Most state secrets are nothing of the kind

Times

23-07-2025

As the double-decker chugged by Lambeth North Tube station, the conductor — this was in the 1970s — would announce the next stop with a chuckle: 'Century House, spies' corner!' The grimy office block housed MI6, which like all Britain's spy agencies then had no official existence. The journalist Duncan Campbell was prosecuted in 1978 for giving the barest outline of the work of GCHQ, Britain's signals intelligence outfit, though neither his scoop nor the bus conductor's joke would have surprised the KGB. During the Cold War it penetrated all our spy agencies.
Secrecy is less obsessive now, though the rules — spectacularly breached over Afghan refugees and serving SAS officers — are still strict. The Cabinet Office publishes a helpful manual about definitions and handling of classified information. The DSMA (formerly D-Notice) website lists five topics, such as the storage and transport of nuclear weapons, where the media is asked, sensibly, to restrain its coverage.
Real life is much messier. Deliberate leaks, active or merely passive, can serve a useful purpose. It is striking that the US C-17 military transport plane that flew from the US air force's main nuclear weapons storage facility in New Mexico to RAF Lakenheath last week kept its transponder switched on. Online plane-spotters gleefully publicised its flight path. Short of a Pentagon press release that the US was putting nuclear weapons back in Britain for the first time in 17 years, the message could have hardly been clearer. The ban-the-bomb lot may complain but an ostentatious sign that the Trump administration is boosting its commitment to our defence sends a useful warning to the Kremlin.
Other leaks stem from shabbier motives. People in all walks of life like to boast. That is why a Grenadier Guards regimental newsletter proudly listed the names of officers now living their best lives with the SAS. Civil servants may be punctiliously tight-lipped but their political masters (and worse, their spin doctors) are easily tempted by the prospect of a favourable headline.
Leaks get worse when information is shared between countries. Our American allies can be extraordinarily careless with our secrets, and vice versa. Contractors are even sloppier. The US-based Cyber Intel Systems lists on its website the exact colour shades used for Britain's classification labels: mischief-makers might find that handy. As I was leaving a meeting in spookdom, an official made me tear off the purple 'TOP SECRET' logo from a sheet of paper bearing something entirely innocuous, explaining 'we don't want to see that on the internet'.
Even real secrets rarely matter for long. Today's troop movements are tomorrow's irrelevance. The most sizzling political intelligence ('Putin fell over again this morning') rapidly becomes stale: perhaps made redundant by subsequent events, or because it reaches the media. Much more important than the actual information is protecting sources and methods that may provide more nuggets in the future. Any clues to past activity may help enemies to work out current and future doings.
Adversaries' ability to spot patterns and anomalies is the hottest topic in the world of secrets right now, and a top preoccupation for the incoming chief of MI6, Blaise Metreweli. The legal revolution of the 1990s, in which our spy agencies gained avowed status and oversight, and later websites and press offices, is dwarfed by the havoc wrought by the digital age on the staples of espionage: tradecraft and cover identities, which conceal secret activity in seemingly inconspicuous behaviour.
• MoD hid Afghan leak from MPs
For modern-day spies heading to work at our agencies' now far more imposing London headquarters, for example, the worry is not a jocular bus conductor but the CCTV on public transport. Coupled with face-recognition software, and with the other digital clues left in daily life (mobile phone use, electronic payments, credit ratings), and the unlimited availability of computer processing power and storage, this risks making even the most shadowy corners of government an open book. Our enemies can create and search databases to reveal and track our intelligence officers and their military counterparts, and those they work with. (Of course it helps if, as in the case of Afghans seeking refuge here, we create the database ourselves and distribute it by email.)
Accountability is flimsy. Our best bet is parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), but past governments have starved it of clout and staff, with a budget frozen since 2013. The ISC issued a blistering protest in May, saying that it in effect had 'no oversight' of the £3 billion we spend annually on spookdom. Despite a judge's recommendation the government sidelined the ISC over the Afghan scandal (which may cost another billion pounds of public money). That was a scandalous breach of the rules: MI6 officers' names were leaked in the database. The ISC is now investigating that, and the government has promised more resources. It has even been able to meet the prime minister, for the first time, shockingly, in more than ten years.
But to be truly effective, the ISC should oversee not only intelligence agencies, but other secret bits of government. The special forces, for example, escape regular scrutiny: too secret for parliament's defence committee, and never discussed publicly by ministers. Yet scandals, and self-serving memoirs, abound.
Secrecy, like privacy, is essential to our society, economy, legal system and defence. But without proper scrutiny from judges and politicians it spares our decision-makers' blushes, not the victims of their blunders. We all lose out from that.