seems to be doing?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n It is an ever-present danger in circumstances where governments do not respect the right of professionals to arrive at their own expert judgments, whether in military, medical, engineering or intelligence analysis, and to submit them without fear. Of course, in the end governments do not have to follow expert\u2019s opinion, but they should recognise an obligation to consider it carefully and to be prepared to explain the reasons for not following it. In the democracies, that is what we would expect. Not so in the autocracies. That seems to have been a real problem with the assessments provided to President Putin before he launched his attack on Ukraine. It is difficult to imagine that the FSB and SVR did not understand that the Ukrainian people would resist Russian aggression, and that President Zelensky would not flee Kiev and abdicate at the first signs of the Russian attack on Kiev and thus leave the road open to a Russian appointed leader.<\/p>\n So, there are dangers in governments demanding political loyalty from their intelligence chiefs, as President Trump seems to require?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The US President has the legal authority to appoint senior officials in the administration, subject to the usual Senate confirmation rules, and that includes the intelligence agencies. But it was highly unusual, as President Trump did, to dismiss very senior intelligence, security and military leaders simply because they were appointed by the previous administration. That happened last year to the Director of NSA and Commander of Cyber Command, and his Deputy Director of NSA, last year, representing both a great loss of expertise to the 5-eyes sigint relationship as well as to US security itself at a time of growing danger not least from Chinese cyberattacks.<\/p>\n President Trump and DNI Tulsi Gabbard<\/p><\/div>\n Is that a risk you highlighted in your 10 lessons in intelligence?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Yes, if national leaders are seen to denigrate the professional advice they are given, and assert against the facts their own firm beliefs about possible threats, that is bound to create the risk of encouraging biased assessments. And that risk is bound to increase if intelligence officers come to feel their actual livelihoods may depend upon pleasing their masters by echoing their views.\u00a0 But it is important to recognise that the risk of bias in intelligence assessments is not just from analysts consciously bending to the expectations of policymakers, which is historically rare.<\/p>\n What other sources of bias are you referring to?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>The final \u201clesson in intelligence\u201d in my book is that it is our own<\/em><\/strong> demons that are most likely to mislead us. The unconscious<\/em> biases that we all suffer from \u2013 and I mean all of us. Confirmation bias when we favour, and readily recall, information that supports our existing beliefs while ignoring or dismissing evidence that contradicts them. Anchoring bias when we <\/strong>rely too much on the first piece of information we receive. Perseveration, when we stick to our original line of thinking even in the face of contrary evidence. And many others. Since these are unconscious biases we need others to point out when we are suffering from them. Which is why I call intelligence analysis a team sport.<\/p>\n Such biases seem to have been a factor at the time of the US decision to topple Saddam Hussein in Iraq. After the mistakes made in assessing intelligence over WMD in Iraq, how much does the West still suffer from this tendency? <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Important lessons were learned, and applied, after the independent UK inquiries into what went wrong with the Iraq WMD assessments. Those inquiries had full access to all the intelligence and policy files and took extensive evidence from those involved, myself included.\u00a0 One result was a decision to professionalise the craft of intelligence assessment, making it a government specialist group (like economists and statisticians), providing more intensive training in a UK Cabinet Office led College of Analysis, facilitating the interchange of analysts to gain experience of the range of intelligence community work, and increasing the status of analysts within the intelligence community are some of one of the changes made. But the events of 2002\/2003 in Iraq cast a long shadow. US and UK intelligence correctly assessed the intentions of President Putin in 2022 to use military force to try to overthrow the government in Ukraine, and conduct a false flag operation to provide an immediate excuse. We issued a warning. But leaders of some of our major partners pushed back on that assessment.<\/strong> They could not bring themselves to believe Putin had been lying to them when he had recently assured their leaders he had no such intention.<\/p>\n When do you see the clearest danger that intelligence may be interpreted retrospectively in order to validate an established political line?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n A warning sign is when leaders exhibit hubris about their prowess in statecraft. That dogmatism often plays a part in underestimating serious risks. Driven by the unconscious influence of a settled conviction on the part of leaders that their policies simply rule out disaster. That leads in turn to planning being based on the assumption that bad outcomes will not happen because<\/em> the policy being followed removes the risk. Always beware when reassured \u201cthat can\u2019t happen because we have policies to ensure it cannot happen\u201d. Or when reassured, after pointing out historical instances of things going wrong, that \u201cThis time it is different\u201d. Unlikely events do sometimes happen. A tragic example was the Israeli intelligence failure over the brutal Hamas attack on 7 October 2023.<\/strong><\/p>\n HaMossad leModi’in uleTafkidim Meyuchadim MOSSAD<\/p><\/div>\n Before the attack, according to Israeli media, there were Israeli military intelligence sightings of Hamas fighters training and conducting reconnaissance, and Israel appears to have even obtained a Hamas attack plan. But Ministers insisted that Hamas had neither capability nor intent to carry out a major attack. As a result, no warning of the likelihood of an attack was issued, and as a result no IDF operational contingency plan was created, leaving a long gap before an effective military response arrived.<\/p>\n Shab\u00e0k – Shin Bet<\/p><\/div>\n Behind that flawed judgment probably lies a fatal <\/strong>policy<\/strong><\/em> failure at Israeli Cabinet level to recognise and plan for major risks in their political strategy.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Y<\/em><\/strong>ou have written that understanding President Putin\u2019s Russia requires an analytical effort comparable to that once devoted to the Soviet Union.\u00a0 Do we continue to project onto Russia an ideological framework that does not correspond to its own?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n We might start by thinking about how Russia, like the Soviet Union when it existed, conceives of the primary rationale for their intelligence agencies. Western agencies see their primary purpose as to provide intelligence to meet the requirements placed on them by their customers, in defence, foreign affairs domestic security so on. I spent seven years as a member of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee that every week delivers to the highest levels of government strategic assessments on developments of concern. The intelligence chiefs are present at the National Security Council<\/a> when Ministers discuss the implications of these assessments. Russian agencies on the other hand, like their Soviet counterparts before them, see their purpose as pursuing on behalf of the State a secret form of political struggle. Their job is to take \u201cactive measures<\/strong>\u201d to exert influence on adversaries and weaken their political, economic, scientific, technical and military positions. The UK, Germany, Poland and other allies are seen as such adversaries, not least because of our support for the independence of Ukraine as a sovereign nation. Those Russian \u201cactive measures\u201d today include subversion, disinformation, arson and sabotage, designed to damage and disrupt our support for Ukraine while staying just below the NATO Article 5 threshold of open warfare.<\/strong><\/p>\n President Vladimir Putin<\/p><\/div>\n Is this what is meant when people like you define the Russian leaders \u201cChekists\u201d?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Yes, I trace this belief in \u201cactive measures\u201d back to the days after the October Revolution of 1917. Lenin used the notorious Cheka secret police as his \u201cshield and sword\u201d, The job of the Cheka was less about collecting intelligence, and much more about detecting enemies and applying measures however harsh to destroy them. You can trace the present Russian secret agencies and their violent culture back to their KGB predecessors and before that the MVD and KI and MGB, the wartime NKGB and the notorious pre-war NKVD, and even before that to the OGPU and the GPU that emerged from the original Cheka when that was dissolved in 1922. Each generation passed on their violent outlook to the next. Putin had a new statue erected at the new SVR headquarters to the founder of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky or Iron Felix, after his original statue in front of KGB headquarters was pulled down by demonstrators at the end of the Cold War. That is why the Russian agencies today are still Chekists in orientation and training, busy today trying to disrupt nations like the UK, Germany and Poland that are supporting the independence of Ukraine against Russian aggression.<\/p>\n Russia Foreign Intelligence Service unveiling ceremony Statue Dzerzhinsky<\/p><\/div>\n Do you think Russia\u2019s \u201cactive measures\u201d are having any success?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Not really. So far, although individually dangerous acts, the sabotage and cyberattacks have been spasmodic and limited in effect. And politically, they just reinforce public determination not to be intimidated by Russia. Although having said that, threats are being issued from Moscow that the hostile \u201cgrey zone\u201d activities will be stepped up if we continue to support Ukraine with weapons, and keep up sanctions on Russia. The bigger danger is of Russia becoming emboldened to try to mount more damaging attacks on British or other NATO soil or to harm fundamental Western interests, for example by interfering with undersea cables. That risks a dangerous miscalculation by the Kremlin in authorising serious Russian aggressive acts against NATO territory, whether against the UK, Germany, Poland or other allies. Mistakes could be made that would result in major damage to infrastructure and even to large scale loss of life. NATO would have to respond in self-defence despite the risks of entering an escalatory spiral that could be difficult to predict. That message has to be conveyed to the Kremlin that the path they are following carries big risks.<\/p>\n Your interpretation of the geopolitical and strategic situation suggests that, in order to understand today\u2019s Russia, we should devote an analytical effort to President Putin\u2019s Russia comparable to that reserved for the Soviet Union. The Western governments are failing to understand (again) the true intentions of the Kremlin?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The Soviet Union was driven by a hostile ideology involving preparing for a final conflict between communism and capitalism that leaders in the Kremlin believed, as an act of faith, was inevitable. That was coupled with a dedication to the spread of international communism. Combined with its size, bolstered by the forces of the Warsaw Pact, that made the Soviet Union a formidable military adversary. Russia today is not in a comparable position, despite Putin\u2019s desire to recreate the Warsaw Pact and Russia\u2019s vast arsenal of nuclear weapons. But like the Soviet Union, Russia is ruled by a closed elite. Putin is an autocrat who believes he has a historical destiny to fulfil on behalf of his vision of Russia. He is surrounded by a small circle of siloviki, <\/em>for the most part cronies beholden to the President and unwilling to provide objective advice. During the Cold War there was a preoccupation in the West with Kremlinology, with specialist analysts studying for example who might be missing from the elite group on Lenin\u2019s tomb for the May Day military parade or who might be allocated that year a position slightly further from favour with the top party leadership. Today, comparable expertise is needed to explain the way decisions are taken in the Kremlin and whose voices with access to the President are the most influential. And expertise is needed to understand the rationale for decisions of the Russian President that to most lay Western minds would seem irrational. Within a Western frame of reference, it is hard to understand decisions that seems alien to us such as doubling down on the war in Ukraine despite Russia suffering daily losses of troops estimated at between 1500 to 2000 a day, and the Russian people suffering in their everyday life the effects of heavy international sanctions. It is important in crafting responses to the Russian aggression to be able to see the West and Russia itself through the eyes of Putin (it is illuminating to study the published historical account written by Putin himself to justify his conviction that Ukraine has no right to exist as a State separate from mother Russia, and to realise what a highly partial and distorted view of history does to the worldview of the Russian leader). To begin to understand what he sees from his point of view is not, of course, to be led to agree with his conclusions or to condone his lawlessness. But understanding where he is coming from is essential in explaining his hostility, bordering on paranoia, towards NATO that he believes is already at war with Russia.<\/p>\n NATOs-Pressure-and-Russias-Response-A-New-Global-Order-Emerges<\/p><\/div>\n Professor, how have the role and the everyday life of intelligence officers changed from the end of the Cold War to today\u2019s world, shaped by the pervasive presence of social media and artificial intelligence?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>That is a question I am often asked by Masters\u2019 students at King\u2019s College, especially those contemplating trying to enter the secret world. I invite them to think of the intelligence community being pulled in different directions by three forces and having to find a point of equilibrium between them. Think of them as the sides of an inverted triangle. A set of forces down one side comes from changes in perceptions of threat and thus changes in the demands placed on the intelligence agencies. The Al Qaida attacks on New York and Washington on 9\/11 and the high level of threat of further attacks had a fundamental impact on Western intelligence communities. The focus had to switch to counter-terrorism with all that implied for the work of intelligence officers at home and abroad uncovering and investigating terrorist groups and cells. That resulted in deeper links between human and technical agencies, deeper collaboration with the police, and new institutions such as the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre<\/a> in London and equivalents in allies and partner countries overseas. More fundamentally, the work of many intelligence officers that would traditionally have been described by the classic intelligence cycle changed to resemble more the work of a detective investigating a serious crime, with dynamic daily, sometimes hourly, interactions between those officers directly gathering information and those tasking them using those snippets of intelligence to build the investigation. Rather than the fixed Cold War intelligence requirements, what was called for was information about individuals of interest, their names and aliases, contacts, location, movements, financing and of course intentions.<\/p>\n Lesson learned from the past show that meeting intelligence requirements concerning terrorists as individuals requires different approaches from traditional Cold War targets, such as obtaining the range and the radar cross section of a new Soviet aircraft.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n That is the point I am making. But, of course, we should not forget that the more traditional intelligence requirements still exist today but they are on top of the urgent new demands I have just mentioned. Which brings me to the second set of forces down the second leg of the triangle that have fundamentally impacted the world of secret intelligence, those of advanced digital technology in meeting the new requirements. The digital technologies and their application in global communications, mobile devices and the internet have profoundly changed the potential supply of intelligence. And that supply has been dynamically interacting with the demands for intelligence we have just been discussing. Sometimes it would be new threat-driven demands that prompted investment in new means of digital supply. Sometimes, it would be the other way round, where advances in technology driven by commercial applications would spark ideas for how they could be applied to the world of secret intelligence. You can think of it as a global coincidence that just as the focus switched to the individuals who mean us harm, the digital innovations appear: packed switched networks, personal mobile devices and of course the internet and social media. It is those massive data sets that intelligence officers have to mine to find their targets and discover their everyday train de vie<\/em>. The harnessing of the analysis of communications meta data for example, both internationally and domestically, has helped intelligence officers unravel terrorist networks and disrupt many serious plots and bring terrorists to justice. But the very power of digital sources to reveal personal information, so valuable to the authorities in preventing terrorism and serious crime, inevitably raised public concerns over how wide the agencies are casting their digital nets, and whose authority is needed for the most intrusive forms of investigation. The third leg of my triangle represents the forces on the intelligence community from the legal and ethical constraints that society imposes.<\/p>\n I assume you are referring here to democratic nations, not the autocracies where such concerns are always going to be secondary to their leaders\u2019 demands for control of domestic dissent and external security. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Exactly. Western intelligence officers have to accept that they work in an environment subject to democratic scrutiny and controls. And their adversaries do not. But having public consent through democratically passed legislation does confer long term advantages, for example in the kind of people that can be recruited. The UK is an interesting case. Following intense debate in the British Parliament, a new law was passed in 2016 to regulate the investigatory powers used by the agencies and the police. In essence, Parliamentarians of all parties were convinced that to protect the public powerful digital tools should be available to the intelligence and security authorities, but in return they would have to accept a much more stringent regime of legal regulation and both Parliamentary and judicial oversight. The new surveillance regime could be described as 3R<\/strong>s: the open Rule of law<\/strong> (no secret powers); Regulation of authorisation and oversight<\/strong>; and Restraint<\/strong>, placing on the individual intelligence officers involved the duty to ensure that they are able to justify their use of the powers as both necessary and proportionate. The results in terms of plots uncovered and frustrated are impressive.<\/p>\n Do you see comparable changes ahead to those of the decades after 9\/11?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>Yes, I do. Our intelligence communities have had to add to their continuing pre-occupation with terrorism, from the extreme violent right as well as the violent jihadists, the re-emergence of State threats, intensified by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and most recently the US attacks on Iran. Threats are not just coming directly from the State agencies engaged in \u2018grey zone\u2019 hostile activity, but from criminal proxy groups acting on their behalf. That has been the case for some years in respect of Russian cyber hacking gangs, conducting ransomware and other attacks mostly for their own acquisitive motives but at time responding to State requests to cause disruption, especially in countries supporting Ukraine. In addition, Chinese cyber attacks have become more aggressive, targeting for example much of the telecoms and other critical infrastructure of the US (you will recall the advisories issued last year about the so-called Chinese Salt Typhoon<\/a> and Volt Typhoon<\/a> cyber campaigns seeking to find means of disruption should conflict ever come between the US and China). Add all that up, and it represents a formidable intelligence challenge to understand what is going on, and to attribute responsibility, on top of the pre-existing threats from terrorism and hostile espionage that have not gone away<\/p>\n You described the second set of forces acting on intelligence officers from the arrival of digital technology. Has that overtaken the need for traditional human sources?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Yes, and no. On the one hand, what I describe as digitisation, has revolutionised the way all intelligence officers work. Every form of information we can access, through vision, sound, touch, even smell and taste, can now be rendered as strings of numbers. Financial transactions, logistic supply systems, traffic light control, electricity grid control and almost everything that keeps normal life going depends on the right digital data being available when needed. When you have information in numerical form we have the advantage of being able easily to store and recall it, share it and encrypt it securely. But as an adversary you can corrupt it, manipulate it (digital fakes are now commonplace on the internet), and you can deny it through ransomware and other hacking of information systems. Remember malware respects no national border. Our intelligence and security agencies and police colleagues have their work cut out. I should add that the mechanics of spying and of counterespionage are now digital.\u00a0 But well-placed human agents (including those with access to an adversary\u2019s digital systems) remain invaluable. And the very human skills of how best to persuade a potential agent to help us remain as they always were. Human intelligence agencies are not going out of business, although some of the types of people they are looking for to help us may have changed .<\/p>\n human-in-the-loop<\/p><\/div>\n Does the advent of artificial intelligence also fundamentally change the work of intelligence Agencies, especially in support of military operations?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Frontier AI capabilities are creating a fundamental shift in how human oversight of intelligence has to work. Traditionally, a human would be in the loop<\/strong> – directly involved in each decision, including assessing the validity of the intelligence input. In fast moving combat situations, the role is becoming on the loop<\/strong> – setting the rules and boundaries for network of electronic sensors in advance, then monitoring the system that then acts on its own, and stepping in only if circumstances change or something is seen to go wrong. The human is still responsible, but they are now a supervisor rather than a participant.<\/p>\n This is not a failure of policy. It is a constraint of the operational environment. And it means that our ethical obligation shift also. It is no longer sufficient to ask: how do we keep humans in the loop? We must ask instead: how do we ensure that the loop that the human is operating on governs systems that can rate the quality of intelligence input, and reason morally in the ways that we want? And how do we ensure that when circumstances change the system is able to respond appropriately?<\/p>\n Intelligence Hyper-Loop<\/p><\/div>\n Returning to the previous topics, what should the relationship between intelligence and politics be? And between secrecy, political decision-making and the public narrative through which those decisions are presented<\/em><\/strong>?<\/em><\/p>\n The relationship in my view has to be one that respects the integrity of professional intelligence assessment on the one hand and the right of democratically elected politicians to have the final say on how it is used on the other. There must be a felt duty on the part of political leaders to have regard to professional advice be it from economists, medical experts, meteorologists, diplomats, military chiefs – or intelligence officers. The obligation is the same, to pay due regard, to question and seek further information or research – but not to demand a professional judgment be altered to fit the views of the politicians. I would add that in a democracy there should be an expectation that if considered professional advice is not being followed politicians will explain their reasoning. Where there is genuine secrecy to be preserved that can be in private to an appropriate Parliamentary Committee.<\/p>\n Countering disinformation is becoming an increasingly important function of the security and intelligence apparatus. Yet the definition of a \u201cthreat\u201d, and the political use of the perception of that threat, can too easily be shaped ad usum delphini. What safeguards are needed to prevent the defence of the public sphere from turning into an administration of truth?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The best disinfectant is exposure to sunlight. Where disinformation is spread openly, as it is today by the State broadcasters of Russia over the war in Ukraine, then the counter has to be open debate led by our politicians engaging as many different voices as possible in the public sphere. That is what free speech is about. But where deceptive means are being used covertly to amplify the disinformation, for example through the use of bot farms, or through deep fake videos and forgeries, then it is for the intelligence and security agencies to establish the facts, and make the necessary attributions, and then for politicians in government to decide what actions to authorise to defend our information space. That could include offensive cyber action to disrupt an adversary\u2019s activity, as happened to the attempts by ISIS to spread extreme violent material through the internet.<\/p>\n Many commentators have spoken of a supposed crisis within the Five Eyes alliance as a consequence of the Trump administration. Do you believe such a crisis is possible? And how are the strategic priorities of London and Washington changing?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The 5-eyes grew out of a unique historical circumstance in signals intelligence cooperation. Long experience of working together has brought deep professional respect between staff, and personal and family friendships. It takes a long time to build that level of mutual trustworthiness in intelligence, and now in national security, military, diplomatic and other realms. The extent, depth and sensitivity of that co\u2011operation spans the gamut of intelligence activities, whether they be operational, analytical and so forth and is the best in the world. If I may quote the former Director of the CIA, the Hon. John Brennan, when he and I gave evidence together to a British Parliamentary Committee earlier this year \u201cWe rely on each other; we treat each other like brothers and sisters in what we do and what we share with them, because there is a real alignment of values and principles between our countries as well as between our services.\u201d On the point you raise he went on to say \u201cThe political winds in Washington blow all the time. They are blowing rather strongly these days, but a lot of intelligence professionals understand how to avoid getting caught up in those winds.\u201d It is not the first time that there have been political disagreements between 5-eyes governments. I cited to the Parliamentary Committee the breakdown in 1956 in the relationship between US President Eisenhower and UK Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, over the Suez debacle. I was not surprised to learn that, during that major crisis, GCHQ and its US counterpart, the National Security Agency, were working hand in glove studying the Soviet intervention in Hungary, despite the waves lashing the transatlantic surface at that time. I am confident that below the surface the 5-eyes professionals will continue to get on with what the professionals should do. And we should recognise that at the same time, each member of the 5-eyes will be deepening their intelligence and cyber relationships with other partners in their mutual security interest.<\/p>\n You have studied the relationship between intelligence and political decision-making for decades. In the emerging multipolar system, intelligence services appear increasingly to perform diplomatic, preventive and even narrative functions. Are we entering an Era in which intelligence shapes foreign policy as much as, or even more than, traditional diplomacy? Does this represent the triumph of a \u201cnational security\u201d logic over the traditional logic of foreign policy?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Intelligence should inform not direct the making of foreign policy. Inevitably, secret intelligence becomes a very important input to foreign policy in dealing with closed societies with governments that are covertly pursuing illegitimate aims, as Iran has done with its nuclear enrichment programmes and its support for Hezbollah and the Houthis. Senior intelligence officers will have relationships with counterparts in many parts of the world and sometimes those can develop into unpublicised backchannels to put out feelers over beneficial changes in foreign policies that would be harder to do using conventional diplomatic means under the glare of media scrutiny. But that is nothing new. Recall the backchannel with KGB Washington station chief Aleksandr Feklisov that helped to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis.<\/p>\n You have consistently stressed the importance of distinguishing what we know from what we merely believe we know. Looking at the international system today, what is the major risk that Western political elites are either overlooking or interpreting through the wrong conceptual framework? And what strategic consequences could follow from that misreading?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n It is hard to shake off the habit of seeing the world through the lens of peace and war, where we think of war is the exceptional state of affairs and peacetime as the norm. But in area after area of the globe we have perpetual wars that we usually describe as conflicts but which with modern weaponry have all the deadly intensity of war.\u00a0 Some involve State upon State conflict (such as Russia\/Ukraine); some involve proxy groups (such as Iran\u2019s use of Hezbollah).\u00a0 The security of the defensive Alliance, NATO, rests on the Treaty principle of Article 5 – an attack on one is an attack on all. NATO strategy is to deter any armed attack on its territory, and we should congratulate our predecessors for having succeeded in deterring conflict during the Cold War. But that very success risks masking the continuing conflict between Russia and the NATO nations being played out below the Article 5 threshold. We have to recognise that Russian agencies are today conducting \u2018active measures\u2019 including sabotage against us. We need to recognise the reality of this \u2018grey zone\u2019 warfare being waged against the European members of NATO.<\/p>\n A new season of Slow Horses has recently been released. What do you make of the series and of Mick Herron\u2019s novels? <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>I love the TV series of Slow Horses with Gary Oldman\u2019s acting; having Mick Jagger sing the title song was a masterstroke. But I sense that, as some of the TV reviewers have pointed out, by the fifth TV series it gets harder to sustain the startling originality that was such a feature of the early series. All secret intelligence agencies have to deal with staff who make serious blunders or develop personal issues around alcohol, drugs or gambling but are bound to fear the consequences of dismissed staff making waves in the media. The genius of Mick Herron is in the concept of Slough House to provide a form of purgatory for such cases keeping alive the slender hope that they may yet cleanse their souls and in the words of Mick Jagger \u2018dance with the big boys again\u2019.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>More broadly, among the writers who have shaped the popular imagination of espionage, which author do you most admire, and who, in your view, has understood the intelligence world most accurately?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n I have favourites in each of the literary traditions of spy novels: the adventure stories (\u2018a licence to thrill\u2019 from Buchan to Fleming); the literary novel of character and conscience (from Conrad to Le Carre); the political thriller (such as Eric Ambler does brilliantly); the suspense and mystery novel creating a parallel universe of secret institutions (such as Mick Herron does with the Park and Slough House). The best of them blend aspects of each tradition. We should of course not look for realism in the genre (there is no 00 licence to kill in the British Secret Service). This is fiction we are talking about where the author makes stuff up to entertain. But some former insiders such as Somerset Maugham and John Buchan (from World War I experience), and Graham Greene (from his World War II service in MI6) bring a depth to their readers\u2019 understanding of what spying involves. <\/em><\/p>\n And are you tempted to enter the ranks of spy novelists?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Not just tempted, I have succumbed! I have now written a trilogy of espionage novels, the first of which QUANTUM ENIGMA<\/strong> will be published by DK Canelo next year. It is set in the very near future, when today\u2019s cutting-edge artificial intelligence has been rolled out across national infrastructure, worldwide. When the US National Security Agency (NSA) believes a mole is leaking the Pentagon\u2019s secrets to the Chinese, I have them reaching out to GCHQ for assistance developing and finalising a unique agentic AI model that will help identify and reverse the mole\u2019s activities before the Chinese government can exploit the information they\u2019ve received. But developing this new model carries risks for the GCHQ staff and their families: my characters agonise over whether the potential cost to them and their families is one that can ethically be paid. Plus, there are no guarantees that their frontier work will be able to identify the mole, meaning US national security is being gambled on what US football players call a \u2018Hail Mary\u2019 effort. My story flits between the corridors of power where I used to work in Whitehall and the \u2018doughnut\u2019 shaped headquarters of GCHQ in Cheltenham<\/a>, a project that I started when I was Director there in the 1990s<\/strong>.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.strategicstudies.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Sir-David-Omand-1-458x300.jpeg\")
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