Beyond Busy #96 with Sir David Omand
Graham Allcott 00:04
You're listening to beyond busy, the show where we talk, productivity, work life balance, and how people define happiness and success. My name is Graham Allcott. And I'm your host for the show. This week we're talking to Sir David Omand. He is a real life spy. He was the director of G HQ, one of the intelligence services in the UK government in 1996-97 and also the Permanent Secretary in the home office. So basically the most senior ranked civil servants government official between 1997 and 2001. glittering career in the UK civil service, which we talk about. The word service I think, is a really important one as part you know, when we talk about civil service, and we talk about the sense of duty that people have when they're working in the civil service, which I think is what else we talk about something that may have been lost a little bit. So we talked about his getting a knighthood, double knighthoods and the lifestyle of someone in intelligence services, and also his book how spies think, which, if you are going to buy his book, make sure you buy the hardcover with the jacket sleeve around it. I'm not gonna say any more than that, I'm not gonna spoil it. But it's so beautifully designed, it really is worth it just for the design is gorgeous.
Before we start with the episodes, I have two things I want to talk to you about. The first is we're doing a thing in January called the kindness happening. If you caught last week's podcast, I was talking to Christina Kisley all about how kindness is a really underrated leadership trait. And kindness is really good for productivity. And continuing that theme, we're launching this thing called the kindness happening, it starts on the 14th of January, if you go to eventbrite.co.uk, or eventbrite.com, and just type in the kindness happening, then you will get to the page. And if you want to, if you're a bit lazy, you can just go to getbeyondbusy.com, just look in the show notes. And that will take you straight there. So join us for the kindness happening. It's for Thursday evenings, UK time on zoom with myself, Christina Kisley, some special guests, and about 35 other people. So tickets are very limited, there's only 40. And we're only gonna do this once. So if you are keen to be part of it, then go to eventbrite.com or eventbrite.co.uk or go to getbeyondbusy.com. And check out The Kindness Happening. Use the code Ninja 15. So the word ninja and then just one five, that will give you a promo code for 15% off as well. The other thing I want to just mention is Colette Heneghan and myself are releasing our book how to have the energy it comes out on the seventh of January 2021. So currently, it's in that pre order phase. So I'm going to just make a little plea, which is if you have liked all the beyond busy content that I've been putting out this year, not just all the podcast episodes themselves. But we've been putting out lots of little excerpts and little quotes on our social media, particularly on Instagram at Graham Allcott. And all of that is just it's a labor of love. It's a huge operation really, there's actually three of us working on the podcast now. And yeah, it we do it primarily as a labor of love. And obviously also as a developing a platform so that we can share these kind of things with you. But we would really love it, it would really help us if you can go and preorder 'How To Have The Energy'. And that will really just help us to justify our decision to put so much time and resource into this podcast basically. So we don't have sponsors on it. We it's only ever sponsored by Think Productive by ourselves. And we don't want to have adverts and all that stuff. We don't want to spoil it. But every now and again, we would love to know that it does pay a little bit back. So the books only about six quid or seven quid or something. But you'd be doing us a huge favor because we're in this Amazon pre order phase. And if we get enough pre orders on Amazon, well, you know how this works, algorithms and stuff. So go to Amazon, go and search for how to have the energy, we'll also put the link obviously in the show notes again, getbeyondbusy.com. Please go and buy a book or two or three or five, buy them for your team. Honestly, I think the stuff that's in the How to Have the Energy. I mean, it really helped change my life by not really even changing my diet that fundamentally, but I just have so much more energy for the work that I do. And we've distilled all of it into a book. It's the price of a couple of coffees, so head over to Amazon, buy a few of them, pass them around, and honestly it will really help people. So go and check out how to have the energy. I'm really proud of it and really hoping that we get a Good start to the book launch in January 2021. So that's how to have the energy.
And now it's time to get into this episode.
So I'm with Sir David Omand, he is the author of How Spies Think. He is a former director of GCHQ a permanent secretary of the Home Office. He's taught at the Open University. He, you know, really just has had an incredible career and was fascinating to talk to. We didn't quite get around to some stuff at the end, but I wanted to ask them about because he got pulled away to go and do something else. So I'm just going to do a little bit of a wrap up at the end of the podcast as well. But let's get into it. Here's my conversation with Sir David Omand.
I'm with Professor Sir David Omand, how are you doing?
Sir David Omand 05:49
Very good, very good this afternoon.
Graham Allcott 05:51
and you'd say just before we hit record that you're not used to talking in public about your work. So that's quite an interesting place to start.
Sir David Omand 06:02
That's right. If you have a full career, if you have a full career in the security and intelligence and defense world, as a civil servant. You are expected to keep your head down and and it's for the politicians to do the speaking. And I agree with that. But I've been out of the business now for some many years. And I've been teaching and writing and I've got a visiting professorship at King's College. So I think it's perfectly fair now for me to come and talk about the book I've just written.
Graham Allcott 06:32
I mean, presumably, there is some things that for the rest of your life will be confidential and off limits there. And there are probably several grades of that. But is there a sort of general sense that the obligation for that on certain things diminishes over time, I'm just interested in how that works.
Sir David Omand 06:52
Mostly, I mean, you develop a self censoring angel that sits on your shoulder and whispers in your ear when you've been enticed into saying more than you should. But the British community is now generally, is much more open than it used to be, we acknowledge the existence of intelligence agencies, the names of the heads of those agencies of public knowledge. And occasionally they appear on the media themselves, the details of their operations remain secret. And in certainly, in the case of human intelligence, it's secret forever, they really don't want that coming out in other areas of intelligence sort of assessments, which are made by the Joint Intelligence Committee and so on, with the passage of time, those get released to the National Archives down at Kew, and you can go down there, free, you can go down, and you can read your way through what did the Joint Intelligence Committee think about the early part of the Cold War, and it's all there.
Graham Allcott 07:57
That's also one of my favorite. I don't watch a lot of news. But one of my favorite news stories of the year is always the story on about January, the first or second, which is where they release another year's worth of what were previously classified papers, and we were somewhere and we like it towards the end of the Thatcher era in the way that's
Sir David Omand 08:15
Yes, yes. I mean, it's like formally, you know, it was 30 years. But now, you know, material does tend to get prized out by Freedom of Information requests, particularly in the United States. So very often a story of some past intelligence success or failure comes out, and it often comes out on the American side, because we've been working with them, and they are rather more open. But in the end, if you think about the huge triumph, the Secret Service MI6, managed with the recruitment of like Gordievsky. You've got the wonderful Ben MacIntyre. Now writing a book, the spy in the traitor. It's the best book I know on human agent recruitment, recounting in some considerable detail. Now, that is Margaret Thatcher's time. You know, we're now in 2020. So, time has passed and it's less sensitive, and his role has been made public. But to have for MI6 to have the acting head of the Cadet B station in London, acting as their own agent. In my book I recount that back when Margaret Thatcher first met Gorbachev the soon to be Soviet leader. Gorbachev brief chunks that were being written by Gordievsky from the London embassy, as the head of the political reporting in the London embassy, and large parts of Margaret Thatcher's brief will being read written by Gordievsky through m i six. So no wonder the visit was a success. She knew what he was going to raise. She'd been tutored in the kind of answers she should give in order to catch his attention. And they apparently hit it off. And afterwards, she said, this is a man I could do business with. And that was then later transferred to Ronald Reagan, you know, the Arch Hawk, who met Gordievsky after he'd been smuggled out of Russia, he went to the United States, he met Reagan, and was responsible for a sort of conversion on the part of Reagan towards sort of building bridges with Russia, and engaging in some serious arms control.
Graham Allcott 10:40
And that quote, from that to this is a man I can do business with, with became a very famous quote, and it feels like so there's some great topics in your book, which I'd love to come to. And I have to just hold this up for the video. So you have to buy David's book in hardcover, because, honestly, the cover is just so beautiful, just the way it's been done. So you've got these little holes so that when the what you call this bit that goes around the outside the leaf, I guess it's a call, when that's when the jacket is wrapped around it? Is that is that right? Is that the hardcover jacket, it says how spies think, but then when you take the jacket off, it's just seemingly lots of black and white letters. And it's quite difficult to make up the title. So
Sir David Omand 11:22
and that's a very, it's a very good representation of what analysts do, which is you have a lot of fragments of information. And can you actually derive;pull out from them some kind of pattern, knowing that you'll never have all of the fragments?
Graham Allcott 11:40
Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about your career before we talk about the book specifically. So you spent time as the director of GC HQ, you've been the Permanent Secretary to the home office and spent, you know, really a glittering career, you know, really being part of intelligence services and being present in lots of very big moments in history, I guess, would be the best way to summarize it. And so coming back to what we talked about before, so when you were director of GCHQ, that would have been '96-'97. Were you a public figure in that role? Or was was it not known that you were the director at that point had that changed,
Sir David Omand 12:25
I was a public figure, it was announced by 10 Downing Street, that I was going to take the job. I had worked in the Ministry of Defense, as the policy director, the Deputy Undersecretary of State for policy, and in that job, I met a lot of journalists, traveled with them to NATO meetings, and so on. So it would have been absurd to try and conceal who I was. So I was the first GCHQ director to have a photograph in a public newspaper. But the tradition has now really eroded. I think it's a good thing that the British public can actually see and hear the chiefs of the national intelligence agencies, and they gave occasional broadcasts or interviews. So you can see the caliber of people that we're employing to run these organizations.
Graham Allcott 13:22
Yeah. And so obviously, that's one of those jobs that maybe a lot of people have a curiosity, about, you know, being in the intelligence services being a spy. There's a certain, you know, movie, fiction cache associated with that line of work. Can you just describe, like, what does a typical workday look like? What does the office look like? What What can you tell us from the outside that you're able to share with us?
Sir David Omand 13:54
First put out of your mind, almost everything you read and see in films, there are very, very few books that capture anything. And you know, for good reason, because people who write novels, sometimes extremely good novels, they want them to be bought and read and, and to be entertaining. Just as an example, if you were to read the entire cover of Ian Fleming all the James Bond books, would you find an occasion in which he brought back secret intelligence, right? He's not an intelligence officer. He's kind of licensed hoodlum to go and sought out difficult people who are planning usually some absolutely fantastic plot against the globe. And he does so very successfully. And he is portrayed as being a member of MI 6 and they're building features in James Bond movies and it's all great fun, and I suspect there's part of that service that is rather proud That they have a global brand. But it's completely misleading. Because that's, can you imagine trying to recruit someone who will help you and provide information for you, when they are under conditions of great secrecy in a hard country like well, like Gordievsky in Russia. And there you are blowing things up, crashing helicopters
Graham Allcott 15:28
skiing down the mountain,
Sir David Omand 15:30
turning up in five star hotels, announcing yourself by your real name. I don't think you wouls last a millisecond. But it's entertainment. And the truth is that it's mostly perspiration, it's mostly hard work. I have huge admiration for those who do it. I've been in the community. But, you know, I did not spend my career standing on a street corner, or in a seedy hotel somewhere on the other side of the world waiting for a contact to turn up. So, I have great admiration for people who do that. And sometimes they put themselves seriously in harm's way in order to get information which they believe will help better decisions to be made by our government. And these days, it's very much about stopping people who have intention to harm us, you know, the terrorists and the serious criminals and, and proliferators.
Graham Allcott 16:32
And presumably, you know, whether you're one of the people, you know, hanging around on the street corner, or whether you're one of the people, you know, sat in one of the offices, presumably Your job is about because it's about public service. And because it's about reacting to events as they happen, that must have an impact on the work life balance aspect of things. And the culture of it must be that if you need to work a very long week because something bigs happening, then that's just an expectation. So is that something that you were aware of going into that line of work did you think this is going to be there's going to be an element of service and kind of personal sacrifice to, you know, to do a good job here?
Sir David Omand 17:15
What do you say is undoubtedly true of the intelligence services, but it's also true of the civil service more generally. Why does somebody join the civil service out of university, They know that the career is going to involve as you say, you have to do the job. And if that means working the weekend, you work the weekend, if that means coming home late at night, and I spent quite a lot of time in the ministry of defense working in private office. So I was working directly for the Secretary of State for Defense, about five of them and, and, you know, if something blows up, you stay and you make sure the job gets done. And there's a wider sense of public service. When I left university, I could have been an academic. I decided, I like the idea of public service. This is 1969. And the idea of public service, with the emphasis on the service to the public, was very strong amongst my contemporaries, could have gone into industry and industry is essential. And I sit on a board today and I watch how commercial companies operate and generate employment and generate wealth for the country. But there is something very special about public service. And as a nation, woe betide us if we lose that sense, because it's a huge national asset, you're going to look around, where countries don't have that tradition, to see how difficult it is to administer.
Graham Allcott 18:55
The way you talk about it makes it sound like you think we have lost that or lost it to some degree.
Sir David Omand 19:01
I think we have I mean, partly that's inevitable, because the service for various reasons and not least austerity, the services have been squeezed. Where there's sudden needs arise, the U turn to the private sector, and the private sector has a big role in supporting the public. I'm not against that. But you know, in the end, the private sector, it's the bottom line, you have to persuade the investors in the company, but you're still a company that's growing that has a solid balance sheet and, and so on. The motivations in the end of the public service official, are different. It is, now I that makes it sound rather romantic, but it is a reality. And I found when I was working in the home office, for example, which has some very difficult subjects to deal with. In my day, it was prisons, asylum, immigration, nationality issues, criminal justice issues. These are hard, hard subjects, and the dedication that the individual officials put in to try and to get the right answer for the public. It's very different from the sort of considerations which you would give in a commercial environment.
Graham Allcott 20:24
It feels also, like, the pressure of that, over a long period of time must take its toll, particularly if you're, it's a bit like within Westminster politics, it always feels like, okay, we'll get over this crisis, and then it'll come down. And you know, my experience, I had some experience in the early part of my career working in a charity that led me to spend a lot of time in the home office, actually, not not long after you'd left there. But you know, working for people like Hazel Blears, and Charles Clarke and the like. And I found myself in the home office on the morning of seven, seven. In fact, I was, I left Whitechapel and was annoyed, why I couldn't get on the train in old gates, and ended up getting a taxi there and had no idea what had happened on seven, seven. But what you know, I got to know a few of the civil servants there, and it felt like they were constantly getting to what they thought was light at the end of the tunnel. And then it turned out that there was another big tunnel ahead of them, and they'd have to throw themselves down it for a while longer before they really got got a break. Did you ever feel like you got to a point where you really hit a wall and in terms of work life balance and rest and overdoing it, you were you were struggling?
Sir David Omand 21:43
It's certainly the case that
21:46
you
Sir David Omand 21:48
you have to put the hours in when it's necessary. I think good when when management's has it right, then you are very careful to look after people when life is not so tough. And you try and give people a break, to circulate them around different posts. You know, I think this is well known, if you have if you're an official and you're dealing with child abuse, then you really do not want that individual dealing with a subject like that for 12 years, right? It's got to be long enough to build up the expertise to be able to work effectively with the police and the criminal justice system. But these things can enter the soul. And it's a problem you get with the police service as well. Because if you're not careful, your officials are only seeing the dark side of human nature. And that, again, is why it's very useful that they are working closely with the charitable sector and the nonprofit sector because you'll you tend to, that's a sector filled with people who are on the whole optimistic, and they're right on the front line, and therefore they are able to provide a reality, which sitting in an office, you know, consulting law textbooks may not quite give you. You mustn't be too detached. On the other hand, you can't become so emotionally involved, that you then have difficulty working for, say, on a change of government.
Graham Allcott 23:19
Yeah, yeah. So a lot, a lot to think about there just in terms of boundaries. And yeah, and the relationship between the self and the work, right? And like, how much of your identity is taken up with that too. And you said, you're probably the first person to be on Beyond Busy has a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Bath. Which was, I guess, is it? I don't know the terminology. But is that the second time you were knighted so you were knighted first? Yes. And then that's like a promotion of being knighted again.
Sir David Omand 23:55
That's right, I got a telegram from the chiefs of staff in the Ministry of Defense, when they second award was saying I think at your age twice a knight is too much.
Graham Allcott 24:09
And and what's that, like? So the first time you were knighted was was 2000. You'd been home office Permanent Secretary for a period of time before that. And what's that, like when you first get that, that first telegram and just show us behind the curtain of all that what actually happens? What does it look like?
Sir David Omand 24:30
Well, it's about as you were saying, you've been working flat out, you know, clocking ridiculous as every week, you know, 50 60 70 hours a week, and sometimes more. There's always a sense of perpetual crisis. you're rushing to put out another fire, help the sector estate and deal with some piece of business. And it says visible recognition. Have that service. Yeah. And it's very interesting, the response of the staff is very positive, because you're not accepting it just for your personal blue eyes, you're accepting it on their behalf, as well. And that's a powerful message for the staff. And if you started not to recognize the people who are keeping the system weren't running and the ship of state, you know, occasionally listing to one side or another, but they are keeping it moving through the water. And you have to recognize that, because if they, if you sending out the wrong kind of message, which is why this is why I object so much when certain figures talk about, you know, demolishing the civil service or criticizing, this is not the way you motivate people. The British public service has a lot to learn, it always has had, I came across a wonderful example, in a book from the, in fact published just at the beginning of the Second World War, complaining about the attitudes of the civil servants who are getting in the way of the war and the rules and regulations. And, you know, you could have quoted it word for word to some of the complaints you get today. It is apparently true that even in the 1860s, the Majesty's Treasury, every letter they sent out was written by hand, and copied several times by hand. And this is years and years after the letterpress had been invented. So the select committee in the House of Commons, summon then Treasury officials, and said, This is ridiculous. Why are you doing this, but they refuse to change. And life went on until long after the typewriter had been invented. They was still resisting this innovation. And the same was true of the dictaphone. So shorthand was just being introduced, after the first dictaphones were being introduced. So this is resistance to innovation. So I've got a lot of sympathy for those. Dominic Cummings is one obvious example, you feel very frustrated that sometimes you see innovation, and it's not being pushed through. The contrary point of view, which you also have to hold in your mind, is if you want to motivate a lot of people, to change their ways, sometimes quite uncomfortably. Some of them may lose their jobs, they may have to retrain, if you want to push change through, you've got to have a convincing story as to why it's necessary for them to join in your Crusade, and change their ways. I mean, that takes me back to GCHQ in the late 1990s, when you could see the digital revolution approaching us from the west coast of America, all this new technology, and it was going to seriously, but the business, the office, the business, and so people had to change and had to change very dramatically. And they did. But that was because there was a convincing narrative as that they rather terrible term people use, you've got to have a narrative. And that indeed, they did it. I used to say to them, your grandparents helped win the Second World War, your parents helped win the Cold War. Now it's your turn. Are you going to give up? Or are you prepared to tackle these issues, problems of terrorism and proliferation and serious criminality in the digital age, and they did it and they've they, it's the one department staffed by civil servants that makes technology sing.
Graham Allcott 29:11
And you mentioned there the west coast of America and technology. And I wanted to talk at the end a bit more about some of that technology and some of the implications of that has for, you know, small concepts like truth, and things like that. So let's come on to that. But let's talk before that about the book. So the book, as I mentioned, how spies think. And the I guess the the kind of central part of the book is how can we take some of the methodologies and the ways that in the intelligence services, you have to think about information and often incomplete information and make sense of it and make snap decisions that are going to be the right decisions. And you've got this model in there the SEES' model for analytical thinking So, do you want to just talk talk us through the SEES' model? And how that can help somebody, you know, working in a business or working in an organization and helping people to deal with information in that kind of a way?
Sir David Omand 30:13
Yes. I mean, I spent many years, including seven years sitting on the Joint Intelligence Committee, watching the analysts since working with them to try and provide information, reliable information on which decisions could rest. And a central question in the book is, what do you need to know, to take a sound decision? And that's a question you should kind of ask yourself, whether it's, you know, am I going to try and change jobs? Am I going to change house settle down with a different partner? What? What would I need to know to take a rational decision? Of course, there's the other part of the decision, which is emotional. What do I want to achieve by this? Or what do I fear that I want to avoid by taking a decision? And somehow in our brains, you've got to bring both together? Which is hard? Yeah. But if you take the rational part, you know, what do we need to know? I've suggested that there are four outputs, that the analytic process, whether it's you thinking in your head, or whether it's a bunch of analysts sitting in the Cabinet Office, for outputs, and together they form SEES to make it easy to remember. And the first is situational awareness. Which answers questions like, what, when, and where? Good example at the moment is COVID COVID-19? What is the infection rate? Where is it taking place? When was the last set of figures derive from? Do we have the information? And if the current arguments, clearly, we don't have all the information that we need? And lesson number one is your knowledge of the world is always fragmentary, incomplete, and it's sometimes wrong. That's true of all of us. You never have complete information. So but you do need to start, if you can, with some pretty solidly grounded fact. Let's go What is going on? I'm not pretending that's always easy. As we see with the COVID case, it may be very tricky to get those facts and to get the public to understand what they mean and what they don't mean. Which brings me to the second part of SEES, the E, which is explanation. And this is answering questions that tend to start with why or how, because facts are dumb. And the statisticians keep saying correlation is not causation. Just because you see what looks, is it a coincidence? Or is it part of some pattern? Is it coincidence that this is happening, or the Russians behind it? The COVID equivalent would be asking questions about why, why is it that certain main members of the Bain community are worse affected by this disease than the rest of the population? And that's why question, why is that thing you're trying to explain or what is going on? And,
Graham Allcott 33:38
and in the book, I think you talk about terrorism as an example, at one point, and it's like, these people are committing this terrorist offense. But then why are they doing that kind of understanding the motivations of those those people and kind of getting in their heads is a big part of that.
Sir David Omand 33:54
Every defense lawyer in the court case knows about that facts can be interpreted in different ways. So fact, the fingerprints of the accused was found on a bottle thrown at the police. court case results. Was it because he threw the bottle? Or was it the mob rushing past his has picked the bottle out of his recycling bin. So two different explanations for the same fact. And whether it's intelligence analysts or whether it's the general population, you have to be able to explain what's going on. If you've got a good explanation, you can move on to the third stage, which is the second E, which is estimating how events might unfold. So with the data you've got, with the explanation of the model, what's going on? how's this gonna end up what's going to happen next, and the COVID example of that, Is the modeling that takes place where you make some assumptions. And then you run the model. And then you say, Well, if nothing is done, the numb rate of infection is going to double, and the hospitals will be full by the ninth of November or something. And there, it's really important that you're not just extrapolating from the data, and drawing lines on a curve, you've actually got a model of explaining how, you know, does it take place face to face? Is it contact on to the disease on surfaces, it does it take place in schools, you need to be able to explain. And then if you've got a decent explanation, you can then move on, and you can start to predict intelligence analysts hate the word predict, because nobody's got a crystal ball. And it gives a false impression that you're able to predict the future. You can't, nobody can. But you can have a pretty good stab at giving some running some models and giving an idea on certain assumptions. This is how it's likely to turn out. And then the final s in SEES is strategic notice, which is slightly different. And this is watching how you don't get blindsided because you've been so focused on this one decision that you don't get hit on the back of the head with something entirely different, or some development they hadn't anticipated. And, you know, we talked about COVID, it is extremely serious. But there are other things which can come and hit us. And we should be thinking about what kind of preparation should we make as a nation, what kind of investment, what kind of research should be conducted, so that when it happens, we're not so surprised by surprise itself, which is one of my other intelligence lessons that if you invest in strategic notice, then you stand a good chance of being able to better deal with whatever comes in hits you because you've made preparations. The homely example of that is insurance. You know, you insure your car, you hope you're not going to be in an accident. But you actually strategic notice that there are some lunatics driving around the roads rather badly, particularly at the moment with COVID, it seems to worsen the driving habits. And if you're in that kind of crash, you will be very glad to have insurance. And you certainly need a minimum of insurance to be legally to safe. So that's the only example. But the example I put in the book, I don't know if you remember the event, when the Icelandic volcano with the unpronounceable name blew its top. And the whole of Europe's air was the atmosphere was filled with this fine ash. And nobody knew what was safe for a jetliner to fly through. So the air traffic authorities wisely applied the precautionary principle and shut everything down. If you've got down European aviation, they discovered you shut down most of global aviation because the number of flights that go over Europe and nobody was allowed to fly. And for a week, there was complete chaos. People were grounded school parties couldn't get back home for the start of the term. There were people dumped in airports, when planes landed emergency landings, who didn't have visas for those countries, and therefore weren't allowed to leave the airport. You know, for days. I mean, it was chaotic. And we now know that the Icelandic authorities have been asked pleading, saying here's strategic notice. We don't know when but one of these volcanoes will blow top. Yeah. Why don't you do the research now? As So in fact, they had the aircraft engine manufacturers flew some flights, they discovered it was safe, aviation reopened. But that was about a million pounds, a billion billion pounds worth of cost and a week of utter misery for passengers, which could have been avoided by taking note or heed of strategic notice. And lots of other things out there that we ought to be thinking about, not least because of global warming, for sure.
Graham Allcott 39:39
There was also a report early on in the COVID crisis about how the NHS were trying to do pandemic modeling and drills and that had been cut back a couple of years ago. And so, again, there's I mean, I don't know what that would have looked like but maybe it would have resulted in better preparedness. I don't know.
Sir David Omand 39:57
Well, when I was in the Cabinet Office, As doing the security and intelligence coordination job, we published risk registers and they're still published, you can get them on the web. And the top right hand corner of the, the graph that shows likelihood of trouble. And impact, if it happens, was always a pandemic. But I suspect austerity after 2007 2008, we had unfortunately squeezed Public Health England was obviously really squeezed for resources, stockpiles are rundown, and we entered the current pandemic, not very well prepared, it appears, or as well, I do want to denigrate the efforts that were put in I mean, the nightingale hospitals being built in record time, and that's a remarkable achievement, and the hospitals put in their emergency plans. But across the country as a whole, we weren't really it seems to me quite as prepared as we should have been, given that some form of pandemic, you couldn't predict exactly the characteristics of COVID-19. It was a new disease, but some form of pandemic, therefore, stocks of PPE arrangements to expand, track and trace, test and trace, and so on locally, all of those could have been in place, but we'll have to wait for an inquiry know that some point in the future, we'll learn lessons.
Graham Allcott 41:31
Absolutely. So the book is just full of these fascinating stories and examples that you give from your career. And, I mean, I loved reading it as someone who's is somewhat of a of a politics geek, as well as being someone who loves thinking about how do you take ideas and examples from one part of the world and apply it in another in other parts of our economy or whatever? And was there a sense that writing the book for you is, you know, almost like an autobiographical thing to, right. So there's a lot of stories that, you know, where's your sense of, I really ought to write these things down. Because, because because you've been kind of at, you've been a fly on the wall, you've been in the room and been part of some very big decisions that have affected the life of the country. So just wondering if that was part of the reasoning behind writing the book?
Sir David Omand 42:22
No, I'm almost the opposite. You know, I started with some ideas, I wanted to put out particularly about what's going on with fake news. And so and that, which led me to think about the analytic process, how do you know what you need to know before you take a decision, which led me into thinking about the SEES, that's one way of breaking up the subject, which I think is quite useful. And then came the thought, well, I've been illustrate this. Rather than make it a book of theory, in a decision theory of the sort you get in management, textbooks at airports, I better actually try and illustrate make it come alive. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, well, I've actually got plenty of examples from my time that I can use with some degree of authenticity. But some of the examples I put in a purely historical and I was a babe in arms when those events took place.
Graham Allcott 43:33
But you do talk about, you know, the bit at the beginning of the book where you're working for John Nott and you go into, you kind of go into Margaret Thatcher's office when she's doing something else and have to interrupt the prime minister to say, Hey, we have new intelligence about the Argentine's wanting to claim the claim the Falklands and we're about to go to war. You know, you'd like you're right there in that moment. It's a huge thing. And the other one that really struck me was the thing about Jack Straw during your time at the home office, and the pressure that he was under around the passport issue that arose where basically everyone was panicked about, about renewing their passports. And because it's a bit like what we saw with the stockpiling on the shelves, as you point out in COVID, where once people get wind, that there might be a delay in passports everyone puts their application in more quickly. So you've been at some of those moments where there's been huge pressure on individuals. So yeah, well, are there any others that because you wrote the book that way around? You didn't mention the book, but it might be worth them. Telling the tale here in terms of just being at some of those important
Sir David Omand 44:46
I'm not going to tell you if I have any side shall save them up for the next book. I say that over the next book. No, you are career, such as one I've had in in the sort of defense world and security Until you're privileged to be a part of major events, albeit sometimes as a fairly Junior spectator early in my career, but nonetheless, you're there. I mean, I genuinely will not forget that afternoon in the House of Commons on the 31st of March 1982. Working with John Nott on a speech on something entirely different it was the British acquisition of Trident D five missiles for our deterrent, working away on how to explain this in his speech, the House of Commons. And this runner arrives from Whitehall, with a lock pouch containing GCHQ intercepts. And the moment he took them out of the pouch, I knew what they were because I worked it started my career, Dan knew how to read these things. And what they showed, without any shadow of doubt, really, was that the Argentine jointer had set of an invasion fleet to see that by the end of the week, they were going to be at the Falkland Port Stanley, the capital of the Falklands, that they've had a submarine conducting a covert reconnaissance of the beach. So all the signals pointed. And John and I just looked at each other and sort of said, yeah, we better find the prime minister, because we knew this is going to rock the government quite apart from the loss of the Falkland Islands themselves. The this would put in serious Jeopardy, the continuation of the government because of the reaction. And so we rushed down the corridor, and we busted on and we showed her the intercepts. And I recount this in the book. The first reaction was actually to ring President Reagan, and get him to ring the jointer and say, Don't be so silly. Call this off. Reagan, the American power could persuade this jointer to stop. We didn't have the force in the South Atlantic that could stop them. There's nothing we can do. It's too far away. And the jointer refused to accept Reagan's telephone call the White House and they kept putting it off, because they knew they would probably have their arm twisted behind their back. And they would have to call it off. So it happened. But because of the GCHQ advance warning or be at only a few days, that enabled the prime minister to agree to the sending of a task force to the South Atlantic, which could be announced on the Saturday after immediately after the invasion. So look positive, it looked like yes, this is a terrible, terrible shame for the United Kingdom. They've this jointer this narrow fascist jointer has invaded the Falkland Islands British territory, but we're going to get them back. We're sending a taskforce. And with that if you just woken up to the news on the Today program. I think the reaction of her own backbenchers would have been very severe. As it was Carrington, the Foreign Secretary was, felt he really had to resign because he lost the confidence of his own backbenchers.
Graham Allcott 48:37
And in some of those moments, what what did you learn about pressure? And how human beings react under really severe pressure like that
Sir David Omand 48:48
it's difficult to generalize? You can? I think, certainly, if I was talking about officials, you can broadly put them into the category of those who really flinch who really is not what they do. They don't like that. So they kind of withdraw into themselves, and those who kind of expand, and, you know, their underlying natural sort of human talents come out very prominently. So some people are good in that kind of crisis doesn't necessarily mean they're going to take good decisions, but they're on top of a situation. They know they have to show leadership. Yeah. And some people just not what they do, they're, they're much better taking longer term decisions, looking at all the evidence, weighing it up, being very careful. And some in a crisis. Sometimes you just have to act and history will judge you and if you act the wrong way, you'll get have a very bad time. But you've got to act and it's not acting has a very heavy price. Again, there are COVID lessons, no doubt to be learned in future about that.
Graham Allcott 50:08
What was the moment that you felt most under pressure in your own career?
Sir David Omand 50:12
Oh, my goodness. It probably was, you know, depression during the Falklands, the early part of the Falklands's campaign was very intense. All our preparations, all our war planning and gaming and taking part in exercise had all been a NATO crisis with the United States as our principal ally, working together with our partners, and German partners, and so on. Whereas this was a national crisis. And we hadn't really any experience of dealing with something we will complete to start with completely on our own. And a lot had to be improvised a lot had to be made up on the spot. Afterwards, looking back on it, of course, we discovered that there've been so much innovation. And I sent out a minute on the Secretary of State's behalf to the Ministry of Defense, basically saying winning the war comes first. No recording the details, and counting the cost will come afterwards. So report what you've had to do and how much you've had to spend. But don't wait, get on with it. And afterwards, when you know, it was examined by the internal auditors and so on. Mostly we got better value of money for money, because decisions were made more quickly.
Graham Allcott 51:42
And I suppose we also have to talk about terrorism and Iraq. And that part of your career, too. So you were involved, Well, you wrote the the contest strategy, which has become the strategy of counterterrorism still in use today? Yes, right. 20 or so years later,
Sir David Omand 52:03
I started that this in about September, October 2002. When I took office, this was a new poster that was created that I took over a security intelligence coordinator. So we started work on it. And eventually, I presented it to the Cabinet. And they accepted it. And the contest strategy had a very, there's a lot of discussion about what is the nation are we trying to achieve? What is the strategic goal of having a counterterrorism strategy? I mean, it was obviously reducing the risk from terrorism, but by how much. And we came up with this formulation, that to reduce the risk from terrorism, so that people can go about their normal business freely. And, you know, it's, you're not setting out to say, we're going to destroy Al Qaeda. We're not setting out to say we will have zero risk of terrorism, because you probably wouldn't live want to live in a society with that level of surveillance. Yeah, yeah. But we're saying what the key test is to deny the terrorists, what they're most seeking, they want to put us in fear. They want to put the public in fear. So the public will put pressure on governments with off of at least for example, if normal life is continuing, we're winning and they're losing, by definition, so can you keep normal life going? And then we added those two riders freely and with confidence freely, meaning, you haven't succeeded if you brought the terrorist risk down, but you've had to sacrifice our freedoms and liberties in the process. And with confidence, meaning, do public, does the public feel confident? Do they use the London Underground? Do they get up in the morning? use public transport? Do foreign visitors arrive to people use civilian airliners? Is the inward investment in the country. And so these are all indicators that we are prevailing as a normal society, then you have the disturbance of a real event, terrorist event, and how quickly can you bounce back into that state of normality? And then we had to operationalize that aim. So we turned it into four programs that famous, pursue and prevent and protect and prepare, where you could have lists of things that government could do local goals. could do, the charitable sector could do, everyone had a part to play. And in that way you sort of pushed the.... it aligns very different from the United States objective, which was to destroy al Qaeda. Amy. And the this idea of, for example, when you come to protect against terrorist attack, can you do so in ways that don't put the public in fear. So the less barbed wire on police officers, you know, barriers or rest of it. And we came up with this secured by design. So if you look at new buildings in London, they are all much more secure against a terrorist bomb, for example, than previous generation. But the details you don't need to know about, it's just it's something that is that that is happening and where the cars get parked on the ground, that sort of thing.
Graham Allcott 56:00
And even some of those bollards that you see visibly, they're still, relatively speaking, quite unobtrusive. Right? So normal life is going on around a lot of the things that have
Sir David Omand 56:10
contrast between the balance around parliament, yeah, which are still very temporary, because they haven't agreed on what the permanent solution should look like, what the rebuilding of Parliament or the tidying up of, of Parliament. But if you look along, say Whitehall, there are balustrades there, but along the line they fit in. The public doesn't need to know as it were, that the reason for that is it will prevent, you know, vehicle bomb from getting too close to a building. The American embassy south of the river is a classic example because they've put a moat around the embassy. And it looks nice. It's kind of scenic, it's landscaped, but I wouldn't want to try try and drive a truck bomb into it because you go straight down to the bottom.
Graham Allcott 57:01
And you couple of things I want to talk about before we finish and yeah, do you want to get on and talk about some of the contemporary issues around information and disinformation and so on, just before we leave the terrorism, and that that sort of phase around sort of post 9/11. So you gave evidence to the Iraqi inquiry, and you talk in the book quite a lot about the how the SEES model applies to Iraq and some of the things that some of the big issues, you know, around getting the right kind of intelligence for Iraq. What what's your reflection, looking back on that period? Now, in terms of how the intelligence services dealt with all the issues around Iraq,
Sir David Omand 57:45
I think it falls into three, three buckets. One, situational awareness, we know know that some of the evidence, some of the intelligence reporting was very flaky, which we didn't know at the time. And some of it on biological warfare was actually a fabrication, which was fed into the American system. And from there, it got into the British system from an Iraqi defector in Germany. And the German service, debriefed him, produced all these reports about mobile, biological warfare trailers, and so on, which Colin Powell used in his presentation to the United Nations to justify the war. And it after the war, the journalists track this guy down. And he said, I made it up. He was an chemical engineer, he had worked on biological warfare programs, when Saddam had them. So he had all the technical knowledge to say this is still continuing. And that led the intelligence community quite seriously astray. So there was situational awareness problems, there are also explanation problems, in that quite a lot of what was seen was written off as this is Saddam's deception program. And including when he maintained, of course, that he'd given up these programs, they said, Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? And there was quite a lot of over interpretation of what evidence there was. So those two problems sort of interacted with each other, and meant that the Joint Intelligence Committee assessments towards the end of 2002 had really were in some serious error, which it was pointed out by the inquiries that took place up to about the middle of 2002. They were pretty good, actually. But they got hardened up as some of this evidence, so called evidence came in. And then the third issue was how do you explain all that to the public And that's where perhaps the, this wasn't really the, this is the dossier that was produced and so on, where more care should have been taken. And we should have spotted that we should have made much more of the rule number one of intelligence, the lesson of intelligence, you know, is fragmentary, it's incomplete, and it's sometimes wrong. The way it was presented was with a certainty, which really was probably more than it It should have, should have been ascribed to it.
Graham Allcott 1:00:34
Do you feel like those lessons have been learned? Or do Yes, yeah. It's actually quite a long time ago now as well, isn't it? Like, how does that how did those essence stay learned rather than fading?
Sir David Omand 1:00:44
We have to keep refreshing them and there is the College of intelligence analysis. So the young analysts get trained, and they get talked to by people like me, and try and keep these lessons alive, but different mistakes will be made? Probably not those ones. But there are always things you have to learn.
Graham Allcott 1:01:05
And I guess that's just the nature of the job as well. All right. Let's finish that I really wanted to talk to you about the disinformation stuff. And maybe what I'll do is I'll do a little spiel at the end of the podcast, yes, do you want to just tell people where they can buy the book looks like you have somewhere you need to run to?
Sir David Omand 1:01:21
Well, the book will be out on the 29th of October. It's all the usual outlets, both real book shops, and of course, Amazon, and so on. And there's a digital version, and actually took the trouble to read the whole book. So there's an audio version, which you can also get hold of. And I suppose I conclude by saying it's the book is a call to arms in favor of rational analysis, to support decision making. And it's a warning, you know, be very careful on social media, not to spread further false reports and false and be careful about deception, because there's quite a lot of it around.
Graham Allcott 1:02:05
Absolutely. And where are you being called off to now what's what's the rest of your day looking like?
Sir David Omand 1:02:10
Oh, it's yet more at a lecture I have to give, in fact, an audience in the United States.
Graham Allcott 1:02:16
Okay, hope it goes well. So just a real pleasure having you on the podcasts and the book's fantastic. So congratulations on it. And thanks for being on beyond busy.
Sir David Omand 1:02:27
Great. Thanks very much, Graham.
Graham Allcott 1:02:36
So as you heard there, at the end, David was pulled away to get ready for another engagement at a quite sort of short notice. And it was a surprise to both of us. And there was like about five minutes of stuff that I wanted to talk about from his book, which I really loved. And it was the final battles going to ask you about at the end, because it really sort of wrapped it all up. And we just kind of didn't get round to it because of that. So I just want to say a couple of things really quickly. The end of David's book is fascinating and talks about disinformation, and what that means for democracy. And it paints some pictures of future elections in the UK in the US. And some of the possible scenarios where people are duped into voting for one particular party or another, based on things like deep fakes based on disinformation, stuff, that just is palpably untrue. And, you know, once everyone puts their cross in the ballot box, then it's too late. Right? So yeah, you might have been duped by something, you know, on a Wednesday. But if you voted on the Thursday, it doesn't matter if you find out by the Saturday that it was all fake and wrong. And to date, you've made a choice. You know, that's how democracy works. So feels like we've got this 24 hour, very dynamic media culture that is capable of all kinds of things, including being manipulated from all kinds of different angles, Russia, obviously, being a really obvious one, but so many different places can manipulate information. And at the same time, we have an electoral system, which is really still quite Victorian, you know, in terms of walking into a ballot box and picking up a pencil and writing your, you know, writing across against the person that you want to vote for. And so kind of feels like that is a little bit of a weakness, the fact that our voting systems are so driven by it being you know, basically one day every four or five years decides the direction of the country. And so I just think there's something really important at stake here. And well, there's something fundamentally at stake here. And one of the things that I think we need to really think more about and push out is the idea of critical thinking. I think this has been something that through the COVID period has really come from Light, you would have thought that a pandemic would be the event that shut up the anti vaxxer movement forever. And actually, early on in the pandemic, I remember seeing someone saying, anti vaxxers, getting a brief glimpse of a vaccine free world. And I thought, yeah, I mean, this should be the end of the argument, right? And actually, of course, we will note on the opposite. So I think there's definitely, you know, there's that we definitely need to really think about how people view objective truth, we really need to establish some trusted mechanisms around a shared view of what truth is, or what truths are. And I think critical thinking is something that we really need to engage with as a skill. And as a topic much, much more. Over the years, I've always been really annoyed as someone who did Media Studies, a level hearing, politicians, actually, of all, you know, shapes and sizes, but particularly conservative politicians really disparaging the topic of media studies and calling it a Mickey Mouse a level and things like that. And my theory is that people feel quite threatened by media studies. And it's the same reason why people tend to do down the humanities, and particularly history is because those are the subjects you know, history and Media Studies really are the two academic subjects that really teach us some of these critical thinking skills and to really analyze why is a certain organization behind a certain point of view. Why is that newspaper pushing that particular narrative? Why do those people care that, that that's the the control of the narrative. And so I think we really need to get much more savvy around this. And I'm quite lucky in that there's only a couple of people that I've come across in my own networks who are falling for these kind of very silly conspiracy theories. And I think it's the duty of all of us when you see that, not to just take the easy option of saying, okay, that person was from my school, I quite like them, but I'm going to block them. It's, you know, it's really important to try and engage in those conversations, and really, you know, layout of it the challenge. I actually had a situation that a while ago, where I said, really, I mean, I agree with you about 90% of what you're saying, but that part of what you're saying is ridiculous. And the reason I was doing that was to really just quash any influence of those kind of conspiracy theories. And just to make the point that, okay, so even if I'm on your side, even if I agree with you about so many things that the government is doing wrong, then, you know, actually, that is something that we just have to say is just probably untrue, even if you might want it to be true, emotionally, some true. So I think it's just really important for us to have those conversations. And I think it's all of our duties to protect the idea of objective truth. And, of course, the idea of free speech so that we can really dissect the ideas. I think, if we lose that, we lose so much. And I thought that was just really well put at the end of David's book. And the way he plays out, there's different scenarios and, you know, different sort of media influence and, you know, the sense that media really has so much power to influence behavior, particularly when we don't have such strong sort of objective institutions anymore. You know, people don't use the BBC anymore and say what you like about the BBC, but they do have things like the newspaper review? Well, I'll show you both sides of the argument. And, you know, they will have the fact check kind of stuff that goes on on the BBC website, and, you know, looking at the particular evidence and facts behind particular political speeches and things like that. And I think that's really, really important. There's a whole load of websites, websites like Snopes that we're that we're all aware of that will help to put evidence in front of us. But I think we really need to defend the idea of objective truth, and, you know, really help people to think critically. And I think as we go through the next couple of decades, if we don't have that, as a fundamental part of the education system, we're going to be in real trouble. So it's a lot at stake. And I just thought it was a point really well made in David's book and one that I really wanted to wrap up and make on his behalf because we went out of time. So that is that. And the other thing I just want to say before we finish is that we we talked before about the fact that my book with Colette Heneghan is on pre order. So if you want to go to amazon.co.uk and thank us for this podcast, you can do so by buying a or multiple copies of 'How to Have the Energy' so go and do that amazon.com and next week, we actually have Colette on the show. So we're going to be talking about “How to Have the Energy”. We're going to be talking about nutrition, how to eat well to have good energy for your work, how to have a really healthy lifestyle for the vitality and just full of energy. So that's coming up next week with Colette. As always, thanks to Mark Steadman, my producer on the show, Think Productive, our sponsors for the show, and you can find the show notes and all the previous episodes at getbeyondbusy.com. We'll see you next week.
Take care Bye for now