 School of Security Studies. My name is John Geerson and I direct the Center for Defense Studies and I'm delighted to have Sir John Soares joining us this morning to have a conversation. Sir John is Executive Chairman of New Bridge Advisory Affirmative Setup in 2019 and after a distinguished career in the Foreign Office including Stintz as the British Ambassador to Egypt and also our permanent representative at the United Nations. Sir John became the 15th C Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service MI6. We're going to talk a little bit about his career but also the journey that the world has taken in the course of his career. So welcome Sir John and thank you for joining us this morning. Well thank you, thank you John and thank you to all your colleagues and students who are tuning in today and it's great to be back at King's College. I hope to be back there in person before too long. Indeed and we of course would have liked to have been doing these conversations in person and online at the same time. I mentioned that you started your career in the Foreign Office in the late 1970s and a variety of postings but I think that's quite a good way to take us into the fact that the Foreign Office you joined in the late 1970s must have been pretty fundamentally changed by the events of 1989. Just a decade later all of the certainties of the Cold War changed. How did it feel on the frontline? Well most people think about 1989 as the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square and so on, these great powers. I was actually in South Africa at that time and I was working in the British Embassy there on the whole question of prodding, encouraging, pressing, demanding that South Africa bring an end to its apartheid system and promote change there and my four years in South Africa from the beginning of 88 to the end of 92 it bridged some rock solid state of emergency, repression, apartheid through to a real aspiration of hope with the release of Nelson Mandela and political prisoners and it was a real lesson to me of how peaceful change can be brought about by a combination of argument, economic pressure through sanctions, a degree of isolation and support for communities who were badly in need of it both economically and politically and there was a huge argument at the time over the role of sanctions and Margaret Thatcher was famously pretty negative about them but on the front line I could see that some of those sanctions weren't particularly effective but others really were effective especially the financial sanctions in some ways the lessons of what succeeded and what didn't succeed in South Africa have informed the debate about sanctions over the last 30 years. That's interesting how did those lessons and those mechanisms fair when you've got to ensure next crisis in the Balkans not so many years later? Yeah well sanctions sometimes get a bad rap because they do cause widespread harm, we see the damage they do to individuals and to communities and populations but they've also got areas where they've been successful and I think the Balkans is an example certainly towards the end of the 1990s of how sanctions did contribute to bringing down President Milosevic in the same way that they helped bring an end to the apartheid system in South Africa. Again it's not a silver bullet it wasn't as if sanctions were the sole answer it was a great combination of pressure and of course the 1990s was a particularly bloody decade in the former Yugoslavia and we approached it I was working for Douglas Heard after I came back from South Africa I worked in Douglas Heard's office running his private office and it was really the first post-cold war crisis in Bosnia where the Americans said they didn't have a dog in the fight the European Union proudly declared that this was the hour of Europe they didn't have much to back it up that the the Russians supported the Serbs the Americans supported the the Bosnian Muslims the Germans supported the Croats and the British and French were trying to keep the peace between them we were really muddling through because we haven't really done this sort of stuff before the cold war was completely different it was a it was a fixed process proxy wars stalemating Europe and suddenly we had a war on the European continent where all these values and all these countries interests were mixed in and we didn't really have the tools to to find a way through and lots of mistakes were made on Bosnia and hundreds of thousands of people died as a consequence of the conflict there and that in some ways was a negative lesson learned of how long it takes to orchestrate international efforts and how peacekeeping can't be if you're if you're trying to preserve a piece you have to establish a piece in the first place and there were some there were intellectual and policy errors made as well as some political errors at the time in the end I think we found our way through on the Balkans and then for example the handling of the Kosovo crisis at the end of the 1990s was much more well considered and well judged and effective than our handling of the Bosnia crisis at the beginning of the 1990s and my career in the 1990s took me from Douglas Hertz office to a year at Harvard to three years in Washington running the foreign defense policy part of the British Embassy in Washington and then I came back and was working number 10 as Tony Blair's advisor so that period of the Balkans was so seared through me during that during those years but we certainly learned a lot more about the importance of effective military intervention of how the military can back up diplomacy and reinforce it and can drive the policy delivery on the ground in a sense that was the Kosovo was probably the high point of Western military intervention we had a successful intervention in Sierra Leone a year or so later which was also strikingly successful but of course then came the decade of the 2000s and the never ending wars and the learned successes of the 1990s turned into failures of the 2000s. I mean just before we move on from the Balkans I recall when the British first sent forces into Bosnia the commander went there with his advance team and said after the event that the relationship and the working between the Ministry of Defense Foreign Office and others you know what wasn't as as good as it became later let's put it that way and when he arrived he was told where there were 96 NGOs that want to speak to the British commander and he had sort of five staff with him and he said and all of those NGO organizations knew more about the situation on the ground than he did having just arrived there and it took it was quite a steep learning curve and the impression was that you know deploying force for the British anyway was easier than being effective in those early weeks you know because we hadn't done intervention as you say for a long time. And we didn't even have an embassy in Bosnia at the time and when we did open up an embassy in I think it was 1994 the foreign office in its wisdom sent a particularly junior guy because he didn't have many people to manage and therefore it was a junior role whereas this was the I was in Douglas Hertz office and this was the most demanding and difficult issue on his agenda and we had thousands of troops there and one sort of first secretary's level diplomat as the ambassador it wasn't his fault but it was he was completely out of his depth and I think this interplay between politics the military and well diplomacy the military and humanitarian assistance we we learned this painfully in Bosnia about how this intersects it also to some extent in Somalia as well and I think one of the lessons I draw is that diplomacy didn't have a sufficiently prominent role in those crises as soon as the military got involved the military took over and they claimed they didn't want to take over just with sheer scale and level of organization and sometimes force of personality meant the military did take over and the diplomacy was relegated to a secondary concern and and but in the end of course Dick Holbrook in in in Bosnia and the combined efforts of NATO leaders particularly Tony Blair in Kosovo showed that actually the only way through this is through political leadership so towards the end of this of this period you you found yourself as you said working at number 10 at a time of Blair's Chicago speech of criteria for intervention as you mentioned a successful Sierra Leone on a small scale how how was it speaking truth to power in those years and do you think it it took us in a direction that that led eventually to the to the National Security Council model this was of course the period dismissed by some as as so for government you know well it I have some sympathy with Tony Blair and I do and I'm not party political I've worked for you know Douglas Hurd and John Major for Tony Blair and Jack Straw for Gordon Brown and David Miliband and for David Cameron and and William Hague and each of them in their way I mean one day I might write a book about it but not yet but each of them in their way was a was a public servant and and accepted advice from professionals like me and weighed it in the balance and so I do have some in some ways the most effective politician of them all was Tony Blair and he was excellent at striking a balance between political concerns and professional analysis and advice so I never had any difficulty in providing him with advice and he didn't always accept it but there was no difficulty in the act of speaking truth to power and I think the the sofa government bit came in because there were some members of his government who were just not reliable they just couldn't they couldn't resist going out and talking to the media as soon as a meeting was over and in order to you know we have to remember Tony Blair was at one sort end of the political spectrum of his political party and there are plenty of people at the other end of the political spectrum who wanted to undermine him quite apart from the the the TBGBs as we call them they were out between TB Tony Blair and GB Gordon Brown and the which which ran through that time but I do think that although Cameron made quite a few mistakes as prime minister I think the structure that he set up of a national security council was much better than the than the much more informal style the so-called sofa government decisions that prevailed when Tony Blair was prime minister in some ways it was convenient for me because I was one of those sitting on the sofa and so you didn't have a big process to go through but but in terms of machinery of government and and creating an environment where as we do now at the National Security Council you start with an intelligence briefing from the chair of the JIC the intelligence chiefs can can add and supplement that briefing you have professional advisors you have domestic people like the home secretary and maybe the business secretary around the table along with the foreign secretary and the defense secretary and and you have a common platform of information and an open argument around the table in confidence as to what the options are and what the consequences of the options are and that frankly is better than relying on the decisions of of one individual of course David Cameron didn't always follow the NSC he took his decision to have a referendum on on Brexit only consulting his political advisors there was no there was no sense of ways that where is the national interest here he ignored that question and so even the Cameron system wasn't foolproof but it was better than what preceded it so I mean this period saw interventions it saw national action but also multilateral action you you moved on from number 10 into Middle East posting and then and then to the United Nations as you look back and you reflect how how have these institutions that today we are told that post-war concordat is is is fracturing how do you how do you view the well there's the scorecard for those multilateral institutions over these 20 years or so as we move into the noughties but multilateralism has institutions and it has processes I mean one job you didn't mention that I did was as political director in the foreign office which I did for four years between Egypt and New York and in some ways that was really rewarding because it was the interplay between I basically I was in charge of doing the hard grind on policy across the board for foreign secretaries and for the government of the day and it meant using NATO the United Nations the European Union as ways of of of building coalitions but also it means it's very close working with the French and the Germans as part of the E3 on on the Iran negotiations for example working with the Americans French and Germans on how we deal with Russia and as a threat in Europe and and dealing with allies on the ground in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and the and the rather fragile structures that were emerging there in the governments there and it's you have these these overlapping processes you have a domestic policy process you have a negotiation with close allies about what is the right way to do things and then you deliver that through the international institutions like the UN like the European Union the NATO the G7 and so on and and being involved in that process was fascinating obviously when I was political director I was at one end of that process formulating the policy and and working closely with Washington Paris and Berlin in particular about what the western approach should be then when I went to New York it was a process of delivering that through the Security Council or through the UN agencies or the UN system as my counterparts in NATO and Brussels were doing through their through their organizations as well so it was it was a complex sort of sausage machine of of you know issues emerging what do we do about it what do others think we should do about it how do we deliver that how do we create change on the ground and you know there were successes and failures but there's absolutely no doubt that the multilateral system in that entirety that doesn't mean taking things cold to the United Nations and expecting a solution to emerge it means using that entire sausage machine of policy analysis of development of processing of a negotiation of then delivery has worked very well and the UK was quite good at it and we had that intersection as I say of our roles in all these organizations privileged position in the United Nations leading membership of NATO and of the European Union and one of my sadness is about Brexit but quite apart from the politics of it and the economics of it one of my sadness is about Brexit is it's removed the UK from from that full cruel role in the transatlantic relationship which which we used to I certainly used to we hugely benefit from when I was at number 10 when I was political director in the foreign office and again at the United Nations one of the areas where the EU generally has been regarded as not a central course is in is in matters of intelligence you went from the foreign office into the world of secret intelligence much smaller organization well I suppose not that much smaller than the foreign office but I mean smaller compared to the military that you've worked with and the UN what were the challenges that were sort of highest on your list as you moved in as as C well I of course started my career at C I had my first tap on my shoulder when I was not in university and I'd applied for the foreign office but then got sort of sidetracked if you like and channeled into intelligence and I found after a number of years in intelligence that actually I was more interested in policy and in ideas and in politics than I was in operations and and analysis and my natural home was in diplomacy so I was a bit surprised when I got tapped on the shoulder again this time by Gus O'Donnell who was cabinet secretary at the time to say John we need you to go to Vauxhall Cross to run MI6 and that was that came as a surprise I had to think about it quite hard but I realized that that the service had the intelligence service had suffered damage to its reputation in the aftermath of the faulty intelligence on Iraq on being close to the Americans on treatment of detainees in the counterterrorism efforts and the that presumption of trust in MI6 had eroded and so I when I arrived in MI6 I realized that my job was to modernize the organization and it had been run by internal chiefs for the previous 40 years and frankly the MI6 I left in the in the beginning of the 80s hadn't changed much when I went back 30 years later the rest of the world had changed but the MI6 had not changed very much and I think that lack of modernization was part of the backdrops of the mistakes that it made as a service in the in the in the several years after after 9 11 it had poorly leadership at the time it was dislocated from the rest of of Whitehall and it it wasn't clear about its its role in the in that post Cold War year and it had just it had gone downhill a bit during the 1990s is the truth of it so when I went in I had I had three clear messages to the service which I summed up each in one word one was reputation second was alignment and the third was delivery reputation was about restoring trust and confidence in the service that we had to modernize our methods we had to account for ourselves better to ministers to parliament to our partners in the intelligence community and to to the media as necessary and rebuilding that reputation was essential the second was alignment we had to be much closer to the customers and to our partners in intelligence creation than we had previously been there's a certain sort of dare I say slight arrogance in MI6 about the and pride justifiable pride in the organization but the quality of the operation was more important than the impact that it was having on policy and the sense of separation was valued in historically in the past where it's actually you only have an effect as an intelligence agency if you're very clear who you know what people need what decisions are coming up how your intelligence can act as a platform to better inform the policymaking that's done either at senior official or ministerial level so alignment with the rest of government was was essential and the third was delivery that we had a record of producing good intelligence with some you know major shortfalls on on iraq in the run up to the iraq the iraq war but that's a big shortfall I know but the intelligence was good but the intelligence environment was changing it was becoming much more technology focused and we're at the early stages of the digital revolution and I don't take personal credit for this there are some very able people inside the service who realize that actually we needed to divert our attention less from that sort of human personal relationship as the foundation for building an intelligence relationship we need to rely much more on data and the counterterrorism world actually was where we led this and in some ways the tradition of MI6 was the the James Bond figure the case officer in the field was the was the the key person in any intelligence operation a bit like the fighter pilot and has a massive support team but the fighter pilot in the RAF is the person who has the highest status and we realized actually the most important person in any operational team was the data analyst and it was the data analyst who could pull together data interrogate it work out who we needed to be targeting where the weaknesses were and opponents defenses where the points of access might be and the case officer simply did what the analyst basically told him to do him or her to do and I think that was a revelation a revolution rather revelation to some as well on on how intelligence works so those are my three messages reputation alignment and delivery I mean these in these years and in the decade before you became C of course the another huge change for MI6 was the close working with the with the military in the in these long-term deployments and some of your well later your staff but some of your predecessors as well you know I have talked about how those relationships have been lost in the decades before sort of perhaps cold war relationships which obviously were close where the the estimates were all about the military challenge in many respects in the politics but by by the 2000s it all had to be rebuilt and and and the the question has been raised a number of times at King's is as we've moved away now from these big deployments how will that be maintained I mean are you confident that intelligence is close alignment with with the with the rest of Whitehall can survive a non-operational decade or two well well John I don't think we should create another war just to make sure that the intelligence and military communities are working closely together it's certainly true in a time of crisis whether it's an existential cold war crisis like we have with the Soviet Union or a hot crisis as we had in the Balkans and Iraq and Afghanistan that they they generate you only you only survive and prevail if you can integrate all your assets and actually one of the things we're witnessing in the United States in the failures of some of their policies in is that failure to integrate all the all the different aspects of of American power to make it more than the sum of its parts and I think we could say that's part of the problem they're facing in Afghanistan at the moment the I think for the UK I've been like most of you I expect I've been studying and working on the integrated review which came out last week and I think this just the very title this the understanding the efforts on diplomacy on the military on intelligence on development they do need to be integrated across a single policy if you want to be really effective I'm diffid who I have a lot of admiration for and the work they did that they they spoiled it slightly by having a rather sort isolationist view of themselves a bit like am I six in the 1990s that they thought that they were a bit different that they didn't have to obey the rules of everybody else now I frankly have reservations about this complete dismantling of diffid and its integration into the fcdo because I'm not sure if that is going to enable that high reputation and thought leadership that diffid had in the international development community I'm not sure that will be able to continue but on the intelligence side I think I hope that one of the legacies that I left behind in the service after I left I know Alex Younger certainly has taken it forward and I think Richard Moore wants to as well is that sense that we are only part of a whole we are only one cog in the machine and whilst we do some very unusual things and we have some brilliant people and some legal powers to we can use in the right conditions which make us take us into dangerous places to do very difficult things we are nonetheless just one part of the government machine and we should never lose sight of that and I think the military are sort of learning that as well and the fact that they're not struggling in the markets of Basra or the hot and dusty parts of Afghanistan they're going to be deployed in smaller units they're going to be much more technology dependent and that's the sort of revolution which the intelligence community has gone through as well over the last 10 years and I think this shared use of technology platforms this shared deployment in relatively penny packets in different parts of the world to do leadership, education, intelligence, building, training in an integrated way I think will help keep up those relationship but obviously they won't be as close as when you're working on some nighttime operations in Baghdad and going from an MI6 officer going with a special forces unit to attack a particular ISIS or whatever hold out and getting intelligence there using again and going on to the next target two hours later and going on to the next target two hours after that that develops a sort of blood brotherhood in battle that you can't replicate but we don't want to have those battles in order to just replicate that spirit I mean it's interesting what you say obviously everything's becoming technologically enabled I guess traditionally though MI6 called itself a human organization used to be describing a future that that is probably going to be not just technology enabled but technology centered is this the beginning of the end of the distinction of intelligence? emphatically no the signals intelligence SIGINT and technical intelligence can tell you what people are saying to one another they can tell you what is being written down or being communicated from one person to another but it doesn't tell you what's inside the head of people and what human intelligence tries to get at is intent as we always say in our business threat is a combination of capability and intent SIGINT and military intelligence can tell you a lot about capability but it's human intelligence and only humans that can tell you about intent and what people are really thinking now we don't always get it right it's an art as much as it is a science but that is the essential element that MI6 brings to to thinking about risk and threats and challenges that we face now what is the role of technology in that but I describe the role of data analytics in planning operations I want to penetrate the the Iranian nuclear weapons program or the Chinese cyber program you need to have that facilitated because you can't you don't meet these people at cocktail parties you don't you know you don't have access to them like we had some access to the Russians during the Cold War where you had diplomats and negotiations and international organizations in order to access these people you need it to be technology facilitated and also the way technology has evolved with very strong surveillance capability in places like Russia and China indeed all around the world there's much stronger surveillance capabilities just not restrained by the law or privacy or human rights in places like Russia and China well that actually gives an advantage to the home team that the MI5s of this world are in a stronger position without technology than the MI6s of this world are as we as you know we're the ones who have to go out and forage in difficult places and the MI5 play defense at home now there's a very important role but the new technology environment means that the traditional means of you know false identities and false credit cards or whatever they didn't they last more than five minutes in a modern hostile environment it needs your offensive operations your intelligence collection operations have to be intelligence facilitated and intelligent sorry technology facilitated and technology protected as you go out and operate them and during my time I think when I arrived in in MI6 in a space of just five years my leadership we moved the proportion of our effort that went on technology facilitation from about 35 percent of the government of the agency's resources to just shy of 50 percent and I realized early on that my predecessor's goal of building the service by increasing the manpower was actually the wrong goal to be pursuing that a bit like the army today you actually needed fewer people but more capability and more technology in more investment in technology and different skills in order to deliver more output just having more people that wouldn't achieve it well I was going actually going to ask you about how did you find the the challenge of recruitment and of diversifying your workforce when when when you were there I mean is it still work in progress well I think is a bigger work in progress now I mean as I say my goal was to the biggest goal wasn't building up the size of the service we needed to keep on recruiting we needed to recruit different people and the old method and I was recruited by the tap on the shoulder at university there's still a bit of that going on but the the risk is that you end up recruiting people who are you know traditional traditionally seen as as intelligence officers when I joined I was I was I was diversity I went to a comprehensive school I went to a reprit university I studied science and this was not the normal sort of person that mi6 recruited in the 1970s who gone to public school oxbridge done PPE or the classics or whatever and it was a different approach but the john soar style diversity was not good enough because I was a white middle class and male and and many of the demands of the service were for people with much more diverse human skills intellectual skills personal qualities and who could mix in and build relationships with people who are very different and so women were hugely important part of our operational component and made us much more effective we weren't recruiting women just because it was the right thing to do to be fair and but actually women were vastly better at some operational targets tasks than the men were now I'm generalizing obviously but and likewise if you have people from ethnic minority backgrounds it takes people by surprise they're not expecting that a British intelligence officer would be a black woman with a baby but a black woman with a baby can be a much more effective cover for an intelligent person than being a former military officer who's transferred from the guards into into mi6 I mean you hinted about targets for intelligence operations of course you mentioned the integrated review I wonder if you might say something about this debate about china about whether it's an opportunity or a threat and I suppose Russia which you've touched on but also our alliances we we've gone through a period of of quite significant questioning of some of those structures and under the trump administration the biden administration hasn't settled in yet the bridges have set out their their stall in these in these documents over the last two weeks are we getting it right I mean where where are you on on how we should treat china for example well I thought that first of all I thought the integrated review was a really professional effort and I commend the work that's gone into it I mean as you and your colleagues know I wasn't in favor of brexit I think it's sort of it's a an act of self-harm by the UK but we've done it now and now we've got to make the most of it and we've got to find the right way forward and there are areas where there will be advantages there will be more openings I think the measured on China it's language was in some ways more European than it was American and the the specific paragraph does balance the threat to our security and our values from China with the importance of trade and and investment opportunities and but if you take the review as a whole China permeates through it every reference to technology every reference to human rights and our values every refuge to refuse reference to economic standards and and so on these are all direct or indirect references to China and clearly the most of the biggest transformation in the world in the last 20 30 years has been the rise of China there's an obvious thing to say but I do think China has taken a different direction recently in the 1990s there was still a debate going on in China about how open they should be and what direction they should take in some ways in a very ugly way Tiananmen Square in 89 was a open manifestation of this this battle going on inside China and Hong Kong and the one country two systems left open the possibility that China could become a bit more like Hong Kong as well as Hong Kong becoming a bit more like China but I think iron into the Chinese soul that in after the financial crash I think around that time they concluded that America was in decline that the Chinese system was better than the American system and that China's rise was inevitable and they didn't need to make compromises to the West and by the time Xi Jinping came to power that was deeply established as the received thinking in China and she was chosen because he was a representative of that school of thinking and we're now in a situation where China is much more assertive the days of hide and bide of the long gone in some ways the Trump era has reinforced their conviction that America is in decline we will see what happens through Biden and what happens after Biden because the Chinese think in decades not just in four-year periods of Western governments and I do think that China is a systemic challenge it's a systemic rightful now the Chinese system is not one of invading other countries in a sense they will settle on that you know I'm sure your students start their studies with Sun Tzu and old theories of Chinese warfare where you you maneuver your opponents into defeat before without shooting a without firing a shot the I think that is still part of the Chinese mentality but the range of powers that China has economic technology increasingly military their determination to separate themselves from the western system which we will see I think we obviously see now in the technology world I think we will see over the next 10 to 15 years in the financial world as well they do not want to be dependent upon the dollar that creates too much vulnerability for them and they do want to draw other countries into a dependent relationship with them shooting thing has been open about this he wants to ensure China is less dependent upon foreign countries and the foreign countries are more dependent upon China and and that is a strategy they're pursuing and we see what happens to countries in Southeast Asia that take Cambodia and Laos or whatever what happens there when they become completely dominant on China China takes up their their their politics you know it's case like Australia which are economically dependent upon China biggest trading partner and they become the the target of very severe bullying by China I think for us in Europe my concept of China is it's essentially a a land power yes we talk about the South China Sea and the first island chain and these sort of ideas of how China is projecting its power in a naval sense but Britain and America for obvious reasons were great powers through our maritime capability I think China is focused more on the Eurasian landmass it sees itself as essentially a land power that wants to dominate the Eurasian landmass and at their end of it they're making a very good job of that and we're seeing the other end of the Eurasian landmass and at the moment the European economy is about the same size as the Chinese economy a bit bigger but if we got to the position that Australia's in and our economy in Europe was just a third or a quarter the size of China then I think China would treat us like they treat Australia and that is something we need to really think in think about in a long-term strategic way and I think the integrated review makes some good moves in that direction. Right well thanks John I think we'll move on to some questions because I've had I've had too much of a go so far I mean first of all my colleague Professor Vegano in National Mathematical Sciences asks are we getting cyber security and general security in cyberspace rights in your opinion? Well this is a rapidly moving target and it's something which I talk to a lot to my commercial clients in my new advisory role and each time we think we're making progress we do good things in this country like setting up the national cyber security centre we set out basic minimum standards for companies to abide by and all this helps improve cyber hygiene cyber awareness every big company has this as a top risk on their board agenda but then things like solar winds happen and you have an operation which I'm assured by my former colleagues originated from Russia it probably involved over a thousand Russian software engineers to manage this operation over a period of nine months to a year it's a massive operation and they had access to tens of thousands of entities and were able to pick and choose the hundred or so they really wanted to strip bare over the period of nine months that they were in and this is a scale of operation that we've not seen before and we talked about sort of WannaCry North Korea and sort of throwing their fairly basic skills and seeing what they pick up we talked about not Petia the Russian attack in the Ukraine which went viral and brought down a number of major companies and that was three years or three or four years ago but we're now in a new realm with solar winds of a highly sophisticated cyber attack orchestrated could only be orchestrated by a hostile government and we've seen with the recent attack on Microsoft a similar attack possibly coming from from China and the scale of state threats is getting greater and greater so I was struck in the integration review about the cyber operations center a cyber force I think it's called which to my mind is a way of being clear that we have offensive cyber capabilities as well as defensive ones I think we need to get into a world of cyber deterrence I think we need to be clearer about our doctrine on cyber and I think one of the things that we can do during the Biden administration is bring together a small group of democratic allies to work out what we really think what our posture really is on cyber and communicate that to hostile powers and to hostile crime groups or terrorist groups to be clear that there are certain barriers here certain thresholds above which there will be consequences and you have to set out what those consequences are but I think there's the technology keeps on advancing but our doctrine and policy is struggling to keep up with it. Thank you. Brian McLeod on a sort of national security structures question points out that the structures even with the NSC seem to move and change and evolve with each prime minister of course they have to to some extent but she asks whether those strategic decision making structures ought to be a little less flexible and that prime ministers need to be to be guided into a certain system rather than being able to you know share the role of cabinet secretary with the national security advisor on a whim and then change their mind I mean I you know do we have structures that are worth embedding for the future? Well it's a valid question but in some ways I have great admiration for the way in which the Americans have embedded their interagency process and the way in which when I was working in the embassy in Washington in the 1990s I could feed into my contacts in the in the Pentagon and Langley in the in Foggy Bottom at the State Department in the NSC at the White House and in various congressional years what British concerns were in knowing how that interagency process would come together and it really worked really effectively much more so in a sense than the British interagency process which didn't really exist at that stage and then of course along comes Donald Trump and you know you try telling Donald Trump you've got to listen to this intelligence review you've got to weigh the views you just throw it out of the window and one of the one of the reasons why America made a a catalog of of errors during the Trump era was because the interagency process simply collapsed and I think what we're seeing now under the Biden administration is a much more sophisticated group of people using the interagency process as it should be used so I think my answer to your colleague is you can take a horse to water but you can't make them drink and if that horse is Donald Trump you won't drink with curiously with Boris Johnson although he has some curious or character qualities he is quite admiring of the public service and he does listen to people even if you don't always see the evidence of that and watching it evolve as a leader through the pandemic has actually been quite interesting to see how dependencies become on scientists and how the big mistakes he made early on in the process and that was not listening to scientists enough and how the big thing he's got right which is the vaccine program how he is listening to scientists and entrepreneurs he listened to them at the right time on the right issue thankfully I think it is right to develop these interagency processes we've got the JIC the Joint Intelligence Committee which has existed for I don't know 50 years or more you probably know better than I do it's even 70 years I think the JIC has existed for we've got the Chief of Defence staff overseeing all the military there's very good military civilian integration there we've got the National Security Council I think these are all good structures to use in government but you've got to have ministers who actually respect them and want to use them. Thanks lots of questions coming in now so I'm going to be short and trying for a lot of curveballs at you so Dale Addison asks do you think things would have been different or turned out differently in Syria if the British MI6 and the Chief of Defence staff had gone down a route with political guidance or agreement rather to arm train and equip the Free Syrian Army rather than the policy we adopted? The CDS at the time David Richards and I were very clear at the National Security Council that if we wanted to make a strategic difference we needed to get involved in a in a more substantial way. David Cameron and the politicians view they were scarred not surprisingly by Iraq and Afghanistan was that we couldn't get involved in another war but just because we couldn't do everything doesn't mean we should do nothing. The trouble was we ended up with a position where we did enough in terms of arming and equipping the opposition to keep the war going but not enough to prevail, enable them to prevail and that was true of us and the French, of the Americans, of our Arab partners in the Gulf and so on. We did enough to keep the suffering going but not enough to bring it to an end and our advice in 2012 after the conflict had been going on for a year was that only the sort of interventions of air zones and direct military engagement of protecting the opposition on the ground would be enough to turn the tide. Unfortunately that has proved right but it took another, well the suffering is still going on in Syria. I mean some would say the biggest influence of the British was to have had the parliamentary vote just before the decision by Obama not to implement the red line but anyway. Sophie Lane asks, you've touched on this a little bit but with regard to the integrated review why is there so little reference to Europe, Brexit and the Commonwealth? Well there are two different questions. The big sort of, the ghost of the feast is the European Union and one of the drivers along with China and technology of the review is Brexit and whilst the review is quite strong on the United States, on NATO and working with France and Germany and Italy and Ireland and so on it really underplays the importance of the European Union. I think there's a post-Brexit hangover on both sides of the channel, we're seeing it in this vaccine row, we're seeing it over the Northern Ireland protocol and frankly in a world which is as contested as it is, we both sides need to get over this hangover. We have common values with our continental colleagues, we have very similar approaches to business and to international standards, we have a similar view of the world, we really do have to get beyond Brexit but I fear for political reasons on both sides of the channel that both sides at political level will continue to pick at each other, continue to pick the Brexit scab so that it can carry on bleeding for both sides political advantage, it's not a pretty picture. A number of observations and questions about China which I'll sort of group together a little bit. Thomas Duffy was interested in your suggestion of China as a Eurasian power, of course the US and others have noted that the Chinese navy has expanded dramatically in the last years but he asks if they are land power should we expect this Chinese naval the PLA navies to crest and decline in effect because fundamentally as you argue they are land power and an anonymous questioner asks whether Xi Jinping's focus is reflective of systemic behaviour or rather the individual leader, I mean you seem to suggest that China had changed before you became leader, I don't wonder how far it is the system. Yeah well let me take those two, I mean China's not going to roll back its investment in the navy, it wants to be a maritime power as well but I think that is a way of extending its area of defence, it wants to have a sort of, you can't have a sphere of influence in maritime waters but it does want to control the South China Sea, it doesn't want the US Navy to be patrolling between Taiwan and the mainland as it did 20 years ago and now can no longer do, it wants to be able to push back its opposition further away so that China's got greater freedom within, particularly within the first island chain of operation and that it controls and dominates those areas. So I think they'll continue to want to do that, I think the string of pearls approach, there's still something going on about that in the Indian Ocean with their efforts in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Djibouti on the African coast and so on. So I think they will continue to build up their maritime capabilities but I stick by my view that fundamentally they see things in terms of land and that's why the Belt and Road is so, you know the Maritime Road oddly is a reinforcer of the belt which is stretching China's influence across Eurasia and on Xi, it's a mix of the two of course, I do think Xi Jinping emerged through the system because he and his people who won the arguments about the direction of Marxism-Leninism inside the party. So in some ways he's a product of that but equally his personal approach, his high appetite for risk, we see much higher risks being taken by Xi than we have under Hu Jintao or Jiang Jemin or Deng Xiaoping. I think there is a human aspect to this, I don't really subscribe to the great man theory of history but I do think leaders have a big influence on their countries and can nudge things in one direction or another and I think Xi is doing that in China. Shuan Lu asks what's better for the world, a China that's open or closed to the rest of the world. I kind of know the answer. In the long term it has to be open but let's not be naive about this. I remember the time when the anniversary of the Nanking Massacre when the Chinese opened up a little portal for hostility towards Japan and I think got overwhelmed. I mean if China had an open political system you'd see forces of Chinese nationalism which would be very hard for the Chinese to control and be pretty ugly in the region as well. So each country has to evolve gradually. I think it's a great shame that China is undermining and destroying the one country, two systems in Hong Kong so I think there are real benefits there for China and I think this Taiwan issue is going to become really tough over the next 15 years because you'll be hard pressed to find a single person in Taiwan that'll own a political party that wants to be incorporated back into the mainland especially given the direction that China itself has taken. So obviously in the long run an open China is better but it can't happen overnight but for the last seven years it's been going the opposite direction. Right we're coming close to our time limits John but a couple of questions I'll throw at you and you can give very short answers if you like. So one interesting one is how far you think the intelligence community in Britain is well placed to support the Indo-Pacific tilt if it goes ahead which is talked about in the IR? Quite well. I think we've got a good reach. I mean I work closely with counterparts in India in obviously Australia, New Zealand, part of the Five Eyes and we have a means of communicating with the Chinese on intelligence channels which I think is worth using and to be clear areas where we can work together, genuine counter-terrorism issues but equally be clear about what our values are and what we weren't subscribed to and I think having those requires a pivot obviously. It's basically a pivot away from counter-terrorism and away from supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the people are highly adaptable and I'm sure we can do it. I'm afraid to say that I'd like to continue and I'm sure everybody else would we've come into 12 o'clock and you've done a great job in fielding a range of questions. I apologise to those whose questions I haven't managed to turn to although they're still in the chat function. So John can I thank you very much indeed. Obviously the university is delighted to have you as a visiting professor and has benefited from it for a number of years but thank you also for today where you're very gamely taken on a pretty wide range of questions and areas of specialisms. I think if there's a career to look to for many of our students and friends something as diverse as yours is an amazing model but thank you very very much indeed for your time today. Well pleasure thank you and I very much look forward to re-engaging in person with the staff and students at Kings and let's hope we'll be able to do that this summer. Thanks so I'll hand over to Charlie Laderman who's the convener of these of these conversations. Thanks Charlie. Thanks to you both thanks to John and to John for a really fascinating discussion and to all of you who ask questions it was the range of the discussion was really excellent so thank you on that. Just a final sub-advertisement on the next two events that are coming up. Firstly we have Moira Andrews next week who'll be talking about the interaction between law and strategy, someone who's been in the in the seat of government and as a legal advisor to the foreign and Commonwealth office as it then was and talking through the inter-relationship between those so particularly those of you who are looking for a career in law she will provide some really fascinating insights into that and then the following week we'll have Kevin O'Brien who'll be talking to us about the role of digital security within strategy so we've got a great programme of events and it's yeah we want to as many of you with us as possible but just before we end I just want to thank again John and to John for a great discussion to Danielle, Kevin for setting this up and yes just a real highlight I think of our calendar this year so thank you. Thank you all very much. Thanks. Thank you. Bye.