 Hello and welcome to the Australian National University. I'm Dr. Reese Crawley, a historian in the Strategic and Defence Study Centre within the Coral Bell School of Asia-Pacific Affairs here at the ANU. SDSC has a long and rich history of researching and writing about intelligence agencies both within Australia and the region and we're currently undertaking the official history of ASIO, the first volume of which came out last year. Today I'm joined by Professor Keith Jeffery from Queens University in Belfast. Professor Jeffery is the author or editor of 14 books on British military, Imperial and of course as the official historian of the secret intelligence service or MI6 intelligence history as well. During his visit to Australia Professor Jeffery addressed a large audience at the ANU where he discussed some of the challenges facing intelligence organisations in the past and some of the changes and continuities that they face today in the age of terror. For those interested you can find that lecture on the ANU podcast website. But today Professor Jeffery has made time to answer some questions along those lines. Thank you very much for joining us Professor. It's a pleasure. One of the key themes that you discussed in your lecture was the significance that security and intelligence agencies place on secrecy and particularly concerning the sources and methods. Why is this important? How do they go about it and what are some of the consequences if they get that wrong? Well the absolute core requirement for any intelligence organisation is to protect its sources because once you reveal or once you give your target some suggestion of how you're getting information against them they can take steps to protect this. Now the obvious example of this for example is in signals intelligence and during the war one of the greatest secrets of the war and the greatest intelligence triumph of the war was the ultra-secret Bletchley Park about which we know a lot there are movies and novels and all sorts of stuff about this but where they cracked the German codes. Now if the Germans had found that their codes had been cracked they would have changed the system and denied the British access to for example naval enigma in which it made a crucial difference in the battle of the Atlantic. German submarines reporting in their position in the Atlantic it was immediately available to the British or more or less I mean it wasn't as easy as that of course but once the process had been developed then you could target these submarines and you could neutralise or largely neutralise the threat but it was absolutely essential to keep this secret not just of course from the Germans but generally so because careless talk as the old wartime poster goes careless talk can lose lives and in some ways the way it was processed was as important as the information itself. Yeah loose lips sink ships. Yes that's exactly it yeah. Another related aspect that you touched on was the dichotomy between keeping states or keeping state secrets from one's own public when your adversary surely knows about those secrets already. Are you able to share some examples from history of that occurring? Well there was a crazy period for 80 years when the British government denied the existence of its security and intelligence organizations. MI5 and MI6 were both established as the same organization in 1909 and until the 1980s and for MI6 the 1990s there was no statutory recognition of these organizations. No in a way the dogs in the street knew that they existed. Dogs had megaphones in the street and everyone knew there were spies and organizations of this sort but no British government representative could be got to confirm this they would say I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of this. Now that led to a kind of absurd position where for example the headquarters of MI6 which was first in a place called Broadway in the interwar wartime period then it moved to a century house which is south of the river near the Imperial War Museum and it was against the law to identify these buildings. Century house is 13-14 stories high it's quite big you can see this sort of thing. Now the Russians knew about Century House but the British people who paid for it and who were being protected by it were prohibited from sharing that information and this kind of absurdity eventually proved impossible to sustain. Now of course as we can see from the James Bond movies now if you watch Skyfall there are only two I think facts relating to intelligence in Skyfall. One is that the headquarters of the organization is that Roxy building again south of the river Vauxhall Cross in London. Second fact is that it has been attacked by it was attacked by IRA mortar bomb during the Northern Ireland troubles so it's vulnerable and it exists beyond that of course the James Bond stuff is entirely fiction but it there was this absurd period in which they knew more about the intelligence than we were allowed to know. Yeah a funny situation which we see all over the world. In the post 9-11 world where the intelligence community particularly that in the US was criticized for siloing its information we've witnessed an expansion of the need to share and the result and we see this through WikiLeaks and through the Snowden revelations has been a joined up worldwide intelligence network. What are your impressions on the desirability of the need to share compared to the need to know in that compartmentalization that you see in the first 40 years of MI6? Well need to know is of course one of the great bases of security and confidentiality I mean it works in private life as well. You doctor and your medical advisers need to know about your condition but I don't think necessarily your colleagues or you know your wider family if you don't want to share it do so compartmentalization is part of human life and in part of the normal privacy and confidentiality. Now on a state level there are different issues here in that the technology and the ability to share information is one way of making it useful and being able to put together previously unrelated facts that might then target you know enemies of the state or people who wish us ill. You need to do that you need to join up the information that the police have with let's say the security service in Britain MI5 with let's say airline records, travel records, mobile phone records all this sort of stuff. Now that brings with it a danger of a hugely intrusive state apparatus spying on its citizens and it kind of subverts the working assumption that we are innocent unless proven guilty and one of the problems about the security state is that it assumes as with security in an airport the whole point of security in airport if you think about it is that everyone is suspect and we're all kind of guilty until we pass through the X-ray machines and we're then declared innocent. Now that's that's quite troubling in a way it's not necessarily reassuring so you have to balance these needs for joined up and connected information gathering with legitimate concerns for private confidentiality and privacy. I think building on from that and we've seen this with the leaks do you think that those leaks will tighten that intelligence belt or is as Michael Hayden has said that the benefits of sharing do they outweigh the risks of another Snowden? Well intelligence organizations internationally have shared information and must share information and will continue to do that. I think it's salutary one of the salutary things particularly of Edward Snowden's revelations which revealed high levels of cooperation between countries within what might loosely call the Western Alliance but not just those of course. What Snowden has revealed is that this exists and kind of authoritatively done so. Now I think that's a fact of life it's not going to stop but I do think in a democracy you do need a countervailing accountability regime that says that requires permission to do these things which may be transcend civil liberties and there's always going to be attention between the maintenance of the correct maintenance of civil liberties and the need for security and on a kind of spectrum of you know one end you have the police state which we don't want but at the other end you have anything goes which we don't want either. With your unique insight into the intelligence agencies both you know having access to their records and also outside sitting as a scholar outside of their control do you think we the West or perhaps the UK in particular have got that balance between civil liberties human rights and security right? Well it of course is a matter of trust in this sense and we could trust our public servants to do the right thing all the time but we also need regulations and rules just to keep them concentrate their minds as to what's appropriate and what's not appropriate and there will be points at which the intelligence agencies want to interfere and and as it were intrude into our private lives that's fine but they need to be able to justify the need for this and that's going to produce a bit more of a bureaucracy it's going to make it potentially more difficult but nobody said democracy was the most efficient form of government it is inefficient but it's a lot better than some of the alternatives. Then it's an important debate to keep having and we're having it here in Australia at the moment particularly I think following from the Snowden revelations and and looking at collection of metadata and things like that but I think you know that you've provided us a really neat insight into the mystique of the intelligence world from someone who's been had one fought in and one fought out for the last five or six years and I think you know apart from the dry martinis in the fast cars there's certainly a different picture there so I'd like to thank you again for coming to see us and I would I would stress to anyone or urge anyone who's interested in the real story of MI6 not the James Bond story to pick up a copy of one of the many prints or editions of this MI6 book here by Professor Keith Jeffrey thank you very much Keith. Thank you.