Within a year Dick White had also left, and British Intelligence had lost its two most important executives. Their contribution is hard to overvalue. They were a perfect match. Dick was the subtle interpreter of intelligence, smoothing feelings in Whitehall and Downing Street; F.J. was the tough man, sounding warnings and bringing bad news.
I broke with them on only one issue in twenty years - high-level penetration. I think history will judge that they were never prepared to force the issue through. Consequently they allowed decisions to go unmade and the issue to fester so that it caused more damage than it ever need have done. But in other ways their contribution was massive. They became a link between the Old and the New World, and together they made British Intelligence respected throughout the world.
Hanley seemed ill at ease when he first moved into the Director-General's office. He knew he was a controversial appointment, and this made him move with a greater degree of caution than ought otherwise to have been the case. He wanted to please and reassure his political and Whitehall masters, and he made compromises a more secure man might not have.
Hanley was a bright man, intellectually superior to F.J. But he lacked F.J.'s strength of character. I didn't have faith in him, as I had in F.J., and my separation from the office began once F.J. left. The Service began to change, and those last four years were an extended farewell.
At first the changes were slight - silly things, like the fact that Hanley, unlike F.J., never offered lifts in his chauffeured car. But then they were more pronounced. We moved offices from Leconfield House, first to Marlborough Street and then to the drab premises on Gower Street. I suggested to Hanley that we go for a greenfield site, perhaps in Cheltenham, but he was insistent that we had to stay in London. He began to promote his own men. They were young and keen, but they were civil servants: men of safety rather than men of arms. I began to realize that a generation was passing. For all our differences, those of us involved in the great mole hunts, on whichever side, were fast disappearing. The age of heroes was being replaced by the age of mediocrity.
Hanley summoned me in soon after taking over to talk about my position.
"I have faith in you, Peter, and as long as I am in this job, there will be work for you here," he told me, referring to the rising resentment which had plagued my last year in D3.
He told me he thought I should leave my job as K Branch consultant, and come and work for him personally.
"I want you as my personal consultant on counterespionage," he told me. "You'll have an office next to mine, and you'll see every paper as before. But I want you to look at some fresh problems for me. I don't want you wrapped up in the current K Branch cases - I want you to be looking ahead."
We drew up a new agenda, some of it to my liking, other parts not. He wanted me to continue to control the VENONA program, and agreed that we should finally initiate a comprehensive worldwide search for any remaining traffic.
He wanted me to look at Northern Ireland.
"I need one of your bright ideas, Peter," he told me, "see what you can do..."
He wanted me to sit on the Computer Working Party, which was planning the transition of the MI5 Registry into the computer age, a leap into the future due to take place in the mid-1970s. D3 had given me a special insight into the use of the Registry to trace leads, and he wanted me to apply these techniques to computerization.
At first I thought Ireland might give me a new lease of life. I made a couple of trips. It reminded me a lot of Cyprus. A fierce, insoluble conflict made worse by a vacillating British policy. At the time I first went, the Government were telling the world that the situation was getting better. I spent a fortnight reviewing the records of all explosions over a twelve-month period. I drew a graph and proved conclusively that the weight of explosives being detonated was a steeply ascending curve. So much for an improved security situation! But, as in Cyprus, the Army and the politicians simply refused to face reality.
The only major recommendation I made was that we should devise a system of tapping the telephone lines of the Irish Republic. Lines across the border were well covered, but vital Provisional IRA communications flowed back and forth from the west coast of the Republic to Dublin. I devised a scheme for intercepting the microwaves from the attic of the British Embassy in Dublin using a device no larger than a packing case, but although MI5 endorsed the plan, the Foreign Office vetoed it. This was in the period leading up to what became the Sunningdale Agreement, and the Foreign Office were terrified that news of the plan might leak. I pointed out to them that the basic lesson from Cyprus had been the inherent instability of political solutions negotiated without a decisive security advantage, but they would not listen. It was no surprise to me when Sunningdale collapsed.
I lost heart once the Dublin scheme fell through. It seemed to me a measure of how far the bureaucrats had taken control. Twenty years before, we would have tackled it without any worries at all. I did suggest examining the possibilities of planting booby-trapped detonators on the Provisionals. It would have been a feasible operation in conjunction with MI6, along the same lines as the Cyprus plan to plant fake receivers on Grivas. But even the MI5 management took fright, and refused to investigate the plan any further.
"That's murder," I was told.
"Innocent people are being killed and maimed every day," I said. "Which policy do you think the British people would like us to pursue?"
The Irish situation was only one part of a decisive shift inside MI5 toward domestic concerns. The growth of student militancy in the 1960s gave way to industrial militancy in the early 1970s. The miners' strike of 1972, and a succession of stoppages in the motorcar industry, had a profound effect on the thinking of the Heath Government. Intelligence on domestic subversion became the overriding priority.
This is the most sensitive area a Director-General of MI5 can get into, and it requires a strong man to maintain his own independence and that of the Service. Hanley, through the circumstances of his appointment, was ill-equipped to deal with this pressure. Whereas F.J. was always a champion of MI5's independence, Hanley resolved to do what his masters wanted, and he set about providing them with as professional and extensive a source of domestic intelligence as was possible.
Traditionally, K Branch was MI5's prestige department and F Branch its poor relation, shunned by the brightest officers, and run shambolically by an amiable tippler. But Hanley began to pour resources and men into F Branch and away from K Branch. A whole string of brilliant counterespionage officers, including Michael McCaul, was lost forever.
The most significant pointer to this change occurred after I retired, when Sir John Jones was appointed Director-General in 1981. He was the rising star of F Branch in Hanley's new reorganization, and when he secured the top job he was the first Director-General since Hollis to have achieved it without any personal counterespionage experience. He was an F Branch man through and through, and his appointment perfectly illustrated the decisive shift in MI5's center of gravity.
Early on in his tenure as Director-General, Hanley called a meeting of senior staff in A Branch and F Branch to discuss the changing shape of MI5's priorities. The meeting began with a presentation from Hanley on the climate of subversion in the country, and the growth of what he termed the "far and wide left." The Prime Minister and the Home Office, he said, had left him in no doubt that they wanted a major increase in effort on this target. He then handed over to a young and ambitious F Branch officer, David Ransome, who outlined the activities and structure of a host of left-wing splinter groups, like the Workers' Revolutionary Party (WRP) and the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP).