How Spies Think – Spy Chief David Omand

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

TRT (Total Running Time): 1:01:12

ANDREW HAMMOND: Hi, and welcome to SpyCast from the secret files of the International spy Museum in Washington, DC. I'm Dr. Andrew Hammond, the museum's historian and curator. Every week, SpyCast brings you interesting conversations from authors, scholars and practitioners who live in the world of global espionage. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns email us at [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. Also, if you like what you hear, and even if you don't, please take a minute to review us on iTunes or whatever platform you may be listening from. We're always looking for ways to make SpyCast better and you can help.

ANDREW HAMMOND: Welcome to this week's edition of SpyCast. This week we're looking at “How Spies Think” and we're doing so with Sir David Omand. So, I'm really pleased that I got the opportunity to speak to David because a professor of my graduate school, said that he was the smartest person whom he had ever met. And he had met a lot of smart people, he had done his PhD at Cambridge. Another endorsement for Sir David comes from Rodric Braithwaite. So, Sir Rodric was the last British ambassador to the former , and he said that there is no one more qualified to speak about British intelligence than David Omand.

DAVID OMAND: In 1969, I graduated from Cambridge University. I decided not to pursue an academic career with getting a doctorate. I didn't join the Treasury which is another option that was open to me as an economist. And I went off to work for GCHQ, the British signals intelligence and cyber security establishment, which involves sitting the hardest examination I've ever sat in my life. They let me in to my slight surprise and I started my training as an intelligence analyst and as a fast streamer in GCHQ. Later on, I worked in the Ministry of Defense for really quite a few years. I was the private secretary to a number of Secretaries of State for Defense, including during the Falklands War.

1 I was surprised to be asked to go back to GCHQ at the end of the Cold War, to be director. And they were looking for somebody who could reorient the department, both to new customers following the end of the Cold War, but also to take account of the coming digital age, the tsunami of digital technology which was threatening to render obsolete so much of what had been done so brilliantly during the Cold War with analog radio systems and HF morse and all these other things.

So, I ended up in GCHQ as the director at a crucial time for the intelligence world. I was then sort of headhunted to go and run the , our homeland security department, essentially, the home department. And after three years of that, I ended up in the Cabinet Office, the center of government, as the first U.K. security and intelligence coordinator, responsible to the Prime Minister for the professional health in the intelligence community, the sort of DNI role in America, for the construction of the U.K.’s counterterrorism strategy, which was more of a homeland security role.

00:04:47

So, it was a mixture of things. So, looking back on the career, there's both presence in the intelligence community, I spent seven years as a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee, but also active work as a policymaker in government. And that I think is maybe one of the things that makes people like Sir Rodric Braithwaite sort of think that I know a lot about it because I've been on both sides.

And there aren't that many people who have successfully moved backwards and forwards between the professional intelligence world and the policy world. We tried to keep them separate. We don't want policy considerations to pollute the impartiality of intelligence analysis. But if you've been on both sides, you get a very, I think, helpful view of the interactions and how you get the two to work successfully together. And that's really one of the things I've been trying to cover in my new book.

ANDREW HAMMOND: So, the book has a fascinating title “How Spies Think.” Could you just set out the…

DAVID OMAND: There you are. I’m just holding up the cover so you can see what it looks like on the bookshelves.

2 ANDREW HAMMOND: I look forward to getting a hard copy. At the minute I’ve had to make do with the audio book and the PDF. And I was wondering if you could just set the start out for us. What did you set out to do and how did you do it?

DAVID OMAND: Well, I started work on this book and started thinking about it really after the Brexit referendum in the and then the experience of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and seeing the way in which these great events were reflected through social media, and watching the rising tide of half-truths, distortions, some downright lies, some of which came from some from elsewhere. That was seeking to persuade people of what they should think, and feel, and want and essentially aiming at dividing, you know, widening divisions in society, and setting us at each other's throats.

And, you know, I'm not naive, I know that politics is a contact sport, it can be pretty brutal. The public has always aimed off for exaggerated claims by politicians and a bit of political swagger. That's part of the game, as is personal rivalries and competition between politicians. But we've never before had to suffer politicians and leaders in society who begin to deny the very nature of the truth. The RAND Corporation wrote a report about this, a year or so back, and they called it the “spread of Truth Decay.”

So, we have people from respecting the truth is no longer as important as creating the right emotional impact. And that of course is how social media works. It works on impact it works, on clicks per minute. And for too many people getting their information through social media, you know, they will see something, and they say, “I would like that to be true.” And that kind of morphs with constant repetition on social media into “it might be true.” And that slides, too easily into, “it's as good as true.”

And we've seen this in the U.S., we've seen a bit of this in the recent election. But we certainly saw it in 2016, we saw it in the British Brexit referendum. And it has become a feature of political life, taken to the kind of extremes which we're beginning to see where foreign state, Russia, actively uses this phenomena to interfere, then it's very dangerous for democracy.

So, I thought I'm going to write a book. It's a call to arms in favor of rationality of rational analysis. And I wanted to write it in such a way that anyone reading it would not read it just as a textbook on intelligence community business but

3 would actually say “this applies to my personal life, my business life as well,” because the way spies think, as the title says, the way intelligence analysts work is as applicable to any decision we have to take.

00:10:01

If you decide you want to live somewhere else, you want to change where you live or apply for a different job, or even to decide whether you're going to wear a mask, COVID mask in the street, this afternoon. These decisions you have to hold two different kinds of thought in your mind at the same time. One is the rational dispassionate analysis of the facts of the case and what it is you're facing, why you have to take this decision. But the other part is emotional. It's about what do I hope to get out of this decision or what do I fear that I think this decision might allow me to avoid. And both are necessary. But what I observed, recently, is that the emotional side is leaching into and distorting the rational side.

In government we take huge care to separate these two out. So, you have national intelligence estimates coming out of the U.S. NIC you have estimates coming out to the British Joint Intelligence Committee, you have professional analysis on COVID, you have scientists and doctors producing impartial advice. And then on the other hand, you have the customers for that analysis, who are passionate, they have political beliefs, they have democratic mandates. They have to have the final say as to what happens.

But if you allow just the emotional, impact side to dominate and you're not taking sufficient care of the rational analysis or even worse, the rational analysis is beginning to be contaminated by the other side, the passionate side, then you can get into quite a lot of trouble.

So, that's really why I set out in the book. This is a good way, the first part of the book, this is a good way of thinking about the outputs from intelligence. Not necessarily secret Intelligence but our native wit, our own intelligence, these are the four outputs, as I put it.

And the second part of the book is an analysis of how you can get it wrong, how you can slip into errors of thinking and there's plenty of historical evidence that that happens.

4 And then the third part of the book is, let's use that learning to keep ourselves safe online, to improve the way we build long term partnerships, and indeed, to improve the outcomes of the negotiations which we all have to engage in from time to time.

ANDREW HAMMOND: I think that it's really interesting that you're almost like working on a vaccine for a pandemic of mass truths, half-truths, disinformation, misinformation. So, I think that the remedy is really important, but do we have any, do you have a sense of any understanding of where this pandemic came from? What's going on? Is it the information revolution? Is it broader societal changes? And I wanted to get into the book a little bit more, but I just wondered if you’ve thought a bit about where the malady came from?

DAVID OMAND: Yeah, there are sort of two main drivers. One is the business model of the internet. And don't get me wrong, the internet is a wonderful thing as is social media. Where would we be with COVID if it couldn't keep in touch with people using Zoom and Teams and all the rest of it. So, our economic and social health in the future depends entirely on having a functioning, working, secure, internet. Absolutely no doubt about that. It's a great, great thing. And we'll find in the “Global South,” that there are billions of new users over the next ten years. And that is going to revolutionize economic and social development.

So, it's a great thing, but it does have this dark side. And quite inadvertently nobody planned it this way, but the business model of the internet, that pays for structures, that pays for the free at the point of use service, when you click and you get an immediate answer to your question, and it's free, you don't have to pay for, it's paid for by the advertising.

So, this enormously sophisticated mechanism has been set up where auctions take place within a 1,000th of a second to match who the machines think you are, your income level, your socioeconomic level, your browsing history, your interests, what you purchased in the past, all the data points about you, to match that to what the advertiser says “this is the audience I want to reach for my product or my service.” And in a 1,000th of a second, the auction houses produce a result, a price is settled for the advertisement. And before it's loaded on your web browser, after you've typed in the URL, before it's loaded, up come the advertisements for you.

00:15:38

5

I mean this is, when you step back and think about it, a truly stonking achievement. I mean it is an amazing achievement that this is even possible. But what it does do, because of the way it's structured, is it gives some impact because it's clicks per minute. That's the medium, as it were, of transaction. That's the money-- is clicks per minute. And the more outrageous the material, the more clicks. And you know, plenty of case stories around of how people have exploited this to make a little bit of money out of fake news videos, cat videos and all the rest of it, which is fine. But what it does do is it emphasizes the emotional over the rational, because the impact of what you're seeing is what registers, first and foremost.

And we get a little bit of this with, certainly in the United Kingdom, we get briefings on COVID-19 from government spokesman and indeed from the Prime Minister, and up flashes a graph showing number of cases, or a number of hospitals admissions, or numbers of deaths.

You probably don't have time to look at the scale, even if the scale is shown on the chart, it may not show up on your television. All you see is the line going up, and then the voiceover from the Prime Minister or whoever saying “more and more cases, we need to have further lockdowns or take further measures.” So, it's that emotional and visual impact.

Now, in many cases, that's fine particularly if it's entertaining, or if you have the opportunity to really examine it. But if all it's doing is creating that initial framing, as I call it in the book of the subsequent discussion, you've already had put in your mind a frame within which the debate will take place. And every television producer knows that, how do you introduce a news item, what music do you play, what little clip do you show before you have the interview with some notable person. It's framing and it's a well understood psychological technique. But that's just one of the ways in which to answer your first question the business model of the internet itself encourages this.

And then of course you've got tweets and retweets, you can have automated bots that will then amplify messages. Users are allowed to set their preferences. So, you create for yourself that filter bubble that only selects in information that's more likely to agree with your prejudices than anything else and gradually we get isolated.

6 The other factor is our very human vulnerability when we're on the internet. And again, there's quite a lot of research showing that being on the internet, and particularly the anonymity that goes with the internet, encourages certain kinds of disinhibition, certain kinds of behavior. And you say things, even on emails, that you would never dream of saying to somebody’s face.

And this is one of the reasons why people like the Russians steal emails, because they know perfectly well that on emails people will have expressed opinions that they never intended to be made public. So, you steal them and weaponize them and that was a technique employed against the Democratic National Convention committee in the 2016 Presidential Election and against President Macron’s En Marche party in France. Steal their emails and then tweak them a little bit to emphasize some of them and then release them for effect.

00:19:58

So, the combination of, sort of, that psychological vulnerability with the inherent hardwiring of the way the internet works produces I think quite a toxic combination. So, you're absolutely right, we've got to start learning to live with this safely. I would start in schools, teaching the kids critical thinking, using internet material, and coaching them so that they realize that it's a terrible mistake to retweet stuff without checking out you know what really it is. Don't believe everything you see on the internet. When a friendly appearing individual seems to be, you know, a young person of your own age making contact it could be, you know, it could be an extremely dangerous individual trying to find people to groom for child abuse. Without frightening children, we do need to take them through critical thinking, because it is different from the sort of thinking which you apply to reading old fashioned newspapers, watching old fashioned television. And that's not how the upcoming generation gets their information, they get it from social media.

ANDREW HAMMOND: And help us understand how spies do think. So, for people that have never been involved in it, in intelligence, put those lenses on people that have never worn them themselves professionally. How is the spy thinking about the world? How are they dealing with all the phenomena that's coming in on a daily basis?

DAVID OMAND: Okay. Well, the simplest way I've found to think about it, and more or less is what I put in the book, and I've got an acronym for it

7 because you need to have an acronym, which is SEES. Which is what you're trying to do, you're trying to see the world, clearly, so S-E-E-S.

And the first S is situational awareness, facts on the ground or facts in cyberspace. Do y0ou know what is actually happening? How reliable is the information that you're gathering, pulling together to take a decision? And let's catch this in terms of you had a decision, a big decision to make. Do you really understand the situation that is facing you, the choices that are open, the facts on the ground?

My first lesson in intelligence is that our knowledge of the world is always fragmentary, incomplete, and it's sometimes wrong. And that is true of all life, you can never really know everything. And you'll never know as much as you perhaps ought to know before you take a decision. But some decisions won't wait, you have to take. So, the first step is trying to ground yourself in some evidence that will stand up to scrutiny. And if you're an intelligence officer, you know that there are some adversaries out there who are feeding in data points that are fake. They're deliberately trying to mislead you. And indeed, in political life there are some who are exaggerating, I say pushing in too. So, you've got to be careful about your situational awareness. But with patience, and care, I've seen the analysts really come to, you know, they put together the pieces, they've got the pieces of the jigsaw, if you like.

But there's a crucial, crucial mistake that people make, which is jumping from ‘Well, I've seen the facts on the ground, now I know what's going on.” And the answer is you don't because you have to explain why things are the way they appear to be. Why did you see that evidence and not some other evidence? I use a little story in the book to illustrate this.

So, let's imagine you've got a court and there's a young man charged with throwing a bottle at a police patrol and his fingerprints are on the fragments of the bottle. So, the prosecution says, “Clear cut case, it's his fingerprints, no doubt about it, send him down.” The defense lawyer will say, “Well, hang on a minute. The mob came past his house, they pick the bottle out of his recycling bin. Of course, it had his fingerprints on it, and then they threw it.” Now, which of these versions of reality is the truth? That's what the court, or jury, has to decide. But what it illustrates is, it's the same fact, the same fingerprint, but it's capable of two very different interpretations.

00:25:14

8

And in international affairs, when one nation appears to be dangerous and doing things quite aggressive towards a neighbor, is that deliberate? Did they intend that? So, answering questions about why and how. Whereas your situational awareness, it's answering questions about what, when, and where, basic stuff. Much harder to get to the roots of why is that happening? But if you've got a decent explanation and some good well, grounded evidence, you can move on to the holy grail of intelligence work, which is estimation. You can tell your customers how things are going to pan out and you can begin to model.

And we see this with COVID. So, the experts have data on hospital admissions cases and so on. They now have increasingly good explanations about how the virus is communicated between one group and another or one person and another. You can put those together, make some assumptions about public behavior, and then you can begin to model. If we instituted a lockdown, if we said it was compulsory to use masks of public gatherings, what would be the effect? And that's where you're beginning to model the real world effect on assumptions.

So, the third of my outputs that an analyst can give a customer is that estimation of how things might work. It's not a prediction, it's not a crystal ball. It's probably caveated with, you know, we probably will see this or that, or it may be heavily dependent on assumptions, on the assumption that we expect that to be the following consequence.

And we can all do that. But then those three together, situational awareness, explanation and estimation….whilst you're busy with your head down, trying to work all that out, something creeps up behind you and hits you on the back of the head that you weren't expecting.

So, the fourth output that the intelligence community can give a customer, or indeed you can give yourself by thinking ahead, is what I call strategic notice. And these are the kind of black swans. These are the, “Well, it probably won't happen, but if it did it will be catastrophic.” That's what causes us to take out insurance, fire insurance on our house if you have a house, or property insurance on our new iPhone, or whatever, because if it gets stolen and you haven't got insurance, it's a big loss. And you can actually hedge your bets. You can pay for insurance and live with a greater degree of

9 confidence, and that's because you've got strategic notice that that kind of theft is pretty common.

And in society one of those black swans was the pandemic, was the coronavirus pandemic. Impossible to estimate in advance exactly what the characteristics of a brand-new disease would be that’s just jumped the species barrier. But the idea of there being some kind of viral infection of the coronavirus type, everybody in government has known for years that that is likely at some point to appear. And we had it a bit with SARS, you get different variants of the flu. H5N1 was the favorite for a long time, that if that appears it's going to be pretty serious.

So, we knew in advance that that was one of those possibilities. And then the question for the policymaker is, how much do you invest in stockpiles of protective equipment? Do you invest with the pharmaceutical companies in fast-tracking vaccines, so that they're all ready to fast track a vaccine? Do you have track and trace arrangements? The app that was created, it would have been nice if some of that work had been done in advance of the pandemic arriving. And some of the arguments over the personal data that the app might use, you have those arguments in peacetime, as it were, before you're in crisis.

00:30:10

So those four components that make up SEES, situational awareness, explanation, estimation and strategic notice, form my model. Those are the outputs that the brain of an analyst, or indeed your own brain, can provide you when you come to decide, “Where am I going to live?” and all sorts of questions pop up about, “Where are the children going to go to school?” and “What's the neighborhood like?” and “do I have access to parks?” and anyway, “Why do I want to move out of the city?” or “move into the city?”

And that's the kind of emotional part, and see you have to connect your hopes, and desires and fears, which are very genuine and that's why you're going to make the decision, with the rational analysis of, “What is this new neighborhood really like?” “Have I checked out the facts on the ground?” “Will there be a place in a school for the kids?” And so on. And you bring those two together.

10 So, that's what professional analyst is good at. And with luck if you have final decision makers, doesn't really matter if presidents, or prime ministers, or military commanders or police officers…if whoever policymakers, whoever has to take those decisions, has been trained in “these are the outputs of analysis that I can use” and “these are all the traps I could fall into the cognitive biases and obsessional thinking” and so on. And once you’ve exposed all that and you've trained people, you're going to get better decisions.

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ANDREW HAMMOND: Is thinking like a spy more science or more art? Or is there a blend of both?

DAVID OMAND: It has to be a blend of both. I mean there are some specialist roles within the intelligence community which are science, which are pretty hard-edged science or advanced mathematics. But if you’re talking about the intelligence officers who are analyzing the intelligence. If you're looking at the ways in which they organize the collection of information and so on and the management of the community, you need both.

11 You need a very good humanistic training. You don't want people in intelligence communities who haven't got a sense of restraint because you're using the power of the state to do very unusual things; to steal secrets from other people, to coerce people by recruiting them to help you with information and thus betray the countries whose services they may be in. That's the business. That's human intelligence, that's recruiting agents and they have to betray their loyalty for you, and therefore, you have to convince them that's worth it.

00:35:15

So, that kind of very unusual activity which takes place, inevitably, in secret intelligence, you want that to be done by people who have a good humanistic sense of restraint. The last thing an intelligence, certainly a British intelligence agency, would want us to employ is somebody who has no ethical sense because they're actually quite dangerous. And you can't rely on them being sensible and they will end up doing things that will bring some shame on the organization and sadly from time to time around the world you can see this happening to intelligence agencies.

So, on the other hand, we're in a digital age. Personal information is all digitized. If you want to know about an individual, be they a narcotics trafficker or terrorist or a people smuggler or dictator, where do you look? You look on the internet, you look on social media, you look for the information which we all give out all the time as we live in the digital age. So, you have to have some understanding of that.

And certainly, when it comes to analysis, Bayesian inference, doesn't matter if you call it that or not…I mean without getting technical that is the way in which big data is managed. That is the way in which you're inferring from large quantities of data that you're interrogating or some smart algorithm to come out with a small amount of information which may be relevant to your particular inquiry. And of course, the essence of Bayesian Thinking is that when new evidence arrives, you use that methodical way of thinking to alter your degree of belief in your previous proposition.

So, you think, well take the Cuban Missile Crisis, the analysts in the Pentagon thought that it was unthinkable that the Soviet Union would try and smuggle nuclear weapons onto Cuba. That was their prior proposition. Then along comes some aerial photography, showing strange coffin like shapes

12 on tracks and so on, but unidentified. Then you have the spy Penkovsky providing MI6, the British Intelligence Service, and the CIA with invaluable insights into how the Soviet Union set up the missile bases. You put it all together and suddenly what appears to be there is indeed the first stages of the construction of medium-range missiles that would hold Washington at risk from Cuba.

And thankfully, the intelligence also indicated that from what could be seen, they weren't yet operational. And that gave President Kennedy just enough time to get the blockade of Cuba organized and to challenge President Khrushchev. And since Khrushchev's whole thinking had been “We’ll smuggle them in, get them operational, and then there's nothing they can do about it because they're facing a fait accompli,” it was either go to World War III or back down.

And Kennedy very sensibly gave him a ladder to climb back down; the removal of the U.S. Thor missiles in Turkey, privately agreed, so that he could back down and save his face vis-à-vis his generals. Khrushchev could back down, and the world was saved from World War III. That could have been a confrontation that got extremely nasty. But that kind of way of thinking about intelligence but being prepared to adjust your estimates in the light of new information, if you're like that, that’s the secret to Bayesian Thinking.

ANDREW HAMMOND: And you've got some wonderful examples in the book, but I wondered if you could zero in on one or two of your favorites?

00:39:38

DAVID OMAND: Oh, it wasn't written as a memoir and the examples I pick I deliberately picked rather more from the policy world that I've been in that the straight intelligence world because I don't intend ever to reveal any intelligence secrets.

But let just give you an example, which is: 1982 I was the principal private secretary to the then-defense secretary John Lott… a sort of crisis was blowing up over the Falkland Islands and John and I were working in the House of Commons in Westminster on a speech he was going to give when a runner arrived from Whitehall with a locked pouch. And in it where these folders, three intercepts from GCHQ, my old department, intercepts of Argentine naval communications that they had very cleverly deciphered. And

13 when you read these covert beach reconnaissance of the capital of the Falkland Islands, a task force had set sail destination not known. But another intercept…that there was a senior person on board, you put all this together, and it was pretty evident that by the end of the week, a task force would have arrived, an invasion force would have arrived on the Falkland Islands and there was nothing on the Falkland Islands to stop them but a company of Royal Marines who couldn't put up any serious resistance, too few people. So, by the end of the week we would have lost the Falkland Islands.

So, John and I, we looked at each other and said, “this is very serious, the Prime Minister must be told at once.” So, we dashed down the corridor on the House of Commons burst in on , who was the Prime Minister, said, “Prime Minister, you better look at this.” And she read them, and she looked up and she said, “this is very serious.” And there's only one thing you can say which is, “Yes, Prime Minister by the end of the week we’ll have lost the Falklands and there's nothing because it's so far away, you can do in the time available.” And that allowed her just enough time to agree to put together a naval task force to dispatch to the South Atlantic.

And when the invasion took place, there was a very, very angry debate in the House of Commons on the following day, on the Saturday. She was able to stand up and announce, “We've already got a taskforce together; it will be sailing imminently for the South Atlantic.” You know, “We're determined; we're taking action.” And that almost certainly saved her Premiership because people were extremely angry, but I'll never forget that night from her room in the House of Commons ringing up the duty commander in the Ministry of Defense with this historic instruction from the Prime Minister and the First Sea Lord, “Ready the fleet for sea.”

But what that illustrated was, in a sense, my model of intelligence, the situational awareness. GCHQ had managed to crack those ciphers and managed at the very last minute to pick up communications, which showed what was about to happen, and the explanation of that was pretty straightforward. And my estimate of what was then going to happen was exactly right, by the end of the week they would be on the Falklands.

So, that saved her Premiership. That was an intelligence success. But what was a failure was that it came as such a surprise. And when afterwards there were inquiries, we discovered there was strategic notice. The Joint Intelligence Committee had sent out a report saying that if the junta became

14 convinced that the negotiations with Britain over the Falkland Islands were going nowhere, it was quite likely they'd take matters into their own hands. So, that warning was there yet, government had not done anything. It would have been expensive, but a few hundred million pounds would have extended the runway to allow fast jets to land in a crisis, that would have been sufficient deterrent. As it was, the failure to act on strategic notice probably cost some £3 billion and sadly, a thousand lives on both sides, to settle that dispute and recover the islands back to the United Kingdom, it was our territory that, you know, a fascist junta had invaded. But it needn't have happened at all if the strategic notice had been heeded.

00:44:59

So, there's a sort of perfect encapsulation of some of these lessons about intelligence work. There was a kind of magical thinking, it's quite a useful phrase I find, magical thinking on the part of the then government that it wasn't going to happen and if it did happen, oh well intelligence people will give us warning. But when you look at it coldly, completely impossible to guarantee that, you know, a month in advance, you're going to get advanced notice of that kind of decision. And that the British policy was based on sand, that magical illusion that we don't need to worry because we'll get intelligence warning that will give us time to sail a submarine to the South Atlantic or a frigate or whatever it might be. So, yeah, there we are, that's a little case study.

ANDREW HAMMOND: And you mentioned Margaret Thatcher. Was there a particular policymaker during your career who you thought, they just get it, they understand the limitations of intelligence, the strength of intelligence? And is there also someone that you just thought, this is hard work, they're just not getting it at all?

DAVID OMAND: I don't think it's about personality of Prime Ministers or foreign secretaries or whatever, it's more about what else is going on. And it's, in part, it's how much does the intelligence community push and warn on the Joint Intelligence Committee. You can find… it's not enough to write a paper. The same is true in the United States with National Intelligence estimates. It's not enough to write a very elegant paper, well expressed, lots of evidence and hope that somebody reads it.

15 If you actually want to issue a warning, then it’s like a shout to the political leadership saying, “Stop everything else you're doing, we're warning you something unpleasant is on its way.” And that takes a certain amount of courage to do that. Because if you do it too often and you get it wrong, which is perfectly possible, then you get what's called the Cassandra syndrome after the Princess of Troy who went round, you know, “Beware of the gifts, the Trojan horse” that nobody believed in and that was the downfall of Troy. So, you know, warners who overdo the shouting, crying wolf get discredited. But sometimes you do have to say we're giving a warning.

There's another example I give in the book, a slightly different one, about the difficulties of trying to assess motivations and that was in 1995 at the time of the Bosnian War. And General Mladic, who was commander of the Bosnian Serb army, had occupied the UN safe area of Srebrenica, and essentially massacred the male population and his troops behaved abominably to the civilian population that were sheltering there supposedly under UN protection. And the question was, I was on the Joint Intelligence Committee at the time, what's he going to do next? Is he going to continue ethnic cleansing effectively?

So, I found myself on an airplane heading on a secret mission to Belgrade along with the commander in chief of the Royal Air Forces Strike Command and our American and French opposite numbers on a secret visit to Mladic to both warn him that if he stepped out of line in relation to another UN safe area, the full might of U.S. British and French airpower would be unleashed on his army and secondly to try and to assess, would he accept that warning or was he going to continue to defy the international community and the United Nations?

And it was…I recounted in the book, it was, we agreed that the aviators would wear aviator sunglasses and leather bomber jackets, look as menacing as possible, that we wouldn't accept the hospitality we knew that General Mladic would offer us, you know, sweetmeats and slivovitz, which indeed was set out in the table in the villa outside Belgrade where this meeting took place.

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And he got very angry and he tore open his shirt and said to the air commanders, “You might as well kill me now, but no foreign boot is going to

16 desecrate the graves of my ancestors.” And he then read to us from this handwritten book that he had, which he'd written of the tribulations of the Serb people ever since the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds in the 14th century, when the Serbs were defeated by the Ottoman army. And as far as he was concerned the Bosnian Muslim population were Turks, and they had no place in his country and he was very racist, very blunt in that.

So, when we flew back at the end of the day, it was very evident that his motivation was ethnic cleansing, and he wasn’t going to stop, and it was deep in his bones and the only thing that would stop his was a full-scale NATO intervention on the ground with American participation. And that’s what happened and that did indeed bring their civil war to an end. And Mladic is today languishing in jail, life sentence for crimes against humanity from the international…. a judgment from the International Court.

Again, it's an interesting example of how there are crucial moments when you have to try and assess the motivation of an adversary, and Mladic made it easier for us than he might have done. But without actually personally meeting him It might have been harder to read him. Which is one again of the general lessons that well educated, well brought up intelligence analysts sitting in a comfortable office in Washington, or Whitehall in London, may find it difficult to put themselves inside the mind of a tyrant and not to make the mistake of kind of mirror imaging, how they would react.

And in 1968, the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia to crash the reform movement. The intelligence analysts on both sides of the Atlantic said, “No, the Soviet tanks will not roll across the border because … the International opprobrium, the international fuss there would be, they won’t. It’s not worth it for them.” But actually, that was a complete misreading of their determination to protect the spread of the Czech style reform into other Warsaw Pact countries and they did indeed roll.

At that very minute, I was driving an elderly Land Rover with some fellow students along the border between Hungary and Czechoslovakia dodgy in and out of Soviet tank columns. We didn't know whether they were going to cross over the border and neither did the Joint Intelligence Committee in London, which made the wrong judgment call. Again, mirror imaging, saying that factors that will weigh heavily in Moscow are the same as the ones that would weigh heavily in London, Paris, Bonn in those days, or Washington.

17 We have the same sort of issue with President Putin today who may well judge risk of embarking on say digital subversive activities, very differently from a Western government would judge the risk going the other way.

ANDREW HAMMOND: So, you mentioned the United States, do American spies, for example, think differently, from British spies?

DAVID OMAND: Well, what I'm describing really is the analytic art. When it's, as you say, half art half science. And that is common. So, an American analyst working for the DNI would think in exactly the same way. They’d know the same cognitive traps they mustn’t fall into. They've got the same history of successes on the one hand and some failures on the other. So, no, there’s a very common thinking. When it comes to operations on the ground, then yes I mean the CIA has a large paramilitary arm that is engaged in activity, drone use, for example, that the British Secret Service doesn't really do. It's much more concerned with a covert intelligence gathering, rather than creating action, although there’s a bit of that that goes on.

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Both are very good a back channel diplomacy. So, conducting negotiations or opening discussions with parties that their governments wouldn't be prepared to admit they were talking to. And this of course is what happened classically in Northern Ireland, where the British intelligence community was making the first overtures and discussions with what government saw as a terrorist group. But that of course was the very beginnings of a peace process, which took years to come to fruition. But nonetheless, you know, that without that work by the Security Service and the Secret Service, working together, probably, you know, you wouldn't have been able to bring a peace process together without that kind of patient back channel diplomacy. And there are many examples for the United States, again, back channel diplomacy, trying to find peaceful solutions to conflicts around the world.

ANDREW HAMMOND: And you mentioned in the book consensual hallucination, and I wonder if you could just flesh out that concept a little bit more?

DAVID OMAND: Well, it's not my term, it's Gibson's term from the original “Neuromancer” novel it's sort of the… it appears alongside the first ever use of the word “cyberspace” and the cyberspace cowboys who are in the novel

18 operating. So, but it is the way in which there's a kind of suspension of disbelief. It's what you get, you know, with a really good movie. And you sit in, particularly if you’re in a movie theater and it’s dark, and you have nice big screen, and the sound is perfect, it doesn't take very long to suspend belief that, you know, this is purely a manufactured image that you're seeing on a two-dimensional screen, but you're actually there with it. That's the great skill of Stanley Kubrick or a great director like that, to create that sense of illusion.

But it happens very often when we're also on the screen, the small screen on the laptop, or you see it with games playing particularly if you watch a couple of children competing against each other on a shoot up game and the degree of involvement and passion in which there is, they are, they're there, they're actually part of that virtual reality. And you don't need the fancy virtual reality technology model to do that. Even a relatively simple game with a couple of controllers can generate that sense of consensual hallucination.

So, the extrapolation, and I admit it's a bit of an extrapolate stretch, is in political debate too when you're looking at violently expressed opinions, strongly expressed opinions, and you're part of that group. You will have this powerful sense of this, you've agreed to is a consensual hallucination, that you're part of this. And, you know, that can have its downsides.

ANDREW HAMMOND: With the book, with “How Spies Think,” is there like one lesson that is contained within that book that you wish you had when you were a young man taking the entrance exam for GCHQ?

DAVID OMAND: Well, it’s difficult to pick. There are ten lessons, I'm not going to read them out to you now, buy the book and you can be educated. But the fifth lesson is the one I would pick, “it's our own demons that are most likely to mislead us.” So, self-knowledge is really important if you're going to take good decisions. It's not just somebody else providing you with information and you having some ambitions. It's the self-knowledge of when you're overreaching yourself, or when you're being swayed by points of view and the reason you're being swayed is because of this emotional tug or pull, which may relate to past experiences. Who knows, but you'll only find that out by really understanding yourself. So, it’s the old…the Oracle at Delphi in Greek mythology, you know, first know yourself.

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It's been great talking. I will have to cut this off, we could go on for hours. It's been really interesting having this conversation.

ANDREW HAMMOND: Absolutely. Thanks so much for your time, I really appreciate it. From one Glaswegian to another, cheers and thank you.

DAVID OMAND: Slàinte!

ANDREW HAMMOND: Slàinte! Alright, bye. The International Spy Museum is a full 501c3 nonprofit. If you want to donate to the museum, or if you're a local and would like to volunteer at the museum, please visit our website spymuseum.org for more information.

This SpyCast audio was transcribed by Gillian Rich on 1/8/21 for the International Spy Museum.

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