Since the COVID-19 lockdown began, we at the Danube Institute in Budapest have been compensating for our inability to hold lectures, seminars, and conferences by launching a series of podcasts — originally titled “Lockdown Dialogues,” now renamed the “Danube Dialogues.” By and large, the podcasts have been a success, though perhaps a little ragged at the edges as we learn the ropes. Douglas Murray started the series, and Rich was interviewed about his book The Case for Nationalism. Both episodes proved popular. This week, however, our latest Dialogue broke out of the podcast ghetto and into Fleet Street.
Our guest was Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, as Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service is familiarly known, and the topic was his career and his views on the various issues and controversies that had erupted both during his time at SIS — in five years of which he was “C.” He was interviewed by myself and by my colleague, Mark Higgie, a former Australian Ambassador to NATO, the EU, and Hungary, now a senior fellow at the Danube Institute. And perhaps because the interview was not a hostile interrogation but a fairly relaxed conversation, Dearlove was very forthcoming in his accounts and criticisms on topics as various as whether the European Union is heading for a smash-up and whether John le Carré had been any good as an MI6 agent.
But you can judge for yourself here.
My guess is that there were almost a dozen good “takeaways” from this interview and more than one scoop. The Sunday Telegraph was first out of the starting gate here, with a story that focused on Dearlove’s criticism of the civil servants who in 2003 had committed the UK to the participation of Huawei in the country’s infrastructure without informing ministers in the Blair government:
“I was chief when the original deal was signed with Huawei, and at the time we were not consulted,” Dearlove said during the podcast, continuing:
The government let this go through, and some of us, when we heard about it, were intensely shocked. We were becoming partially dependent on Chinese technology, and I think there’s no question now with 5G this is something we need to scale back and we need to be wary of.
He was accordingly “thrilled” that last year the Tory government had reduced Huawei’s access to the more sensitive parts of the UK’s communications network. That decision represented a change from dealing with China mainly as a trading partner to treating it as a security problem. But has that change gone far enough — either on China policy or in relation to Huawei and 5G?
That’s the biggest takeaway from the interview. But Americans would also be interested in Dearlove’s account of how the Brits and the U.S., especially the Defense Department, differed on how Iraq should be run after the defeat of Saddam Hussein — the Brits wanted to keep the Iraqi army in being so as to govern the country through a group of Baathist generals, but the Pentagon insisted on demobilizing the army and moving quickly to democratic elections.
Maybe too quickly? Watch the interview.