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How Spies Think – Spy Chief David Omand

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How Spies Think – Spy Chief David Omand 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 Soviet Union, 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 today 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 Home Office, 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 United Kingdom 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 Russia 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.
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