Will MI6 finally come in from the cold?

Sir John Sawers is not the Downing Street stooge some of the old guard say he is, writes Tim Shipman. And the new head of MI6 may focus the spooks’ gaze on the real enemy

The man who brought us The Meaning of Tingo is at it again, closer to home. Adam Jacot de Boinod’s previous excursion among unlikely foreign words turned at times into a wild Boojum chase because the meanings claimed for some words softly and silently vanished away once confronted. That was the case with tingo itself, the supposed definition of which was more like a short essay on circumstances in which it might be used.

His latest amuse-bouche, The Wonder of Whiffling (Particular Books, £12.99), is a sort of reverse Call My Bluff, which groups the true meaning of English words according to themes. Imaginative appeal still sometimes trumps sense. A section on words about ears begins: ‘Even the highest in the land have to learn to live with the particular shape of their auditory nerves.’ Well, it’s not the shape of the nerves but the cartilage and flesh they must live with, or pin back, but never mind. What is odd is to find in this section latch-lug’t, a Cumberland word for ‘having ears which hang down instead of standing erect’ — as with a spaniel’s ears not a terrier’s. I don’t know about Mr Jacot de Boinot, but I’d be unhappy with either. The Cumberland word refers to animals.

More usefully, when we move on to the eyes, is canthus — the angle between the eyelids at the corners of the eye, to my husband an obvious word, but not to me. Near the nose sits the inner, medial or domestic canthus. Here lies the lacus lacrimalis, the lake of tears. I wonder if Lewis Carroll had read Gray’s Anatomy before landing Alice in the Pool of Tears.

Carroll used whiffling of course, in Jabberwocky: ‘whiffling through the tulgey wood’. It is no nonsense, but a mainstream word ‘moving as by a puff of air’. A stranger sense comes from whiffler: ‘One of a body of attendants armed with a javelin, battle-axe, sword, or staff, and wearing a chain, employed to keep the way clear for a procession or at some public spectacle’. The origin is Old English wifel, ‘a javelin’. The OED notes expansively that ‘Whifflers formed a regular part of the Corporation procession at Norwich till 1835’. George Borrow, a Norfolk man, wrote in the 1850s: ‘The last of the whifflers hanged himself about a fortnight ago... there being no demand for whiffling since the discontinuation of Guildhall banquets; ...let any one take up the old chap’s sword and try to whiffle.’ Even Mr Jacot de Boinod might think twice about that.

Dot Wordsworth

In the popular imagination Sir John Sawers, the new head of MI6 who started this month, is more James Bond than ‘M’. His now infamous internet appearance in a pair of skin-tight blue swimming trunks put women of a Moneypenny age in mind of Daniel Craig. There is something of Pierce Brosnan’s charm and Timothy Dalton’s intelligence about the new ‘C’ too. But Sawers cannot escape comparison with the hapless George Lazenby either — the only Bond to marry — after Lady Sawers emblazoned details of their home address and her husband’s taste in Speedos all over Facebook.

What worries Sawers’s new colleagues most, though, is that he isn’t a spy at all — which is very unusual, to say the least, for the head of MI6. It is true that he started his career in the Secret Intelligence Service. But he left after seven years to join the diplomatic corps. While no one ever truly leaves the spooks, friends are adamant that he came off the MI6 payroll and devoted himself to a mainstream career, culminating in his posting as ambassador to the UN. When his appointment was announced it was made clear that he was ‘rejoining’ SIS.

Sawers returns as Gordon Brown’s appointee — MI6 sources in New York say that Number 10 alerted Sawers to the vacancy and encouraged him to apply for the job — not because he has until recently been MI6’s man in the Foreign Office but because the Prime Minister wants him to be the Foreign Office’s man in SIS. The appointment of a non-spy who was encouraged to apply by Downing Street is causing consternation in sections of the service. One security source, who is close to SIS men in the US, told me: ‘Sawers was asked to put his name forward. This is seen as a more blatant attempt at political control than even Blair managed.’

Sawers originally quit SIS, one member of the House of Lords who knew him as a young diplomat told me, ‘because he wanted to be an ambassador. He’s a front-of-house sort of chap. It was ambition, pure and simple.’

Sawers is undoubtedly one of the most talented diplomats of his generation but his winning characteristic was that he was trusted by Number 10. A security source who has discussed the succession with members of MI6 told me: ‘He had unusual licence to make policy at the UN. Foreign diplomats liked him because he didn’t have to keep phoning Downing Street for authorisation. They let him make policy on the hoof.’

That helps explain why Sawers was plucked from New York two years before he was due to come home. It has given rise, in some quarters of SIS, to what is described as ‘mutinous mutterings’ about a ‘political stitch-up’.

Having been stung by accusations that the service became overtly politicised under Sir Richard Dearlove and Sir John Scarlett, many had looked forward to the appointment of the man they saw as by far the best qualified — Charles Farr. Farr is a serving MI6 man who is on secondment to the Home Office where he runs Whitehall’s counter-terrorism team, a 100-strong unit of MI5 and MI6 officers. If you want an expert on Islamist terrorism, Farr is your man. Some say that his appointment was a ‘done deal’ last November until Downing Street intervened — though others say Farr was more than happy to stay where he was.

When I reported for the Daily Mail on concerns in the service about the manner of Sawers’s appointment, the message came back from Vauxhall Cross that there was no mutiny in SIS. Everyone was very relaxed about Sawers. Not a whiff of dissent in the ranks, old chap.

Let us take this at face value, at least as the corporate view at the beige and green Legoland by the Thames that is SIS headquarters. You get far more interesting answers if you ask not whether MI6 staff are relaxed about Sawers’s appointment but whether they ought to be.

A senior diplomat who knows Sawers well made it very clear to me that the Foreign Office sees this not as the return of a prodigal spy but as a hostile takeover of SIS. And that means more than simply a diplomat winning the right to write in green ink, the tradition begun by the first ‘C’ Sir Mansfield Cumming.

Counterintuitive as it may seem (and ironic given that Farr was passed over), people around Sawers believe that SIS does not focus enough of its resources on Islamist terrorism and the war in Afghanistan. The terrorist threat has led to more joined-up government: joint committees, secondments, openness — that sort of thing. The consequence has been a steady flow of Foreign Office types through the doors of SIS headquarters. And the word is that they have not always liked what they have seen.

The way some of them tell it, the service is still shackled with a Cold War mindset and personnel intent on running recruitment operations off the beaten path of world events. ‘They’re still obsessed with Russia and the near abroad,’ the diplomat said. ‘There are all these people recruiting agents and running operations in the ’Stans and Chechnya and the Ukraine. Most of these operations don’t achieve anything except justifying their exi stence and keeping people busy. They’re fighting the last war.’ When the Foreign Office brands you old-fashioned it’s generally time to consult your diary to make sure that it’s not the first of April.

But the diplos are deadly serious. ‘They like dead drops and brush contacts and all that — they like the game. It’s all about means and MI6 needs to be about ends. We need them to get stuck in and work more closely with the rest of us to get things done. They’ve got their own agenda.’

SIS is surely right to keep a weather eye on Russia as it pursues energy superpower status — and indeed other obscure corners of the world where political eyes are not yet focused on troubles ahead. But the new emphasis on the Middle East has forced an adjustment in MI6 that was not necessary in King Charles Street. The Foreign Office, which over the years has been more Arabist than the Muslim Brotherhood, has been the principal bureaucratic beneficiary of the post-9/11 world.

These attitudes all come to a head in differences over Afghanistan. The spooks don’t like playing second fiddle to the military or the nation-builders in the FCO and DfID. The SIS agenda is to bring an end to the war and get back to the good old-fashioned deal-making of the Great Game, with the warlords and militia leaders — and that is difficult in the midst of a shooting war.

The diplomats, who have always seen Six as uncouth and slippery troublemakers who undo the good work of their Ferrero-Rocher heavy receptions, are not slow to point out deficiencies in the SIS effort. As recently as April someone who spent a lot of time fraternising with the spooks in Kabul was telling me that literally ‘a handful’ out of the two or three dozen MI6 men on the ground there were fluent in Pashto, the language of the local majority. ‘One of them was amused when Gordon Brown announced a wave of new Pashto speakers heading to the region and then realised that he alone was the wave,’ he revealed.

So it seems likely that Sir John Sawers’s agenda will be to shake things up, to get the spooks working as part of the Whitehall team more than they have hitherto been comfortable doing. If he is aggressive about it, his appointment could end up being the most controversial since Sir Dick White switched from MI5 to MI6 in 1956 (Nikita Khruschev would have been a more popular appointment).

That said, Sawers has expertise of his own which will be invaluable. He was for several years the point man with the Iranians on their nuclear programme. I know from briefings with him that he has few illusions about their duplicity. He is one of the more impressive people I have met in 12 years of journalism. He inspires great loyalty among his staff. It is certainly in the interests of SIS to have a doughty fighter close to Downing Street at the helm.

Sawers is also canny enough not to let himself get painted as a Labour stooge. Contacts with the Tories are well under way. But unless he swiftly makes clear that his DNA spells SIS not FCO there will be trouble — and this time it won’t be anything to do with his swimming trunks.

Tim Shipman is deputy political editor of the Daily Mail.