This
2001 quote from Sir Richard Mottram gives me confidence that British intelligence services are being placed in the hands of someone occasionally able to recognise reality.
"We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department is fucked. It's the biggest cock-up ever. We're all completely fucked," he is reported to have told colleagues, in unusually jaunty language for a civil service mandarin.
Sir Richard Mottram is the newly appointed security and intelligence director at the UK Cabinet Office and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. The quote is from 2001 when Mottram was caught in a bitter public feud between a Blairite Transport minister, Blairite press flacks, and civil service officials.
The Joint Intelligence Committee co-ordinates all UK intelligence operations. It is crucial to shaping policy - or shaping intelligence to fit the policy, as it did in the run up to the Iraq invasion.
It was the JIC that authorised the release of the
"dodgy dossier" on Iraq containing most of someone's graduate thesis and edited by the PR guru who ran Tony Blair's press office.
Instead of being disciplined for providing so much false intelligence, John Scarlett, former JIC chairman, was promoted to head MI6. Blair must be taking lessons from Bush on ensuring his minions always "fail upwards".
For a complete run-down on how the British intelligence services were politicised to "fix the intelligence around the policy" there is this excellent analysis from the Spectator.
Sir Richard might bring a welcome professionalism to British intelligence to restore its (never very good) reputation, or he might conspire with Porter Goss and John Negroponte to "fix the intelligence" around the next imperialist policy. Too soon to know.