Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Former senior aide to Tony Blair is named as the new M16 spymaster
The spymaster who compiled the notorious Iraq War dossier is being replaced by a former senior aide to Tony Blair. Head of MI6 Sir John Scarlett will pass on the codename 'C' to Sir John Sawers, who worked as Mr Blair's envoy in Baghdad and his foreign affairs adviser, later this year. Officials insisted the move was not connected to the impending inquiry into the war, at which the departing spy chief is expected to be a key witness.
During his time as foreign affairs adviser to Mr Blair in 1999-2001, Sir John Sawers was heavily involved in the Kosovo conflict and the Northern Ireland peace process. He has also worked in the British Embassy in Washington and has been ambassador to Cairo. His expertise on Iran is seen as a key factor in his appointment, with international relations with the country on a knife edge.
"It's a reflection of the way things work in government these days," said a former senior officer. "But I'm not sure SIS needs shaking up. You can tell it's in pretty good shape because it hasn't been in the news." Not everyone will agree, with some in the military criticising MI6's failure to predict the resurgence of the Taliban.
IMO: We may well see if Sir John Sawers' expertise on Iran proves useful. These could be testing times. The "dodgy dossier" on Iraq sounds at best unbelievable but we must remember that there were other factors on Iraq, and the present situation in North Korea cannot have been far from us with Iraq in the days before the Iraq invasion. I am aware of several of these factors, a very strange situation. But what is the overall picture, and more importantly can the West now survive at all without the grace of India, too often simply used and then put aside. In a few years, barring new important problems, India will become easily the largest English speaking nation in the world and the whole matter of international diplomacy needs to be seen in the large. And then, what of China, which with luck for the West may become another large English speaking nation, in part at least. All these people can then be genuine allies of the West. But certainly India does not wish to sacrifice its own cultural integrity for the West, although China and Japan have both gone down the road of becoming 'faux-lapdogs or poodles' of the West - and we must remember the WW2 experience of that already. But this organisation entails running networks of agents who can supply genuinely secret information — not cocktail party tittle-tattle but highly classified intelligence upon which the British Government can partly base its foreign and security policy objectives. In other words even a small organisation like MI6 cannot continue to sacrifice itself for the Grahame Greene 'Our man in Havana' type of intelligence, made up for a fee. And new technological factors also need to be taken into account.
During his time as foreign affairs adviser to Mr Blair in 1999-2001, Sir John Sawers was heavily involved in the Kosovo conflict and the Northern Ireland peace process. He has also worked in the British Embassy in Washington and has been ambassador to Cairo. His expertise on Iran is seen as a key factor in his appointment, with international relations with the country on a knife edge.
"It's a reflection of the way things work in government these days," said a former senior officer. "But I'm not sure SIS needs shaking up. You can tell it's in pretty good shape because it hasn't been in the news." Not everyone will agree, with some in the military criticising MI6's failure to predict the resurgence of the Taliban.
IMO: We may well see if Sir John Sawers' expertise on Iran proves useful. These could be testing times. The "dodgy dossier" on Iraq sounds at best unbelievable but we must remember that there were other factors on Iraq, and the present situation in North Korea cannot have been far from us with Iraq in the days before the Iraq invasion. I am aware of several of these factors, a very strange situation. But what is the overall picture, and more importantly can the West now survive at all without the grace of India, too often simply used and then put aside. In a few years, barring new important problems, India will become easily the largest English speaking nation in the world and the whole matter of international diplomacy needs to be seen in the large. And then, what of China, which with luck for the West may become another large English speaking nation, in part at least. All these people can then be genuine allies of the West. But certainly India does not wish to sacrifice its own cultural integrity for the West, although China and Japan have both gone down the road of becoming 'faux-lapdogs or poodles' of the West - and we must remember the WW2 experience of that already. But this organisation entails running networks of agents who can supply genuinely secret information — not cocktail party tittle-tattle but highly classified intelligence upon which the British Government can partly base its foreign and security policy objectives. In other words even a small organisation like MI6 cannot continue to sacrifice itself for the Grahame Greene 'Our man in Havana' type of intelligence, made up for a fee. And new technological factors also need to be taken into account.
# posted by uv : 11:17 PM
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