 Rwy'n meddwl, yr ydych chi'n gweithio, gwasanaeth, gweithio, gyda'n ei wneud y mae'r cyfnodd yma, ac mae'n cael ei wneud i'r cyfnodd, y Prifysgol i'r Cyngor Llywodraeth, yw Professor Ed Byrn, ac mae'r Cyngor Llywodraeth i'r cyfrifoddau i'r cyfrifoddau. Rwy'n meddwl. Rwy'n meddwl. Rwy'n meddwl am ychydig sydd wedi'u cyfrifoddau fydd, mae'r cyfrifoddau i'r cyfrifoddau i'r Cyngor Llywodraeth, a'r ddau sy'n ddau i'r rhai ddechrau'r llwyddon ar gyfer unrhyw hwnnw, ac mae'r ddaeth i'r ddweud o'r cyffredin yn ddweud o'r cyffredin i'r ddweud. Mae'r ddweud o'r cyffredin yn y cyffredin er mwynig wedi'i meddwl i'r ddechrau. Yn ydych chi'n ddweud o'r ddweud o'r anhywll hwnnw ymlaen chi, mae'n ddweud i'r ddweud o'r anhywll ar gyfer y ddweud. dropped me a amongst global Europe. It gives me enormous pleasure in the presence of such distinguished audience from King's itself, and more widely to introduce Southwest Conference LGBSE to give his inaugural lecture as a visiting Professor at King's. Sir John joined the Foreign Office in 1974 and in his early years work in Yemen, Syria and South Africa on behalf of MI6. Un o'r gwrthwyllaf yma wedi'i gynhyrch ar gyfer yr Athe Bael yn amser i'r Prifysg�d Ddechrau Llywodraeth. Felly yn 2001, byddwn yn iawn i'r ap'r pen yn Ymgyrchu Ymdig derbyn i esbyn Yuw, dyfodol i London yn 2003 yn llogu llyfrwydd yr athe Llywodraeth yn y Rheidio Llywodraeth i ymgyrchu Fael yn y Ddechrau Ymgyrch. In 2007, Sir John became the UK permanent representative to the United Nations. Sir John served as chief of MI6 from 2009 to 2014. He is a governor of the Ditchley Foundation and chairman of macro advisory partners. Sir John, welcome to Kings and thank you indeed for agreeing to give the 2015 war studies annual lecture. Please welcome Sir John. Well, thank you very much Professor Byrn for that warm welcome. Thank you for sowing a bit of confusion about my early career, which I'm sure will get the Russian studying well. And thank you for being here to chair tonight's proceedings. I'm also very grateful to the vice principal, Professor Evelyn Welch, and the dean, Professor Denise Livesley, for inviting me to be a professor at the Department of War Studies. And also Professor Theo Farrell for asking me to do tonight's annual lecture. And it's a great honour to be here at Kings. And thank you all for coming this evening. In particular, I worked for 13 foreign secretaries during my time as in public service from David Irwin to Philip Hammond. I don't know if Philip Hammond is superstitious about being number 13. But anyway, the first one I worked with closely was Douglas Hurd. And that was during those momentous times after the end of the Cold War when Yugoslavia was collapsing and there are problems aplenty for us to deal with. And I learnt a huge amount from Douglas at that time. So it's a special honour for me. The Lord Hurd is with us tonight. Thank you. Now, I suspect some of you are here tonight to see if you can find out a bit about what the chief of MI6 does each day. Well, let me tell you, you arrive in the early morning via the Thames. You have a chauffeur driven mini submarine. It takes you to a high tech docking area underwater. An executive rocket lift shoots you up to your office, your plush office. And there are special editions of all the newspapers waiting for you. You scan them quickly. Very quickly. They're in invisible ink. And years ago, there's a special desk there. Years ago, a special desk designed by Q. And you press the button. And a specially chilled dry martini popped up. I thought this is a pretty old fashioned place. Needs to be modernised. So I had it replaced with one which made green tea instead. Anyway, you dip your pen in the green ink and you start on the overnight top secret files and life begins to get serious. There are terrorists swarming over the Middle East. You've got Syria collapsing. You've got British citizens taken hostage. Ukraine is besieged. North Korea are testing a new generation of missiles. The Iran talks look shaky. And our top companies are subject to cyber attacks. And that's the start of most days. But let me start in the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962. I turned seven that year. Who here, with the exception of Laurie, knows how many nuclear bombs were live tested that year in 1962? Have we got a guess? 25. Any advance on 25? It was 178. It's almost one nuclear explosion every other day. And 117 of those bombs blew up in the atmosphere on land, at sea and high altitude. It's hard now to believe the focus on those days with nuclear weapons. I broke my arm around that time and the doctor told me children had weak bones because of radioactivity in our milk and food. And radiation got into the cinema. Doctor Strange Love came out in 1964. I don't know if you remember it. US President Peter Sellers phones the Soviet leader. I've got bad news and I've got really bad news. And the bad news is a ghastly mistake has been made. An American bomber is on its way to the Soviet Union and it's going to drop a nuclear weapon. The really bad news is it can't be recalled. And in the satire a brawl breaks out between the Russian ambassador and the Bellachos American general. And Peter Sellers declares, gentlemen, you can't fight here. This is the war room. It is a triumph of cinema and it shows some subtle wisdom as well. It shows the US and Soviet leaders locked in an ideological battle but sharing human understandings about security and survival. In the movie that's not enough. Events spiral out of control and the film ends with nuclear obliteration. Of course the Cold War didn't end that way. We stuck to dialogue. We built on what we had in common. A meticulous diplomacy produced a series of historic treaties. Non-proliferation. Nuclear arms reductions. The Helsinki Accords. Plus in the end some unexpected warmth between the leaders in Washington and Moscow. That threat of nuclear confrontation including by miscalculation or events running out of control is still with us. We keep that in mind as we deal with Vladimir Putin's Russia and as we watch North Korea. But today other threats feel more immediate. Terrorism. Cyber attacks. Failed states. One of the privileges of being a British diplomat abroad is meeting wise people from other countries. And some of my wisest counterparts are being from China. One Chinese leader was recently asked in private what was his biggest concern as China grew stronger. And I wouldn't have expected his reply. 400 million people he said were on the move from the China's countryside to the cities. We're confident we'll provide jobs and we'll build houses and schools and the transport. His biggest concern wasn't those sprawling practical matters it was something else. He said what these hundreds of millions of people hold on to their basic values. Values. It was values that were central to his concept of China. And without values there could be no sustainable order. My theme this evening is about values and order. And occasionally you'll have to forgive me the odd monumental generalisation. But after the disaster of the two world wars international security arrangements were set up based on shared global understandings about order. We differed with the Soviet Union on values but we found enough common ground to coexist. Our new century is looking rather different. Longstanding ideas of order and values are being challenged in many different ways. Building new understandings for order and values is the central task of our time for political leaders and diplomats. And yes intelligence agencies too. The relationship between the US and China will largely define the way this century plays out. The greatest power in the world since we lost that title has been the United States our closest ally and a country that shares our values. China has risen rapidly to be the second greatest power. Both the US and China believe they're exceptional countries that they should be exceptions to rules that apply to others. And they're both China especially sensitive to anything they can screw as interference. They've been economic competitors but so far each has been able to benefit from the economic engagement whether it's investment or trade or market access. But they have quite different instincts and traditions when it comes to order and values. If they can find shared understandings on order and values they'll set a striking lead for the rest of the planet. Over the past 50 years we've had no major miscalculations between Washington and Beijing. And there is no diplomatic task more important than keeping it that way. Now Henry Kissinger has done more than anyone to define and lead US and wider Western relations with China. Another privilege of recent years for me has been to get to know Dr Kissinger. And there's no one I've learnt more from if I'm honest. His latest book World Order came out last year. And it's packed with the most amazing insights on the great themes of modern history. The state, the Westphalian system, globalization, legitimacy, the balance of power, order and values. His emphasis on the power of evolutionary rather than revolutionary change struck a special chord for me. He said evolutionary change strengthens order by building consensus around it. Revolutionary change destroys the old order and what freedom there was. It is usually replaced with more order and less freedom. And we'll come back to this. He also tackled some of the paradoxes and contradictions of the modern world. Vast regions of the world, he wrote, never shared in the Western concept of order, they only acquiestin it. And these reservations are becoming explicit, for example in Ukraine and the South China Sea. And Dr Kissinger captures the challenges facing today's politicians and diplomats. Today's practitioners have much to learn from him in the search for common ground on values to sustain global order. One thing I'm concerned about tonight is losing my voice. My own diplomatic career has seen powerful examples of diplomacy bringing together order and values. I was First Secretary in South Africa as the Cold War ended. Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister. She was no fan of sanctions. But sanctions and diplomatic pressure helped break apartheid. Thanks to the arms embargo, South African troops were being outgunned by Cubans and Angolans. And South Africa basically ran out of money. When FW De Cleck became president in the summer of 1989, mid-1989, foreign reserves covered just two weeks of imports. And drastic change was unavoidable. So 25 years ago this month, on the 11th of February 1990, Nelson Badmidella walked free from prison. And I have a sort of personal experience of that time because by some chance I happened to be the first British official to meet Nelson Badmidella after his release. It was the morning after his famous release on the Sunday evening. And I heard a friend of mine phoned me and said, he's giving a small press conference to a pool of journalists in the garden of Archbishop Tutu's house. So I rushed around hoping to capture glimpse of the great man. Not only did I capture glimpse of him, I realised that as there were only about 20 or 30 people there, I had a chance to actually say something to him. So I never confessed this to Douglas because he was Foreign Secretary at the time. But on the spot made up a message from the British government. And I approached Mr Mandela and said, hello, well you've got to start somewhere in these conversations. Mr Mandela, on behalf of the British government and British people, welcome to freedom. And I felt very proud of myself having done that. And he immediately said, ah, Great Britain, you're a very important country to us and to what lies ahead. Please extend my warmest regards to Mrs Thatcher and say I look forward to seeing her soon. Well, that was a pretty momentous moment. And I had the good fortune to meet Nelson Mandela half a dozen times later. But that first one minute exchange in the garden of Archbishop Tutu's house stayed with me because it captured the essence of the dignity and the compassion of this great man. And it was four years later that Douglas, I accompanied Douglas to Nelson Mandela's inauguration as president. And the ceremony marked a triumph for negotiation itself. And Nelson Mandela epitomised as no one else really in modern history has done a new order based on new values. Above all the value of generous reconciliation. South Africa stands out as a supreme moral example. A flinching moral reckoning with past crimes, but also shared forgiveness, shared optimism. It's a winning formula and it's helped South Africans move forward largely in harmony. Compare South Africa to the fall of the Soviet Union and the communist system. Central Europe has confronted its past and overcome it. Russia has not. Presidents Gorbachev and Yltsin did the world a huge service in ending the Cold War peacefully. And I was in meetings with senior Russians many times after 1991 as they grappled with open markets and democracy. And Russia started well. It shouldered the full debt burden of the former Soviet Union. It proclaimed political freedoms and introduced market reforms. And Russia became a very different place. But there has been no serious moral reckoning in Russia with the crimes of the Soviet era. No assertion of new healthy values. And Russian politics have slipped back. Less democratic, more autocratic. Russia at first welcomed the cooperative European security arrangements. And then it got frustrated by them and then undermined them. First in Georgia and now in a much larger way in Ukraine. And the Westerns responded with sanctions. Now sanctions never worked quickly to change minds in a more positive direction. Even when carefully targeted sanctions hurt ordinary people before they hurt the leaders causing the trouble. But over time sanctions do impose huge costs. And costs have consequences. A regime's authority declines and its options narrow. I've seen many examples of this. South Africa, Serbia, Libya, Iran. Even in Iraq, Saddam had cut back on expensive military programs as sanctions bit would that we had known it in 2003. Sanctions on Russia are imposing costs. But the Ukraine crisis is no longer just about Ukraine. It's now a much bigger, more dangerous crisis between Russia and Western countries about values and order in Europe. Russia still has a formidable nuclear arsenal. When President Putin was first able to raise Russian military budgets his first priority was to modernize it. He wants these ultimate weapons in his armory just for this sort of confrontation. And only three weeks ago to demonstrate this a bare nuclear bomber flew up the English Channel. Mr Putin insists that Russia's own security is at stake in Ukraine. That European values and European order for Ukraine undermine Russian values and Russian order. This position flatly contradicts all the agreements Russia itself has signed and helped negotiate supporting European order and values. But we deal with the Russia we have, not the Russia we'd like to have. We could take on Moscow, stepping up our response, provide weapons so that Ukraine can defend itself. More stringent sanctions. But how would Mr Putin respond? As long as Mr Putin sees the issue in terms of Russia's own security he will be prepared to go further than we are. He would respond with further escalation on the ground, perhaps cyber attacks against us. We've had thousands of deaths in Ukraine. We could start to get tens of thousands and then what? The test I have learnt for any policy option is not so much what is the right next step. The test much more importantly is where will we be in two years time if we follow this path. Policies can be strong, principled and honourable but they also need to be wise and reflect the realities of the balance of power. A Chinese minister was asked recently about Ukraine in private. He gave a very Chinese and very apt reply. He said, Ukraine has lost Crimea. Russia has lost Ukraine. The United States has lost Russia. We've all lost stability. Back to stability, back to order and ultimately back to values. It's easy to pose these dilemmas. Sometimes there aren't any really good answers. Ukrainians look to us to help them have their chance to be able to enjoy the sort of western freedoms and values that we enjoy here in the rest of Europe. We may end up with a new debilitating frozen conflict in Ukraine for years to come. That is a wretched outcome for Ukrainians but it may be the least bad attainable outcome. For now we can't identify shared values with Russia. Our attempt to do so to find order based on values is leading to disorder. Events are moving fast and Chancellor Merkel's efforts to restore calm certainly deserve our full support. Once we have calm, assuming we can get it, we'll need a new approach to coexistence with Mr Putin's Russia. The convergence between Russia and the West which we had hoped for after the Cold War I don't think is going to happen unless our Mr Putin is in charge. We sort of know that now. But any foreseeable change of power in Russia may well be for the worse. It's not easy and managing Russia is going to be the defining problem in European security for years to come. Of course Ukraine looks straight forward compared to values in the Middle East. Early on I studied Arabic and I met Shelly, my wife in Yemen. The first time we met I took her out to dinner at the Shererson Hotel. For about 20 minutes she looked at me and said you're really a spy aren't you working for MI6? Her intuition was spot on as it has been for the last 35 years even if it turned a few heads the way she announced it. But she's been my staunchest ally and first is critic for the last 35 years so thank you for our journey together. After we got married we went to Syria on our first thing and we were pretty naive at that time we knew that diplomats gave the occasional dinner parties and our first dinner party was rather memorable and left us with a deep lesson. We invited about 16 Syrians round for dinner and we'd done it fairly carefully we had all sorts of salads and foods lined up and we had one dish that was going to cook in the oven which I remember still to this day was Hawaiian chicken so we carefully put it in lit the oven, went away and after about an hour of drinking whiskey and gin and tonic and everything else with our guests we came back into the kitchen and found the gas had run out the oven was stone cold and the chicken was raw. So we panicked a little bit and we had a Syrian friend who helped us and she said have you got a pressure cooker? So we dug out the pressure cooker which in those days we had a standard fitment of 1980s kitchens and we put the Hawaiian chicken in the pressure cooker and I went back and pulled more whiskey and more gin and tonic for another 40 minutes or so and I finally went back into the kitchen and said this must be ready by now and of course it was cooked but there was the pressure cooker cooling down I said it must be ready by now anyway I took the weights off the top of the pressure cooker and a stream of Hawaiian chicken spurted out and hit the ceiling and I said what the hell are we going to do now? and shelly said just calm down opened it up, pulled it into a dish scraped it off the ceiling took it into our now whiskey soaked guests and provided them at long last for their supper they've been waiting for the last two hours for but it taught me a monumental political lesson that if you take the lid off a pressure cooker when it's not and it's too early you get a frightful mess and that brings me on to Egypt I was ambassador in Cairo in the two years after 9-11 we encouraged President Mubarak's reforms limited as they were and economic reform boosted investment and growth but in the absence of accountability it also boosted corruption Mubarak's security obsessed regime just couldn't get its head around political reform you might say that western leaders indulged Mubarak for too long but abandoning him overnight generated distrust across the Arab world and Henry Kissinger in world order makes a wise point in international affairs he wrote a reputation for reliability is a more important asset than showing tactical cleverness the world was impressed by the Tahriria square demonstrations was this the opening to the sort of middle eastern style pluralism that we've been working for looking for for decades no Tahriria square wasn't Egypt Egyptians knew two sources of power the regime backed by the army and the Echwan, the Muslim brothers and after the army removed Mubarak these two forces first tried to collude and when that failed they collided the army were never going to be seen off by the Echwan and the Muslim brothers never seriously tried to coexist now the military are back in power under President Sisi he was trying to address Egypt's deep-seated problems he knows Egypt needs to balance its books that it can't afford these subsidies on food and fuel and he has to remove them however tough and unpopular that might be President Sisi is also calling for Islam to face up to its own extremist elements and that's important political leadership and Egypt is finding its own path to order and values evolution better than revolution I think that we in the UK should work with President Sisi and support his efforts to deliver change at a sustainable rate further east there's been a massive diplomatic effort over 12 years that have been part two to try to strike a deal with Iran over its nuclear program after the strong backing that the UK gave the US over Iraq Jack Straw the foreign secretary felt able to act without US participation over Iran and I was back in London then as Professor Byrne says and I joined French and German colleagues as the leaders of the original E3 negotiating team and our Iranian counterparts were none other than Javar Tzarif then Iranian ambassador at the UN and Hassan Rahani then the Secretary of the National Security Council same team we have today we had meeting after meeting in different cities culminating in three days of exhausting negotiations in Paris in November 2004 French Foreign Ministry started with a grand dinner of grand lunch on the Friday but by Sunday afternoon their hospitality had run dry and we were literally living on tap water and crisps it may be that that diet helped because we hammered out an agreement in those rather hungry hours Iran was to spend all nuclear enrichment activity within a wider process to find a new relationship between Iran and Europe sadly in diplomacy the effort that goes into reaching a deal isn't commensurate with that deal sticking the deal was implemented but this one didn't stick Washington were reluctant to ease the trade restrictions needed to hold Iran to the bargain and sentiments in Iran turned against it and timing makes such a difference in diplomacy just as the Bush administration at the start of its second term was beginning to think new thoughts about Iran and the E3 initiative were beginning to think about what flexibility they could show the Iranians elected President Ahmadinejad who scuppered the agreement before any of that new flexibility could be deployed but this time there was an impressive global response to that to the threat that Iran posed to global values and global order and the Saudi Council with Russia and China in active support imposed sanctions on Iran and the US and the European Union added their own financial measures Iran denies that sanctions have had a political effect well every country subject to sanctions takes that line but slowly, painfully sanctions have changed attitudes in Iran and now the Obama administration is pushing hard from the front agreement with Iran is possible in my view and highly desirable but the politics need to work both in Tehran and in Washington and there needs to be confidence that Iran is really not going to develop nuclear weapons I hope we get agreement and in my view a partial agreement is better than no agreement and I certainly hope it lasts longer than when I helped a broker over 10 years ago I think the Iran example shows how under the right conditions a global consensus can form around threats to order and values in the 1990s we had a good run with Russia and China in responding to dangerous problems in the Middle East in the former Yugoslavia and parts of Africa it was Iraq that changed it I was in Cairo in the run up to the Iraq conflict so wasn't part of the internal British policy debate but I did see the case for intervention in Iraq and I later supported our wider role in Afghanistan I thought we would open the way to a more modern and tolerant order in those countries and better values there has been real progress in Afghanistan though the cost in lives was higher than we had ever imagined and Iraq while the communities suppressed by Saddam the Shia and Kurds fair much better but the country has fallen prey to sectarianism it lacks the order needed for any modern state and what progress has been made has been set back by the chaos next door in Syria in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan Britain is pulling back from international intervention just as America pulled back after the Vietnam War when crisis erupted in Libya ministers didn't feel it right to sit by as Gaddafi crushed decent Libyans demanding an end to dictatorship but nor did they want to get embroiled in Libya's problems by sending in ground forces and I understood all these pressures after Gaddafi was ousted there was no one to hold the ring to help manage a transition to something better as the US and Britain and other allies had done in Baghdad and Kabul Libya had no institutions who or what would take over the answer those were the weapons the result growing chaos exploited by fanatics Syria different situation same outcome I was cautious in our UK discussions about intervening in Syria bearing in mind the lessons of Iraq but I supported the case for responding hard when Assad used chemical weapons against his own people a red line had been crossed but there was no public parliamentary appetite to use force in response Parliament voted it down yes intervening has huge risks and huge costs not intervening also has huge risks and huge costs which outcome is worse Afghanistan and Iraq or Syria and Libya maybe it's too early to say but we do need to have that debate in this country about Russia, Egypt, Iran Syria, Iraq these threaten our wider security and they present our political leaders with wide reaching policy dilemmas but at least there are identifiable national leaders that we can work with however tough or unpleasant they might be we can imagine hard discussions and compromises about values and order the essence of diplomacy is dealing with people we disagree with diplomacy gets into quite new orders of difficulty when states lose control over their own territory take Al Qaeda and the Islamic State phenomena what possible negotiation can you have with terrorists like those back in 2010 I gave the first public speech by a chief of MI6 I said you and millions of people like you go about your business in our cities and towns free of fear why? because the British government works tirelessly out of the public eye to stop terrorists and would be terrorists in their tracks for a while we in MI6 and MI5 and GCHQ felt on top of the problem but since 2013 the terrorist threat has risen again thousands of European citizens have gone to Syria to fight against Assad some of them are returning to fight against us and are emboldening others in their communities the recent attacks in France and now Denmark were shocking but they were not unexpected given the much higher threat we now face we've joined an international coalition to hit back against Islamic State and here and there its advance is being slowed even reversed but as battles rage and atrocities are committed the regime and Islamist terrorists find common cause in attacking moderate Syrian forces this is part of a wider battle Christians in the Middle East Jews in Europe are being killed simply because of their faith and it's being done in the name of Islam a fferocious clash between different branches and interpretations of Islam is taking place violent Islamist fundamentalism rejects our every value it rejects the world's most basic unit of order the modern state it uses our technology we see post-modern social networking being used to boast about pre-modern savagery and this phenomenon of Islamist extremism across the Middle East in Nigeria and elsewhere is a disaster above all for Muslims Muslims are the biggest victim of Islamist terrorism now it isn't for us to solve this problem within the Islamic tradition that's a task for the Islamic world itself we look to Islamic countries to stop these fanatics denounce their ideologies and offer a better path for their youth but don't expect any quick fixes decisions and doctrines that Islam adopted centuries ago fall to be reexamined and Muslims need to find a modern Islamic framework for values and order compatible with the values and order and freedoms of non-Muslims across the planet we in the west can best help what will be a long and arduous process by quietly supporting those in the Muslim world who step forward to lead it meanwhile we do what we can to keep the terrorist threat at bay it can't be defeated in the usual sense of the word so how do we keep terrorism at bay my final point is on security and technology now who in this room didn't lock their front door when they left earlier today no one who did lock their door and most of you I hope but when we lock our doors we make various assumptions we make assumptions about burglars about the local police about the honesty of our fellow citizens about the small print of our home insurance policies and about our rights privacy what if those assumptions are wrong what if a criminal can just appear outside your front door from anywhere in the world and try thousands of keys in your lock every second well welcome to the world of cyber crime and cyber terrorism and thanks in large part to Mr Snowden our intelligence picture to cover these challenges is weaker than it was all of us you and me here tonight are more at risk from terrorism and cyber attack and why? mainly because technology companies have scaled back their previous quiet cooperation with intelligence agencies we all want and we all rely on the amazing benefits of highly networked technologies we want maximum freedom we want maximum privacy we also want maximum protection we want maximum crime our security agencies take privacy really seriously the rules governing use of data are strict and they are tightly monitored and when staff breach those rules the consequences are immediate people have been sacked and walked out of the building I respect privacy advocates I want privacy as much as you maybe even more than you but I do feel that privacy advocates sometimes take security for granted I applaud the technology companies for what they have achieved they do amazing things and they have all sorts of laws and regulations and reputations that they have to balance but national security your and my securities we gather here tonight the security that allows every person in the UK to rest easy this evening that security does not come out of thin air or good intentions it takes diligence and hard effort from us all it can't just be left to the intelligence agencies I've urged this before and I do so again tonight technology companies and governments and we the public have to work together to counter those who menace us and our way of life none of us can afford for terrorists to use Facebook and other social media to plot their next attack confident that no one can monitor them we have to develop a new order for our new technological era and maybe some new values too now this is not easy in fact it's very hard it's hard procedurally it's hard conceptually but we will pay a much bigger price if we fail principle I spent 36 years in public service and a career in public service remains unsurpassed in terms of job satisfaction you're contributing to wider public goods in my case peace and security and I commend it to those who are students here at King's College I began and ended my public service in MI6 it wasn't quite as extensive as Professor Burns suggested but I did learn especially in my last five years how good intelligence underpins our freedoms it helps our leaders understand the intentions and instincts of people who want to hurt us during the cold war intelligence helped avoid Dr Strange Love's Armageddon when all those nuclear tests were happening and both sides understood what it was at stake and made wise calculations intelligence is even more crucial now penetrating terrorist movements tracking cyber activists understanding hostile foreign powers I spent many a fretful weekend in the last five years concerned for our officers and our secret agents deployed on high risk operations and I say to you tonight the men and women of MI6 and MI5 and GCHQ have extraordinary commitment and loyalty to this nation and to our nation's values and the secret agents who work for MI6 are mainly not British they're foreign nationals operating in their own countries directly risking their lives they work for us for different reasons but for many of them one reason comes first they believe in the British approach to values and order and their courage sets us a towering example and the greatest honour of my career has been to lead MI6 my simple point tonight is this in our lifetime the limits of security have changed dramatically from mutually assured destruction by nuclear weapons to risks of social breakdown through terrorism or cyber attacks and ideas of order and values are shifting too the way we think about security needs to change accordingly I believe it will change our public servants and political leaders have momentous responsibilities for making wise judgments at moments of intense crisis at my darker moments I wonder what happens if Russia destabilises a NATO ally if Islamic State advances on all fronts if those coordinated terrorists attacked the western cities and whilst all this happens the eurozone crashes and a major western bank is brought down by a cyber attack there will be quite a pile of top secret files that are following morning in front of my successor but after those 36 years and my five final years of chief MI6 I have passed those files on to someone else don't get me wrong I do so with full confidence but also with a certain private relief now there are many friends and family here tonight but one person is not my father died six years ago he was 16 when World War II broke out in 1942 he trained as a navigator flying swordfish and Avenger bombers from aircraft carriers he crossed the Atlantic from New York in a convoy which were attacked by German new boats and of the 90 vessels that set sail from New York fewer than 70 reached Britain my father almost froze the death in the North Atlantic when his own plane came down he flew low level raids against well defended Japanese positions in Indonesia and he saw fellow ships attacked by kamikazi planes and was wondering if one was coming his way he was only 22 when war ended and he turned up here at King's College in September 1947 still I think traumatised by his wartime experiences he graduated two years later and he had his life back and he fathered five children after his marriage and one of them was me so thank you King's College from all my family for rebuilding his life and you've given so many young men and women like him a fantastic start I think after what he went through my father would have smiled Riley when Laurie Freedman and Theo Farrell asked me to be a visiting professor of war studies here at King's but I've accepted the offer, be warned I'll be back, thank you very much On behalf of the King's community Sir John thank you so much for your own immense contributions to our nation and to international peace and also for an absolutely brilliant and augur lecture you said very high standard Sir John has kindly agreed to take, I'm afraid we can only make it a small number of questions but if you could identify yourself, say who you are we'll get the ball rolling who would like to start yes, and then to your left yep, I hear you Good, my name's Andrew Lamb that's his name thank you very much for your presentation to what the end of your talk you were talking about public involvement and security recently in the last couple of weeks the HACO group has been launching attacks against ISIS taking down their social media sites, social media activity this group has also attacked security services in the past how do you feel about the fact that both your organisation and ISIS have announced a question well it's all part of a confusing modern world picture that we're living in and of course anybody who joins the fight against ISIS their activities are welcome most of them anyway and those who try to bring down the organisations that are protecting security and order in our own countries is unwelcome now, I think activists and others have their own power and they're using it in different directions I think we need to have a clearer sense collectively of how the whole area of cyber should be regulated and monitored and I think this is an undeveloped world actually both internationally between states and in terms of the regulation within states I think there's a big task here for politicians and perhaps for the next parliament to get to grips with these sorts of issues now, I don't have any particular views I don't know the details of the attacks that you're referring to in terms of what they've done against Islamic State but I think those organisations are sufficiently agile that they'll be able to respond quite quickly so I don't think I herald this is a great step forward but I do think the whole area of cyber is one which is pretty anarchic at the moment and you've just described an example of that and we need to bring a degree of order to it Yes, just here two along and then three rows back Hi, my name is Victoria I'm a wall studies alumni and also a treasury employee I just wanted to ask what are we doing as a visiting professor will you be researching, lecturing or anything or just giving us wonderful talks Well, thank you very much The answer is I don't yet know I'm not going to be quite as devoted perhaps as David Oman who is a regular lecturer here but I do want to be associated with the work of kings for all the reasons that I've set out I think there's someone like myself making the transition from public service into the commercial world I think it's really important to stay in touch with the world of ideas and with a generation which is represented here at kings so I'm really looking forward to taking part in your debates and your discussions and if I can be of help in the work of students here understanding some of the events of the last 30 odd years that I've been involved with I'd be delighted to do so Yes Thank you very much for your talk I'm an MA student here at the wall studies department You spoke a lot about values tonight and I think that was very spot on and I was wondering what we actually need to do in Europe to strengthen our values as a union of nations to better deal with threats such as Russia but also with a lot of other issues we're facing globally to strengthen the union itself to be a greater power on the world scale The European Union you mean? Yes Well, I think Europe has done a remarkable job in developing its values since the end of the Second World War and it's built some fantastic institutions to do so I don't think in Western Europe there's a values gap and what they might be is a gap in the capacity to defend those values when they come under attack and of course it's entirely understandable after the end of the Cold War that defence capabilities were drawn back and drawn down and defence budgets across Europe We used to have a standard of 3% of GDP spent on defence and we now have 2% of GDP spent on defence and we need to invest in these defence capabilities we need to invest in the intelligence capabilities as well as I hope I've set out we are under threat and our values are under threat so strong institutions like NATO and the European Union are a vital part of that building partnerships with others having a deeper dialogue with people like President Putin which I think has been absent frankly over the last couple of years the quality of that dialogue hasn't helped but there's not been the depth of exchange between Washington and Moscow that there was for example quite routinely during the Cold War so we need to I don't think it's our values that we need to look to so much except possibly in the technological space where I think we need to explore what the right values are in the new technology era but we need to be more on our metal more ready to recognise challenges to our values and to our system and we also need to invest in diplomacy not with people who agree with us but diplomacy with people who disagree with us which as I said in my speech is the essence of that art yes thank you very much indeed the names you and Grant are the former customs and exercise intelligence analysts for the ex-Soviet Union after I left a temporary resident of the Sheraton Hotel in Sana'a where I remember somebody giving away their past career by a word in the restaurant I'm glad to say that was not a British person my questions to John actually follows on from the lady's question and your own answer and your point about how the UK and I'm sure in many other nations states there is a very real public service and I'd certainly agree 100% how important that is where do we stand with the wider international organisations like the World Bank particularly it was a World Bank project I was on in Yemen but also in the IMF non-military arms of the UN because I do believe your comments about need to be on our metal I don't think these organisations are entirely comfortable with playing a part as shall we say concerned international citizens let me take that question I think the IMF and the World Bank are two remarkable institutions of course they've had to adapt like everybody else has had to adapt over the last years and like many of these international bodies that were established in 1945 their governance structures don't represent the reality of the modern world but we've got to work on that but I think the announcement last week of the IMF programme for Ukraine is another example of how the IMF are very much plugged into the political and security needs and see the role for economic and financial support alongside defence actions now the World Bank operates mainly in the developing world rather than in the areas that we've been discussing this evening but I think they're a remarkable force for good now every organisation has to modernise itself to keep up with technology keep up with the modern challenges we saw during the Ebola virus scandal last year, the crisis last year the World Health Organisation really struggling to understand what it can do and its governance structures just unable to respond to it so everybody needs to up their game make these organisations agile and flexible and responsive that was mainly my role when I was chief of MI6 was to modernise the organisation and I think all these institutions with very strong cultures very strong histories and traditions they need a blend of leadership the expertise inside the organisation coupled with outside people who can say with a pair of fresh eyes why on earth are we doing it this way why has this not changed since 1970 I think every organisation needs that dose of modernisation maybe King's College does as well that's my job we're coming to the end of our time so we'll take a question in the middle and then gentlemen here and maybe I'll take a third but we'll have to stop the questions then so if you try to make the question short that would be appreciated Suhan, how about the intelligence and intelligence security students here thank you for fascinating talking inside the speech I would like to ask you how about the hybrid warfare the Russian action in Ukraine and what is the best way to detail against this warfare especially we Georgians think that it could be an easy target next on the Russian list so is there any effective tool to apply I think one lesson from the Ukraine crisis is that the Russians have developed a capability that NATO at the moment doesn't have a strong response to that the appearance of these little green men in Crimea of rapidly deployed special troops into the Donbas region I think it demonstrates the way that Russia has focused its efforts on the military side of very large proportion a figure in my head but a very large proportion of Russian public spending goes on defence much higher than it does in any western country and they're investing it in new technologies asymmetric responses used to be about chemical and biological weapons or nuclear weapons asymmetric responses is now the sort of insurgency that we've seen in Crimea and the Donbas and NATO needs to rethink its approach so that if that happened in Estonia or Latvia or indeed anywhere else in Central Europe we're ready for it and we have a response which isn't a traditional response of planes and tanks and backed by nuclear weapons we need to ourselves address these new security challenges I don't think there's an early answer to that I think there's a big job for academic institutions like King's to think about these problems it can't all be done in the North Atlantic Council in Brussels there needs to be some stimulus in the academic community as well because we don't have immediate answers to it Nick Butler King's John, from your experience do you think that there are a distinct set of Muslim values and do you feel that those values are compatible with the British values that you talked about or will there always be a tension as with Russia? I think there are some very clear values in Islam of piety of honesty one of the reasons why the Muslim Brotherhood gained support in a place like Egypt was because it was a contrast to the regime but Muslim Brotherhood doesn't equate to Islam I think Islam does have strong traditions and strong values which aren't vastly different from the values of the other monotheistic religions I think the tensions are more political than they are theological and the real divide in the Islamic world is a political one where people are adopting interpretations of Islam but I do think that the way in which Islam was perfectly formed 1400 years ago and of course many of the decisions were taken in subsequent centuries but its internal flexibility has not helped it adapt to the modern world and that's what I say when I think the Islamic world has some really tough issues it needs to address now is there an intrinsic tension between the Islamic world and western values I think there are differences I think there are differences for example we have between the western world and China and Chinese traditions I don't think these are unbridgeable I think there's plenty of common ground what we can't have is one set of vanilla values that applies throughout the world so there's bound to be some variations and I'm struck that as western countries as developing countries develop initially westernization helps the modernize but there's a curve after which it reverses and as they get wealthier and more developed there's an assertion of traditional values we see that in Turkey we're seeing it in China and I think the west when I started my career the G7 countries represented about 75% of global GDP were completely dominant now it's less than 50% in another generation it will be considerably less than that the world is becoming flatter as Tom Friedman said and we're going to have to find ways to accommodate each other's differences but it's going to have to be if we're going to have the same degree of order we've had over the last 60 years it's going to have to be a set of accommodations and values that support global order rather than undermine it and you're right to identify there are some deep issues here and there aren't easy answers but I don't despair there's a lot of schism in here I think it's a question really of modernising our thinking and ourselves on the western side becoming more open and more tolerant and I've said before that there's absolutely no justification for what happened at Charlie Hebdo or in the attack over the weekend in Denmark but I do think we need to be careful not to unnecessarily offend other people's sensibilities just for taking pleasure in offending them I think the Pope was right when he said we need to be cautious and respectful of other people's fundamental beliefs if we're disrespectful we only really fuel the extremists Hi Emily Galston from the Telegraph you mentioned the recent attacks in France and in Denmark do you think the security services in the UK are any more able to prevent such attacks as these taking place in our counterparts in Europe have been therefore do you think the UK may see a Charlie Hebdo style attack Do I think the UK may find itself facing a Charlie Hebdo style attack Well I think it was a year ago that the threat level here in the UK was raised to severe and the definition of severe means that a terrorist attack is highly likely I've said before that all these attempts at carrying out terrorist attacks in this country and the goalkeepers in the security service and the police aren't going to be able to stop every single one of them getting through the terrorists at some point will probably score one of those goals I do think in Britain we are well organised there's very good cooperation between law enforcement intelligence and between different parts of the intelligence community we learnt that after the costly events of July 2005 but are we immune? No far from it as I said these attacks are shocking but they're not surprising because they're part of a pattern of increased terrorist threats that we need to be very mindful of in this country and ok you can see that there may be particular reasons why terrorists struck in the targets that they did but this indiscriminate killing of Jewish targets for example just like the indiscriminate killing of Christians across the Middle East is all part of trying to sow divisions and generate support for the extremist cause and I think we are well organised here but as I say the terrorist centres of terrorism are closer to Europe we've got thousands of people going back and forth from western Europe to places like Syria and the intelligence picture is weaker so of course the threat is higher well it's always good to end in an auger of lecture with a forest of hands of people wishing to ask questions I'm sorry we can't take them all but Sir John may be willing to speak to you informally and the function afterwards if you're able to attend on behalf of the audience and the King's community sincere thanks Sir John for providing your insights into your working life in many aspects of international diplomacy including a time of sea and for your reflections on the security challenges ahead most of all to me I think you spoke about values the values you've seen and those which have guided the world through difficult times of the past the values we must stand behind and perhaps develop further to take the world in the way we need it to go and shining through your whole dissertation your own strong values and beliefs you've had a splendid career and it's wonderful that you're joining us on behalf of the King's as a visiting professor thank you again