Why the Former Head of MI6 Has No Regrets About Iraq

[MUSIC] For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books. Join the declassified club at therestisclassified.com. [MUSIC] We welcome everyone to this very special episode of the declassified club. Now, Gordon, we've had conversations with a few former C.I. directors on the pod, but I believe this is the first time that we'll be accompanied by one of our friends across the Atlantic, at least for by direction. Isn't that right, Gordon? We'll be joined by the head over the former head of what you like to call MI6 Gordon, but I don't like to call it, MI6 on the podcast. I like to call it the secret intelligence service. That's right. We have got with us, Sir Richard Dillab, who was a career MI6 operations officer, and then became chief of the secret intelligence service, SIS, to give it its right title, or MI6, as it's popularly known in 1999, and he served in that role until 2004, which took him through the tumultuous years, really, of the 9/11 attack and its aftermath, including, of course, the war in Iraq. Since leaving he's also been busy, including hosting a podcast, one decision. Everyone's got a podcast these days, haven't they? Sir Richard, welcome to the declassified club. Thank you for joining us. Yeah, thanks. Nice to meet you. Online, Gordon and David, anyway, I'm here. Richard, we're going to go back and talk a bit about your career as far as you can, and particularly focus on your time as chief. But I just wonder if it's worth starting now on your reflections on where we are at the moment, because recent months, the US, of course, has been engaged in a war in the Middle East against Iran, which the UK, unlike in the case of Iraq, is not involved in. I mean, do you view that as the right move for the UK to have stepped back from the relationship and the alliance in the way it has been involved in the past? Well, I think it could have been more supportive of the United States in this conflict, without becoming directly involved. I mean, it made this esoteric distinction between defensive and offensive action, which I thought was a little bit esoteric. But on the other hand, I think we should have from the word go, expressed our support for this conflict. I mean, what's extraordinary about the conflict with Iran is that I retired in 2004. It's an awful long time ago. What was the primary intelligence requirement when I retired? It was Iran nuclear. This is in my book, perhaps or probably the final chapter of a long-running problem, which was always going to come to a head. Trump and Netanyahu have acted in a manner to bring it to a head. So I'm not at all surprised by what's happened. And I think it was inevitable that given the intransigent nature of the Theocratic regime in Iran, this would eventually lead to a confrontation. And I sort of disagree a lot with the legal interpretation of the conflict. I mean, that's the opinion of international lawyers. It's nothing a cut and dried about it. I think the Iranian regime has largely brought the situation on itself. What do you think will be the sort of outcome or trajectory when this conflict is over? Or if the NoSQL is now holds and the conflict is resolved? Do you see resolution or some kind of mitigation of the risks on that file? Or how do you see it going forward now that we've had Operation Epic Fury? I think I would expect the Iranian regime to implade. It went necessarily happened immediately, but on my own podcast on the New Year, I made a prediction that 2026 would see the disappearance of the Iranian regime. And I'm pretty sure in my own mind that that is where this will end up. I mean, the 12-day war destroyed the nuclear program. And what I mean by that is it probably destroyed enough of the centrifuges and the installations to make a serious weapons program ongoing. What it didn't solve was the problem of Fissile material which had already been produced of which we understand there are 450 kilos buried somewhere under the mountain in non-tares after it was bombed. And okay, that would allow Iran, let's say, to craft a nuclear device or one or two nuclear devices. And I use the word craft deliberately. What it wouldn't allow them to do was to create a weapons production line because I think that has been destroyed. So there is a remaining problem. And of course, if you escalate the relationship, it's more likely that Iran would respond in time maybe with some sort of nuclear device which wouldn't necessarily be, you know, I don't want to go into the technicalities, but you can see what I'm driving at in terms of using the Fissile material. So I think an essential part of the end of this conflict is the recovery of that material. And if you have a change of regime, you probably have a more compliant regime with which would have a different relationship with the West, maybe that material can be extracted without a military operation. I think that's probably the direction in which we're driving at the moment. You talked a little bit at the start about the fact that the UK perhaps could have been closer. Do you worry about risks to the intelligence relationship? I mean, you've been quite deeply involved in that and committed to it. Not really. It's a storm that will pass, you think. I think it's so heavily institutionalized. It's so long running. My informal indications are that actually it's in pretty good shape. Look, there have always been tensions and disagreements of policy. There are always isolationist elements within the US intelligence community. I'm not going to go into detail, but in my experience, living inside the relationship isn't quite what people imagine from the outside. But on the other hand, the fact that it exists, the infrastructure around it, particularly things like the UK's agreement between GCHQ and NSA and the nuclear relationship, which isn't part of the actual structure of the special relationship, but I'm including given that our deterrent is American technology or some American technology. This isn't going to disappear or evaporate. So personal relationships, particularly those that trans behavior generates. I wouldn't say relevant. They create awkwardnesses and they create differences of policy when I was at a station in Washington, which I was at one stage. I was often dealing with actually quite serious problems of disagreement, but it didn't make any difference ultimately to the major issue, which is a relationship which is profound, deeply based, institutionalized and has its ups and downs. Okay, it's having a big down at the moment, but it's not going to collapse. I wanted to ask you a bit more about your time as head of station in Washington, which I think was in the early 1990s. Kind of the tail end or really after the Cold War had concluded. Could you talk a little bit about that period of time and in particular what the special relationship was like at that stage and maybe how it's changed or how it hasn't over the past 30 years? This is pre-9/11. I mean, it's in the period when the Soviet Union is implading. I think the exchanges and discussions, sort of understanding what was happening in Russia, what was happening in the Soviet Union. I mean, it was really important that there were areas where there were resistance on CIA's part to real closeness during that period. For example, they were quite preparatory about their views of China. There were subjects where we co-operated very closely and subjects where we were not so close, but overall being head of station, I think I went there in early 1991. I remember driving down to Washington having holiday. I had three months off between two pastings and I'd been holiday up in Maine and driving down to Washington as that attack on the. When I say the White House in Moscow, you know what I mean. I'm not talking about the White House in Washington. Where that specific incident, which was fantastically dramatic and then realizing that these events were going to color the whole of my time there. And of course, there were some really big events like, you know, the defection of the archivist. Mitrokin, one of my favorite stories, yeah? He tried the Americans first, but the Americans didn't get it right. He missed that one. Made a mistake there. Yeah, I missed that one slightly. We ended up with the prize, which became really quite a valuable prize. So, I mean, there was a whole lot of extraordinary stuff that went on during that period. I think you'd been educated partly in the US as well. So, it was quite deeply ingrained in you. And then I suppose you'd lived through the Cold War when the relationship had been very close when you joined SIS. I was an exchange student under the English speaking union program at an American prep school, Kent School, Connecticut, which is a fine school actually. I was subsequently a governor of it. So, I. I know the school or a trustee as they say in the States, rather well. And yeah, I was a fantastic experience. This was 62, 63. Anyway, it was the autumn of the Cuba crisis. My mother, when my mother died, I'd discovered she kept all my letters. And I've got them here in a drawer where I'm sitting next to it. And I found the letter that I wrote to my parents in the school in Connecticut during the Cuba crisis. And it's quite interesting to read the letters of a 17 year old. Did you think you were going to die? Did you think it was all over? Well, I said you know, they're talking about the threat of nuclear war. Anyway, no, I think my letters show supreme confidence that. Everything would be fine. Is it worth? But on the other hand, that there is this massive risk. It's very interesting to see how one sort of digested this extraordinary crisis at that age. And then you joined Sias and then you were in Prague, weren't you? I mean, I'm not sure how much you can talk about it. But I think you ran quite an interesting agent in Prague and you were under surveillance and you know, as a kind of young officer. I remember once after the end of the Cold War, trying to get hold of going to the Czech security service and actually trying to get hold of your file, you'll be pleased to know to find out what they knew about you and it had been magically removed from the archive. Actually, I've got it. So I got it before you, Gordon. You got there first. I did my best. I've got most of it. I haven't got the whole thing. But interestingly, Penguin again, to publish a book about the case I ran next year. Mm. I'm sure you know her, Daniela Richter, who is the most wonderful expert on the STPR Cives, has been immersed in these archives. So I mean, she wrote this book on the relationship between the Czech Communist Party and various Palestinian terrorist groups, which I thought was superb, because no one else had sort of delved into that and understood it. Anyway, she's now delving into this case. Of course, she hasn't got access to the MI6 archives, so I'm going to restrict my comments to what comes out of the Czech archives. But this was one of the big CI cases of the Cold War. Big counterintelligence cases. Yeah. The source was in charge of the operations in Czech records, but an Avodaske Hurti, which means intelligence games, which basically means double agent cases. And his job was to run the operations to penetrate British intelligence, and we were running him. So it was a classic Cold War case. And it will make a fascinating book, because he died. Well, whilst I was in Prague, towards the end of my time there, he actually died of natural causes. I mean, he had a heart attack and died. He wasn't very old. I mean, he was a man in his probably in his 40s, or maybe a bit older than that in his 50s. Of course, the Czechs never could interrogate him. So once they discovered that he had been a British source, which they did from the papers in his house, who had bits and pieces of evidence he had left lying around, their service was completely turned upside down by an investigation which lasted for 12 or 14 years. And sort of phrase their activity, because it was such a key penetration. And it was, I mean, I think the way you know, we had such a complete picture of what they were doing. It was rather, it was a privilege. You might not answer this, but how did you get the file before Gordon did? What strings did you have to pull to get your own security file for Prague and beat Gordon Carrera to the punch? That was pretty easy because I was invited immediately back to Prague after the Velvet Revolution by Havan actually, who was by then president to celebrate the role I had played in as it were, the penetration of, there's a plaque somewhere in Prague when you talk about the torturing secret police anyway. The guy, the dissident who became head of the Czech service, he was a delightful lovely man called older Chanee, who I'm sure Gordon probably knew too. And older was a glazed friend of mine. And older said, well, I'm not really meant to do this, Richard. [LAUGHTER] But he'd say, well, he'd dug into the archives and said, I've got an interesting envelope here of you to take it with you. But it's interesting because it's not the investigational bit of the archives, which recorded what happened after this case. It's my personal file, which is fascinating and very interesting. And I've read it with great amusement. Because the Czechs thought I was a naive, rather useless. I mean, talk about hoodwinking them. I hoodwink them extremely successfully. Because I was there to do one thing, which was to run the kernel in charge of the operations against British intelligence. And they'd never twigged until after he had died anyway. So the Czechs have celebrated this. And they've been awfully nice to me. And I get lots of rather wonderful invitations to go back, which has been tremendous fun. And it's great by love going with Prague. It's just a wonderful city. I used to speak Czech pretty fluently. So I still sort of understand it and can read my way around. But I can't really speak it in the way that I used to be able to.