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unemployedspy
In 2020, Sir Alex Younger KCMG (SU 1976-81) retired after thirty years in the Secret Intelligence Service (aka MI6), the last seven of which he spent as its Chief. Quitting SIS HQ in Vauxhall, ‘the most famous secret building in the world’ as he points out, leaves him freer to look back on his school days, career, how things have changed in the Service, and the challenges it faces since he was recruited three decades ago. Susanna Spicer (SU 1979-81) tells us more.
In 2014, when Alex Younger became the new ‘C’ at MI6, his contemporaries at Marlborough might have had reason to be surprised. A pleasant, urbane, but decidedly relaxed fellow at school, Alex was, by his own admission, one of life’s later developers. ‘I was certainly quite a languid character then. I grew up at university rather than school and was quite backward really,’ he recalls.
The academic side of life at Marlborough held fewer attractions for him than the extra-curricular. ‘One of my interests was mountaineering; I thought it incredibly character forming. My other fascination was computers. Terrifyingly, I was left for days and days alone in the computer science lab just doing stuff. This was quasi anarchic before cyber was anarchic, and it was fantastic. There was a breadth to the school that definitely contributed to some of the qualities I subsequently relied on,’ even if his exam results weren’t the best. ‘Please spell out that there is hope for those who get s**t A Levels!’ he pleads, though given he went on to read Economics & Computer Science at St Andrew’s on an Army scholarship, they can’t have been all that bad.
Sandhurst and a commission in the Scots Guards followed, where his relaxed demeanour continued. ‘While I was in the Guards, we all had a cartoon done of us. In mine, I’m lazing at the bottom of the picture.’ Appearances can be deceptive, and behind his languid image his superiors recognised a highly effective leader with a focussed mind and considerable intellectual curiosity. A year after leaving the army, Alex joined the Secret Intelligence Service. This was in 1991: the USSR was breaking up and the Cold War was ending. The recruitment of spies is the stuff of legend. Has it changed over the years? ‘When I was “tapped on the shoulder” it was a pretty self-selecting time,’ he admits. ‘Subsequently, we moved to open competition and anyone could apply, which is the situation now. But that, of course,
Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) building in London
means you only attract people who think of joining. Looking forward, we probably need to return to a bit of shouldertapping... to ensure we find people who would never have thought of a career with us. SIS has a saying, “We are never going to succeed through scale; we are never going to out-spend our adversaries; we are going to succeed through out-thinking them.” That requires us to secure the very best we can find from all backgrounds and walks of life.’ It also means that the Service aims to achieve a 50/50 gender balance, though they’ve not succeeded yet. He recognises the distinctive advantage of using female agents in certain contexts. ‘I confess to taking considerable delight in using our opponents’ prejudices against them, for they do not value people equally. It is a blind spot, and it is deeply satisfying to use that against them.’ It is also essential that new recruits share the organisation’s values. SIS exists essentially to protect the values at the heart of UK society, he insists. Unlike some nations, however, the UK doesn’t prescribe those values to its citizens, and the work of SIS therefore adapts continuously to reflect broader societal norms. In practice, this requires staff to take moral responsibility for their actions and encourages open debate. As Chief, Alex promoted this openness within the organisation. ‘There should be a culture where it is not only okay but right to have moral expectations of each other and discuss them… I think there’s now a greater readiness for us to talk about the things that society values: democracy, equality under the law, tolerance… without feeling there’s an imposition of a majority view.’ As important in transforming the methods of the organisation are what Alex terms massive, irreversible game changers in the field: globalisation and digitalisation.
The result has been a ‘night-and-day’ change in the level of interaction, cooperation and coordination between the various agencies involved in UK security and, to an extent, the reinvention of espionage in the course of his tenure at the agency. ‘When I joined, things were highly solipsistic, partly because SIS didn’t formally exist. [SIS, GCHQ and MI5 were only formally recognised within the 1994 Intelligence & Security Act.] It was a highly compartmented world, and each Service could more or less achieve what it wanted with what it had and controlled itself. The complexity of the operational environment now is such that you are always going to be reliant on partnering with other people within the intelligence community, both nationally and internationally – and that is completely different. The Service I left in 2020 was also far, far more integrated into the broader machinery of government than it was in 1991.’
The establishment of the National Security Council in 2010 exemplifies this interconnection. Chaired by the Prime Minister, the NSC brings key members of government together with the leaders of MI5, SIS, GCHQ, the police and armed forces, and is designed to be a cross-cutting mechanism and riposte to what Alex calls hybrid warfare. ‘Driven primarily by Russian activity, this is where all instrumental state power is concerted to blur all boundaries: peace/war, cyber/real, all of that. In this context, if you can’t operate across your institutional boundaries, you’re stuffed.’ Alex’s interest in computing, nurtured as a student at Marlborough, led to one of his most innovative moves as Chief. In 2018, he encouraged collaboration between SIS and the private sector by harnessing the power of venture capital to ensure that SIS consistently wins the intelligence tech race. Remaining one step ahead has always been and remains essential, but directly involving the private sector broke new ground in the field. This kind of new thinking and innovation will be critical to address the emergence of new threats posed by our adversaries. ‘The assault on and erosion of truth is one of the most significant challenges liberal democracy has ever faced, because it allows authoritarians to claim there is an equivalence between our two systems that is simply not justified. Foreign interference, predominantly driven by Russia, is seeking to reduce trust within our democratic system and, although it doesn’t seem to be sophisticated enough to pursue any particular outcome, it is succeeding in simply making people believe each other and the validity of their information less. That’s a huge problem that will probably get worse as our opponents become more technologically sophisticated.’ Alex is adamant, however, that we can’t only blame the Russians or Chinese for this disruptive interference. In a sense, the very nature of our open society has allowed it. ‘Big tech, by which I mean the large socialmedia platforms, needs to bear quite a bit of the responsibility for this. The diminution of the currency of truth, the quality of information and politicians’ and others’ readiness to stretch it, is undermining the basis of our democracy and the social media have specifically amplified the problem.’ He remains optimistic though. ‘These things are within our own agency to sort out. We not only could deal with this ourselves, but we must, because if liberal democracy loses its core strength, its capacity to operate on the basis of at least broadly shared facts, then we will slide to a point where people will indeed see an equivalence between the different value systems.’ Confident he has left the agency better equipped to face these new challenges, Alex is anything but languid in retirement. Interesting job offers surely await, but for now he’s just enjoying being his own man. ‘I’ve been in charge of a lot of things, but, since I joined the Scots Guards in 1986, I’ve never been in charge of myself. I’ve found it intoxicating, and it’s not something I’m intending to relinquish.’ He wants to sail to the Arctic Circle, pursue his musical education and ‘Hubris alert! I want to play my role in defending the Enlightenment, which I do think is under threat.’ No small ambition. Meanwhile, in lockdown, it seems Alex, too, has become a master of the sourdough loaf. He may have held the security of the nation in his hands, but underneath, he’s not so different from the rest of us.
