London—Britain’s spymaster, Sir John McLeod Scarlett, has suddenly announced he will retire on the eve of MI6’s one hundredth anniversary next year.
He would have been its chief for five years and officially he would have served his term. But it is the first time the head of the country’s Secret Intelligence Service will have given so much advance warning of his departure.
Within the intelligence community there is mounting speculation that he has been forced out due to MI6’s failure to deal with the increased terrorist threat to Britain, its handling of secret missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Scarlett’s failure to outsmart his long-time arch-rival, Vladimir Putin. The former head of the Russian Intelligence Service and the country’s prime minister has continued to orchestrate intelligence operations against the UK.
“It is no secret that Scarlett’s relationship with Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been uneasy from the outset. Tony Blair had been Scarlett’s political protector in the Whitehall jungle”, said a former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson.
Scarlett had played a crucial part in preparing the now notorious document which claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction–the very reason President Bush and Blair had gone to war. The ensuing public criticism, for what Scarlett was forced to admit were highly dubious intelligence sources in Iraq, had led to calls at the time for his resignation.
Scarlett, 60, had used his skills on the chessboard of intelligence gathering to move himself out of trouble with his political masters.
He became known in MI6 headquarters as Her Majesty’s Secret Agent for the care with which he wrote his regular reports for the Queen on MI6 activities.
He also shared her interest in medieval churches and collecting history books.
Caught by Putin's KGB
Scarlett’s clashes with Putin dated back to 1994 when, as MI6 Moscow station chief, the KGB caught him meeting one of his contacts, Vladimir Sinstov. Scarlett had recruited him a year before at an arms fair in London. Sinstov was the export manager of a Moscow arms company. The KGB officers had pounced when the men met in a café near the Kremlin.
Sinstov had just handed over details of arms sales to Syria and Iraq, and the names of Sinstov’s contacts in Damascus and Baghdad. Scarlett was expelled and Sinstov sentenced to ten years in a Siberian gulag. He died in prison. Scarlett had paid him £8,000 ($11,700) during the eight months they had known each other.
Scarlett’s appointment as Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, JIC, by Blair caused unease within MI6.
Peter Ricketts, the then head of JIC, expressed his concern that Scarlett must learn to keep “the correct distance between intelligence and politics”.
Three days after he became chairman, Scarlett found himself embroiled in the aftermath of 9/11. His report to Blair spoke of “a devastating failure of US intelligence”. It made Scarlett no friends in Washington.
When he became the fourteenth chief of MI6 on May 6, 2004, it climaxed his thirty-two years of spying. He had a £2.5 billion ($3.65 billion) budget. The funding came from the government secret fund, know as the Single Unified Vote, which meets the costs of running British intelligence.
For the past five years, Scarlett has headed a global organisation employing almost 3,000 people. His own salary is £200,000 ($292,000) a year. With it goes a bullet-proof car with a Scotland Yard armed driver.
His office is dominated by a massive mahogany desk which once graced the cabin of Admiral Lord Nelson on HMS Victory. All his predecessors had used it over the last hundred years.
On the desk is the Victorian inkwell, its pot filled with green ink, and beside it the Parker pen Scarlett used to write his letter last week to the prime minister informing him he would leave MI6 next July.
His successor will almost certainly be Charles Farr, 49, a groomed Whitehall mandarin in his customised suit, who has made a name fighting terrorism as the government’s Head of the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism.
The department was created last year–and is seen by many as an indication that the Brown government wanted a stronger focus on the fight against al-Qaeda. It employs over 300 officers, many recruited from MI6–where Farr made his reputation as a field agent in the Middle East and Africa.
Gordon Thomas is the author of a new edition of Gideon’s Spies: The Inside Story of Israel’s Legendary Secret Service, The Mossad, by JR Books of London and available on Amazon Books.
(C) G-2 Bulletin, Washington D.C., USA, and Gordon Thomas.