From Bloomberg, November 14:
The longtime intelligence officer talks about managing China, the psychology of Putin, and why spies shouldn’t expect recognition.
For nearly 40 years, Richard Moore was a career spy in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service — better known as MI6 — unable to tell anyone but his closest friends and family what he did for a living. When he was appointed chief of the agency in 2020, that changed: The name of the person in the top role is the only one made public.
Moore stepped down at the end of September, and this conversation is one of his first interviews since: a look back at the world in which he began his intelligence career and the one we live in today.
In office, Moore was known — as all MI6 chiefs are — as ‘C’, the role Ian Fleming turned into James Bond’s boss ‘M.’ And perhaps those long-honed skills in being unobtrusive are still intact: When he arrived at Bloomberg’s London office for our interview, he slipped past the small welcoming party and collected his badge without us even spotting him. It might have been the flat cap and overcoat — or maybe it’s just how he’s operated for decades: discreet, unassuming, in the shadows.
Until six weeks ago, your daily work involved reading highly classified intelligence. Could I start with the here and now? What you see as you look around the world, and most of us might not.
I think we’re in an extraordinarily contested international environment. I don’t think in 38 years of being an intelligence officer and a diplomat I’ve seen it less well ordered.
There’s just an extraordinary number of loose ends on the international scene, and unfortunately, the way in which relationships have broken down between leading powers — particularly following Russian behavior in Ukraine, but also undoubtedly between Washington and Beijing — [means that] some of the tramlines that we were used to in the years after 1945 are not really there.
I certainly haven’t left the world in a better place than I found it, and I’m lucky that wasn’t in my job description.
More contested means more dangerous?
There are definitely dangers in the world, and they can suddenly loom out of the mist at you.
You mentioned the fraying relationship between Washington and Beijing. How does that play into the MI6 and CIA perception of China, that it’s the major intelligence challenge of the 21st century?
I think there’ve been issues around this relationship for some time. In particular, the rupture of normal diplomatic contact that happened during the pandemic: For a number of years, senior Chinese and senior Americans just didn’t meet.
And that’s a worrying thing. As an intelligence officer, where you can see the dangers of miscalculation, you want diplomats, leaders, to be talking more regularly. The fact that President Trump and President Xi met recently — that’s helpful. Tariffs [are] the current issue. But there are clearly any number of rub points between the US and China, and between the US’s allies and China.
Help me understand how you see China. You’ve talked about it as an “opportunity and a threat,” a combination that is quite hard for people to get their heads around. How is a government supposed to deal with a country as both opportunity and threat?
11 These words come from Moore’s last public speech as chief, in Istanbul in September. “In many areas of the global commons: climate change, secure AI and world trade, China has a huge and welcome role to play,” he said. “We, in the UK, want a respectful and constructive relationship with China. But China needs to stick to the established rules of engagement and non-interference that it publicly promotes.”People often assume, understandably, we’re all about threats. But a foreign intelligence intelligence service like MI6 is there to gather intelligence on a number of global issues.
You [also] gather intelligence to enable your political leadership to seize opportunities. With China: This is a huge and powerful country, and its values and interests certainly don’t overlap always with our own.
So if you are the prime minister of Great Britain, how do you manage that relationship in a way that means you secure UK interests? For me, that means you are pretty robust at home — trying to deny, and then tackle, any behavior aimed at your own country, whether that is espionage or cyber attacks.
And does that happen all the time?
It’s pretty relentless, yeah.
So what did you think of the collapse of the recent case against two British men who were accused of spying for China?
22 Chinese espionage activity in Britain has come under greater scrutiny since September, when a case against two men accused of trying to gather intelligence about policy on Beijing was abandoned. Prosecutors said that China had not been legally designated a national security threat at the time of the alleged offenses. The suspects denied the allegations.China is intent on gathering intelligence on the UK, and we have to recognize that. Ken McCallum, the director general of [domestic intelligence service] MI5, has spoken about that.
He said he was “frustrated.”
I don’t think I’ll be drawn on an individual case — that’s for the lawyers to resolve — but it’s certainly the case that they’re active in this space.
If you can’t take people to task for acting in that space, where does it leave you as a country? What are your levers?
Clearly, if you are spying for a foreign power against the United Kingdom, and you are caught, then you should expect to receive the consequences of that action.
You’ll understand also why I tend to discourage politicians from being too moralistic about the issue of spying in itself. The UK has rather effective intelligence organizations and we are actively gathering intelligence against other countries.
I think where you have to be less tolerant is the sort of hybrid warfare activity that we’re seeing from Russia: arson, attempted assassination. That crosses a very different line for me.
33 In 2018, UK intelligence officials worked painstakingly and at great speed to allow then-Prime Minister Theresa May to accuse Russia of being responsible for the poisoning of former KGB agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with the nerve agent Novichok. This year, six men have been jailed for a Russian-backed arson attack on a London warehouse containing aid to Ukraine. There have also been arson attacks at properties linked to Prime Minister Keir Starmer; Russia has denied involvement.So, on language, do you see China as an “active national security threat”?
I think, clearly, China is involved in activities which threaten our interests and we should be very robust in pushing back against those. They would expect us to do so, to be honest. Beijing respects strength in this space.
So stick to your values?
Stick to your guns.
What would you do with the plan for a new Chinese mega-embassy on the edge of the City of London? It would be the largest embassy in Europe.
Countries obviously have to have embassies. We need one in Beijing — and it’s important that we have that — so it’s right and proper that the Chinese should get their embassy. Whether it’s this one or not isn’t really for me to judge.
It’s a particularly big one. It’s going to be an enormous site.
I’m not there to justify its size or what it does. But you know, I’m sure there has to be a way through, where they get an appropriate embassy, and we are allowed to retain and develop our own excellent embassy in Beijing.
44 The UK has irritated China by not yet approving the proposed embassy at the former Royal Mint, near the Tower of London, a site Beijing purchased in 2018. While Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called for a diplomatic and economic reset with China, he’s under pressure — including from members of his own cabinet — to take a tougher approach....
....MUCH MORE
