Breaking Cover by Stella Rimington

Author:Stella Rimington
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408859728
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-04-23T09:21:05+00:00

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In Berlin, C’s speech went down well with the conference audience comprised of senior members of European intelligence services and some European politicians. While he was speaking, a text of the speech was released to invited members of the media and afterwards Jasminder conducted a Q&A session with them.

That had proved very challenging: many of the reporters seemed sceptical about the new ideas for greater openness just outlined. BBC’s Newsnight wanted to know why the press had been excluded from the event. In fact, how did they even know that the text they had been given was what he’d actually said?

Jasminder replied that many of the intelligence officers attending did not wish their identities to be known publicly, for obvious reasons. And she could assure the Newsnight team that they had the actual text. Next a reporter from the Guardian pressed Jasminder on what he described as her volte face on civil liberties.

Was she not colluding with a secretive intelligence service in helping it to pretend that it was being more open? Would they now tell us, for example, what actual harm had been done to Western countries by whistle-blowers revealing the massive intrusion into the privacy of innocent people?

Not without jeopardising the safety of employees and sources and thus compounding the damage that had been done, was how she’d fielded this.

Yes, but damage to the intelligence services was one thing; what damage had been done to ordinary Western citizens?

Well, most people felt the intelligence services were working on behalf of the public, not to oppress them but to try and keep them safe, so damage to the former meant damage to the latter.

Didn’t this contradict Jasminder’s own concerns, expressed often enough in the past, about the need to oversee security activities, to make sure ordinary people’s rights were not abused?

On the contrary, the new openness was intended to address just that issue. And so it went on.

Jasminder was used to being the interrogator on such matters and it had been an extraordinary feeling to be the target of these questions, but afterwards a reporter from the New York Times had come up and told her she’d been a breath of fresh air in the clandestine world of intelligence. Better still, C had said he’d heard she’d done very well, and even Geoffrey Fane, who no doubt had a source in the press conference, gave a clipped ‘Alpha work, my dear, alpha work’ as he passed her in a corridor on her return.

She’d gone home on a high, and for a change Laurenz came over to her place. He brought with him a bottle of champagne with a bright red ribbon tied around its neck. He seemed almost as excited as she was, which was very flattering. ‘I want to hear all about it,’ he said.

‘Read tomorrow’s Guardian, and then you can decide how I did in the Q&A. As for C’s speech, you’ve already read it!’

‘I know, but what about the sessions – were they good?’

‘I wasn’t at any of them.

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