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Mr. Mates: I fully accept that the Foreign Affairs Committee would like to do that. When I was Chairman of the Defence Committee, I would have liked to cross-examine the defence intelligence services. Of course, we all want to do that. However, is it right? I am firmly of the view that the existence of the Intelligence and Security Committee means that there is no need to do that, unless one wishes to argue that the Committee is not doing its job properly.
Of course, it would be nice for the Select Committee on Home Affairs to make such a cross-examination. Members of that Committee all have their own agendas. Indeed, the report on the ISC was cooked up three years ago by three hon. Members who are very proud of what
they have done. I, however, think that they are greatly mistaken. Writing and producing a report with an agenda means that one ends up saying some rather silly things. For example, the third report of the Home Affairs Committee states:
- the scrutiny committee--
- should be . . . clearly seen to be independent of the executive.
- it is inevitable that the intelligence services will one day become accountable to Parliament.
4.48 pm
Sir Archie Hamilton (Epsom and Ewell): I should like to join hon. Members on both sides of the House in paying the highest tribute to people who work in the Secret Intelligence Service and the Security Service, who do a fantastic job for the country and risk their lives in doing it. I should also like to pay tribute to the Intelligence and Security Committee, on which I had the privilege of sitting in the last Parliament. Indeed, that was a great job, which I enjoyed enormously. The report on Mitrokhin is first class and a good extension of the Committee's activities.
I should like to talk about the structure and accountability of our security and intelligence services. Whatever we make of the Mitrokhin case--it must be said that the archive was an enormous wealth of intelligence--it raises serious concerns about the accountability of the services. The fact that the possible prosecution of Melita Norwood was never referred to Ministers and that the Law Officers were never consulted about whether she should be prosecuted should concern us all very much. We cannot second-guess the decision about whether Mrs. Norwood should have been prosecuted, and that is not the question, but that should have been a ministerial decision. We should be concerned that Ministers were not involved at key moments and learned of her existence only when it was probably too late to do anything. Those worries were also expressed by the hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron).
My concerns go further. One of the problems with the two main agencies and GCHQ is that they answer to two of the busiest Secretaries of State in any Government this country has had. I do not believe that the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary have the time to go into the detail needed to make sure that the agencies are held to account, and the fact that the Prime Minister is inevitably involved in the agencies does not mean that they are being held to account. Those are the most pressurised Ministers in the Cabinet of any Government.
Much has been made of what might happen to the Intelligence and Security Committee, and whether it might be beefed up in some way. I shall not get involved in the issue of a Select Committee, which was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Mr. Mates). It is immaterial what parliamentary Committee oversees the services. The Intelligence and Security Committee is doing a first-class job, and I can
see no reason to believe that a Select Committee could do a better one. The problem, however, is that there are, inevitably, limits to what can be done by any parliamentary Committee.That problem always comes down to operational matters. Are we to have a parliamentary Committee that gets involved in knowledge of operational matters in the agencies? I do not believe that that will ever happen. The people who want it to happen do not help their case by quoting the United States. The experiences of the United States have been somewhat bruising, and that makes it much less likely that Members of this House will be made privy to operational matters in the Secret Intelligence Service and the Security Service.
We need a new sense of accountability within Government. Since the days when I was on the Committee, I have advocated that we should have a Minister who is responsible for the two agencies and GCHQ. He should be at the level of Minister of State, operate within the Cabinet Office and answer directly to the Prime Minister. We would then have somebody in a unique position to judge value for money. That Minister would be completely in the ring of secrecy and would know precisely what the agencies were up to. He would be in a stronger position to make sure that resources were deployed in the right directions. He would be able to demonstrate to the Government as a whole whether they were getting value for money, and they would then be able to alter priorities.
There has been talk on both sides of the House about co-ordinating the activities of the two agencies. That could more easily be done if one Minister were responsible for them and able to bring them together. It might mean that my right hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Mr. King) would get a quicker response from the Government to his Committee's reports, and we might even have got an earlier debate.
That would only be the first step. The problems of the agencies are historical, and we can understand why we have ended up as we have. Before Christopher Andrew wrote about the Mitrokhin archives, he wrote an excellent book about the security services. He spelled out how the Security Service had been established and how the Secret Intelligence Service had its origins in naval intelligence, and so forth. We understand how we have arrived at our present position, but we have two agencies that we would not choose to set up if we started with a clean sheet of paper now.
It was understandable that we should have a home-based service and one based, and operating, abroad. However, we are continually saying that we live in a global marketplace, and communications have changed dramatically. The problems that the agencies are dealing with are international. Trade now works across the globe, and illicit trade is exactly the same. In the prosecution of the drugs trade it is now rather artificial to draw a line between people who operate in Bolivia, where the drugs are grown, or Colombia, where they are processed, and other people who deal with the drugs when they arrive in the United Kingdom and are distributed.
I am keen on the idea of a drugs tsar, but he should be somebody who emerges from one of the secret agencies and he should have total responsibility for pursuing drugs wherever they are and for being involved in the whole chain--from the growth of cocaine, for example, to its
distribution in this country. If we had such a person, we would cut down on duplication and allay the concerns of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) and the hon. Member for Doncaster, Central (Ms Winterton), who is worried about the degree of co-ordination and about duplication.Espionage and counter-espionage are among the many other activities that are undertaken by the agencies, and there is not as great a division between those activities as people might imagine; indeed there are tremendous crossovers between them. As a result of the activities of the Secret Intelligence Service, Gordievsky and Mitrokhin produced a mass of information that enabled the Security Service to prosecute people in this country. Many people are recruited as agents when they are in this country. We draw an artificial line between espionage and counter- espionage, and I would like the two activities brought together under a single agency.
There is no line to be drawn between the agencies in dealing with terrorism because, almost invariably, terrorist acts executed in cities in this country are planned abroad. I should like to see a single agency dealing with terrorism. We must be careful not to continue the artificial division between home and abroad, when there is a web linking activities abroad to those in this country.
In 1994, under the previous Government, there was a great discussion of whether special branch or the Security Service should be responsible for dealing with terrorism in Great Britain. I confess that it did not worry me terribly who took control, as long as somebody did. As we now know, the Security Service came out on top, and we have seen a measurable improvement in our activities against Irish terrorism in this country. We can attribute an awful lot of that to the fact that those activities have been pulled together.
The tragedy is that, in an earlier period when Northern Ireland was more peaceful, we thought that it was a good idea to introduce police primacy, so the Royal Ulster Constabulary has a responsibility for intelligence in Northern Ireland. It would have been much better if Northern Ireland intelligence activities had been brought together under the Security Service.
We should seriously consider bringing both agencies and GCHQ together in a single service, underneath which people could be responsible for the main areas of activity. That would avoid duplication and we could hold someone responsible, which is extremely difficult to do now, for the subsidiaries that would emerge under a single service. I totally accept that enormous political problems would be involved. Normally, in any Cabinet, the Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary are quite big beasts--I am not sure how much that applies to the current ones--and vested interests would argue against such a change, but it should be seriously considered.
Those views were shared when I served on the Intelligence and Security Committee, certainly by Lord Gilbert. When he was persuaded to give up his seat--Dudley--and take a seat in the House of Lords, he was offered a ministerial position if Labour were elected in 1997. He was keen that his job should be as a Minister of State in the Cabinet Office, responsible for the security and intelligence services, but something went wrong. I envisage an episode of "Yes, Prime Minister" and
Lord Butler, as he now is, saying, "Very brave, Prime Minister." Lord Gilbert subsequently became Minister for Defence Procurement--a job that he had done 17 years earlier.If the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service were reorganised, we should find that they operated much better. No business would be operated with such artificial divisions between home and abroad. We should carefully consider bringing the services together, and a start would be to have a Minister of State with responsibility for such matters in the Cabinet Office. If we went down that road, all our worries about duplication and overlap would disappear and we would have a much more efficient service in the areas that matter so much for the security and long-term strength of this country.
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