David Omand
At a time when western intelligence agencies are confronted by mounting threats from hostile states and terrorists, averting disaster requires clear logical processes, strategic foresight, and the will to act.
In September, when drones forced Copenhagen airport to close, the questions came: was Russia responsible? How was the attack mounted? Within hours, conspiracy theories flooded social media claiming that the authorities had deliberately looked away. This pattern – shock, questions, accusations – has become grimly familiar after every attack on western soil.
After the attack on Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester, it was to be expected that the media would investigate how much the authorities knew about the terrorist beforehand. What was his motivation? Were there accomplices? Will there be further attacks? As the shock wears off, however, a sharper question follows: could the attacks have been prevented?
Following the collapse of the prosecution of two individuals in the United Kingdom on official secrets charges, a case in which the hand of Chinese intelligence was alleged to have been at work, the questions become political: did the previous government, in office when the alleged offences took place, assess China to be a national security threat? What is the intelligence evidence behind the prosecution (which the government has now published)?
When answers come, they will emerge from a careful multi-stage process of intelligence activity. But it is in the nature of human intelligence that those answers may be incomplete, fragmentary, and sometimes wrong. Nor can everything be made public. Were intelligence targets to understand what sources and methods have been used, they would be able to dodge and deceive them in the future. Equally, the inferential nature of reasoning applied to an intelligence judgement (for example, the attribution of a cyberattack to China, as the US and UK have done several times) may not be sufficient to meet the different evidential standards of a criminal court.
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