New MI5 bossin full sail for British spies
By Peter Almond
LONDON, (UPI) -- The newly-named head ofBritain's MI5 national security agency, Eliza Manningham-Buller,is expected to shift her focus back to old-fashioned, anti-terroristspies when she gets a scheduled budget increase this summer.
Manningham-Buller, 53, only the second womanto head MI5 after Dame Stella Rimmington, is regarded as a formidable"no-nonsense" anti-terrorist operations specialist whois more comfortable with running secret agents than with the high-technologyspy equipment so recently favored by U.S. agencies. She has closerelationships with the FBI, the CIA and the National SecurityAgency.
Britain has never been able to afford thekind of exotic technology to which the United States has increasinglyturned -- except for the big GCHQ signals intelligence department,which is partially funded by the U.S. National Security Agencyanyway. But recent U.S. intelligence failures have made the Britishrealize that they should stick to their main strength of humanintelligence gathering.
"Manningham-Buller used to be in chargeof finance and IT (information technology) and she knows all aboutAmerican spy satellites and intelligence IT matrices," oneBritish defense intelligence official said.
"But I think her best strength is understandingthat the best defense against terrorism is in old-fashioned humanintelligence like she did against the IRA (Irish Republican Party)."
"Old fashioned" however, equatesmore to "old guard" in reported views of some in MI5,who say she has too much of an establishment background and maylack the instinctive flexibility to swing the agency adequatelyto deal with such fundamentalist Muslim threats as the al Qaidaterrorist network.
For the past six years under Sir StephenLanders, current MI5 director who is to retire in October, Britainscored significant success against the Irish Republican Army butallowed al Qaida groups to operate and recruit in Britain. Securityofficials insist that part of this laissez-faire attitude wasto allow MI5 to monitor and infiltrate Muslim terrorist groups,but other sources say it was because the agency did not put enoughresources into recruiting Arab-speaking, anti-terrorist agents.
Indeed, MI5's own figures show that in 1999,its latest year for published accounts, 30.5 percent of its $210million budget went to terrorism related to Northern Ireland,22.4 percent to international terrorism and 20.5 percent to counteringespionage. Those figures for the new fiscal year are expectedto change dramatically with an estimated $1.5 billion budget,a lessening of the IRA threat and a rise in al Qaida-type operations.
Manningham-Buller, deputy director of the2,000-strong MI5 for the past five years, has been the favoriteof four main candidates to take over from her boss.
She is the daughter of Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller,a strongly conservative lawyer who in 1952 prosecuted a ForeignOffice radio operator for passing secrets to the Russians. Healso prosecuted the Portland spy ring, Soviet spies Peter andHelen Kroger, Gordon Lonsdale, Harry Houghton, Ethel Gee, andGeorge Blake, all of whom were sent to jail.
Sir Reginald, elevated to the title of LordDilhorne, had the sort of booming-voice persona that earned himthe nickname "bullying manner" from celebrated newspapercolumnist Bernard Levin, a nickname that some have said carriesover to his daughter.
She is a large and striking figure, accordingto published accounts. She is said to be "imposing, commanding,"with a jolly sense of humor, a braying laugh and a sharp mind.
Drama critic Michael Coveney, who once casther as a 20-year-old fairy godmother in the Oxford UniversityDramatic Society's 1968 pantomime, was reported by the LondonTimes as saying, "She was well-built like a galleon in fullsail. Men weren't hovering around her, but you knew she wouldbe handsome when she grew into adulthood."
She may have been informally recruited byMI5 at Oxford University, but officially joined the service in1974 after working as an English teacher at a school in London.Her early years in the agency were spent on countering Sovietespionage in Britain. In the early 1980s, she was tasked withworking with defecting Soviet KGB agent Oleg Gordievsky as a doubleagent in the Soviet embassy in London.
Hardly anyone else in the MI5 counter-espionagesection knew about Gordievsky, one of Britain's most successfulCold War coups, and it remained a secret from Michael Bettaney,who worked in the same department but was jailed for trying tosell secrets to the Russians in 1984.
Manningham-Buller played a leading rolein the hunt for the 1988 Lockerbie-Flight 103 bomber, workingclosely with U.S. agents in Washington. She was the senior MI5liaison officer with the CIA in Washington during the Gulf Warin 1991. That same year she was married to a former Irish Catholicleft-wing university lecturer-cum-carpenter with five childrenwho was said by her sister not "to have a clue" whathis wife did for a living.
The next year, MI5 took over the lead rolefor countering IRA terrorism on the British mainland, and Manningham-Bullerwas appointed head of the section. After directing the agency'sfinance and information technology operations, she was appointeddeputy director in 1997, in charge of all agency operations. Lastyear, Manningham-Buller went immediately to America after theSept. 11 attacks to help the anti-terrorism effort, and accordingto sources has remained in close contact with U.S. agencies.
A woman who describes her interests as reading,music, crossword puzzles and history,
Manningham-Buller takes over MI5 at a timewhen the threat from the splinter group Real IRA is still prevalentand other militant groups are targeting Britain and its interestsoverseas almost as much as those of America.
She also has to oversee a multinationaland multi-department intelligence assessment reorganization anda recruitment drive for counter-terrorist agents that may or maynot be helped by a new British Broadcasting Corp. television series,Spooks, which portrays the fictional activities of a group ofMI5 agents in the most dramatic way possible.