Examination of Witness (Questions 29 -
39)
TUESDAY 2 MARCH 1999
MR DAVID
BICKFORD, CB
Chairman
29. Mr Bickford, welcome. When we last met it
was when some of us had lunch with Mrs Rimington six years ago.
I think I am the only survivor of that expedition. This is the
first of occasional hearings we are holding in relation to the
accountability of the Security Services. We have a dispute (running
for about six or seven years) with the Government over the mechanism
for accountability. Every so often we give the strings a little
pull and this is one occasion when we are going to do that. May
I first of all ask you to describe your background as a legal
adviser to the Security Service?
(Mr Bickford) Do you mean my broad background?
30. Yes. How did you become legal adviser to
the Security Services?
(Mr Bickford) I am a solicitor by profession. I was
in private practice for five years. Then I joined the Foreign
Office. I spent about three and a half years in Berlin as legal
adviser to the British military government there. I came back
to the Foreign Office and was dealing with defence, NATO, UN issues,
and also issues of organised crime with the American Government.
At about the time of the Bettaney and Peter Wright problems Sir
Anthony Duff, who had been asked to go in and deal with MI5, asked
if I would become legal adviser there to deal with the problems,
and that is how I took the job in 1987.
31. What does the role of being a legal adviser
entail in broad terms?
(Mr Bickford) The legal adviser is also director in
the agency. The legal department deals with the normal high policy
issues: legislation, human rights issues and the administration
of the Service, oversight. The day to day work involves the legal
advisers working very closely alongside the operational officers,
advising on the operations with regard to the law, civil rights
and particularly, for the last eight or so years, the evidential
problems that operations can cause when the agencies give evidence
at trial.
32. Is it fair to say that during your time
with the Security Services there was a sea change in the way things
were organised there?
(Mr Bickford) Yes, I think that is right. The agencies
were ready for change. They were coming out of the Cold War which
had a completely different attitude to intelligence gathering.
The problems of expanding terrorism, expanding problems of weapons
of mass destruction and, in particular, organised crime, were
coming over the horizon at that time. The agencies were also much
more in the mood to become more open in their dealings. They realised
that one of the problems they had in dealing with the issues was
that there was no legislative base, so they both agreed that legislation
was imperative, and that legislation came into being. Links with
the media were established, which was one of my jobs there, and
also the concept that the intelligence agencies were sitting on
mounds of intelligence which was extremely useful for advising
Government and protecting lives and property in terrorism cases
was not actually being directed to help the law enforcement authorities
prosecute terrorists and others, and we had a change in procedures
and introduced procedures into the courts to allow the intelligence
agencies to give evidence at trial so that this intelligence they
were gathering would gain much better use than it had hitherto.
33. A former Conservative Home Secretary said
to me once that there was a lot of dead wood being cleared out
in that period. Is that your impression?
(Mr Bickford) Yes, that is very fair. I do not think
it was dead wood in the sense of the members because I found the
operational officers just superb. They really were brilliant and
they were recognised as that internationally. The dead wood was
the problems that had accrued in terms of super secrecy during
the Cold War, which was necessary then. You had a single target
that was intent on gathering any information it could. When the
Cold War disappeared the targets began to become much more disparate
and therefore the agencies were able to take advantage of the
fact that there was not a single focus on them and they could
become more open and have a proper legislative base to carry out
their tasks much better than they had hitherto in relation for
instance to terrorism.
34. Is it fair to say that they had become very
introspective?
(Mr Bickford) I do not think they were introspective.
I think that they had a single focus and the single focus was
the defeat of Communism. They had to defeat Communism through
also dealing with subversion. These were very difficult issues.
That single focus could be interpreted as being introspective
from the outside. From the inside I found that the balances were
still there, although I think it is pretty fair to say that the
balances were based on what would be awkward if it became public
rather than the civil rights balances that the European Convention
on Human Rights provided. When I came into the agencies that was
the balance that I introduced from the legal point of view. Of
course this allowed the agencies to operate much more freely.
It is much more easy to create a balance in terms of civil rights
than it is in terms of what might be embarrassing if it became
public.
35. The Peter Wright business suggested that
they had spent a lot of time looking for subversion in their own
midst rather than the world outside.
(Mr Bickford) Yes. I think the Peter Wright affair
was the absolute cataclysm which showed that this super secrecy
was no longer apposite in the modern world. The world had changed.
The defence against Peter Wright was obviously a great mistake.
The agencies learned from that, equally as they learned from the
Bettaney case, that you had to have more of a searchlight on to
the activities inside the agencies, which of course led to oversight.
Mr Winnick
36. One of the accusations—not necessarily
now, one hopes, because there have been substantial changes—certainly
by the Labour side in politics is really along the lines that
MI5 was politically biased, that if there was a Labour Government
in office it would look upon it with far greater suspicion than
if a Conservative Government was in office. Of course the accusation
flouted by people like Wright that Harold Wilson had been a Moscow
agent seems so ludicrous that it is almost unbelievable, and yet
it seems as though there were some people in senior positions
in MI5—am I not right—who actually believed that nonsense?
(Mr Bickford) If there was I did not come across it.
Certainly with Tony Duff that would never have been allowed anyway.
He was the most balanced man I have come across and one of the
most incisive. I never came across that in the agencies at all.
The whole objective from Sir Anthony's point of view was to create
a modern service to bring them out of the Cold War attitudes into
the new attitudes and from the legal point of view that was also
the case. In a sense we were obviously constantly on the lookout
for bias within the service, whether it was bias in relation to
individuals or what. I cannot really recall any cases where I
found that the intelligence officers were not pretty balanced
people. They are selected for integrity anyway. You cannot ask
an intelligence officer to go out and gather intelligence and
then have him come back and tell you lies, or influence the way
he gives the information because, if that is the case, your whole
intelligence case starts to crumble. As I say, I found the operations
of these officers brilliant, so in terms of bias I really did
not find that bias. I arrived in 1987 and I know a lot of the
allegations that have been made were made prior to that.
Mr Howarth
37. Can I pursue that a little more, Chairman?
Is it not the case that in the Cold War era there were a number
of people active in the Labour Party whose allegiance was, shall
we say, at best questionable in so far as they did seem to have
some sympathy with what was going on in Soviet Russia? Although
you have made it absolutely clear to us that you regarded the
officers as having been wholly unbiased, was there a sense in
which the service thought that there were people operating in
the democratic process here who perhaps did have more than a passing
interest in the success of the Communist venture?
(Mr Bickford) That is a very difficult question to
answer. The service at that time was studying subversion. Subversion
was defined in certain respects and belonging to a particular
subversive organisation was a matter for study. Those people who
were studied were studied on the facts of the intelligence that
was coming in as to whether or not they were participating in
what was then a subversive organisation. I do not think I can
go further than that.
38. What you are saying is that there was a
rigorous standard applied, that it was not simply picking off
people because of their political opinion, but because there was
a serious risk of subversion?
(Mr Bickford) Yes, indeed. What was interesting was
that when we came to legislate we actually transferred the categories
of persons permitted to be investigated direct into the categories
that the intelligence agencies were permitted to investigate post
legislation. If you look at the Commissioner's report on the categories
that exist at the moment—I have forgotten which report that
is—he has been satisfied that those categories were acceptable.
Certainly there were very rigorous constraints on who could be
investigated.
Mr Corbett
39. Mr Bickford, someone like me who spent many
years actively campaigning to rid the world of nuclear weapons,
would I be automatically regarded in those days by the agency
as subversive?
(Mr Bickford) No, certainly not.
| 
