Dear Prof Richard
I was the guy who asked the question on Sunday morning, "Were we
unnecessarily paranoid about Soviet Russia in the decades of MAD. Why all the fuss and nonsense from our spies when it was MAD that just about prevented a nuclear holocaust?"
Please could you check, clarify and comment on my report, below of what
you said on Sunday. Ignore my rather jaundiced, unpatriotic, despairing
and dissident interpretation over the usefulness of our secret services!
Very many thanks, if you are able to oblige.
Tim
Richard Aldrich replied and confirmed the facts as being correct.
The offering, below is after his sub editing and that he called "a fiesty piece !!!!" The facts and annual costs of £2/3 billions are his; the conclusions I have drawn are mine:-
At the Wigtown Book Festival on Sunday, I heard Richard Aldrich, Professor of International Security at the University of Warwick, speak about his book about GCHQ. From what I heard, our top ranking intelligent intelligence officers (probably mostly from Oxbridge) got things wrong over Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons at the time of the Gulf War in 1990/91. They told the politicians that he did not have any WMD but, it seems that he did have them all the time, and lots of them! So in 2002/3 there was not only political pressure on them "to bend the intelligence" towards invasion but, also a fear of getting it wrong a second time. Ironically, this led them to over-correct and, again to get things wrong, by telling Blair and Bush that this time they were fairly sure he had them. Therefore, twice they have been mistaken in the case of only one country. Aldrich said that "Saddam Hussein was deliberately ambiguous over his WMD" in order to keep his enemies, like Iran, guessing.
Therefore, are the
two or three
billions of pounds spent every year on GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 worth all the money? They all work so closely with America's National Security Agency, too that there must be much duplication of wasted effort of finite resources and much hot air - of dangerous greenhouse gases.
It seems that all kinds of weird and wonderful shenanigans went on over bugs in embassies during the Cold War that was all a complete waste of everyone's time and money. Time and again, our intelligence officers were taken by surprise at what was known by the Russians despite exhaustive efforts to keep it all secret! I can only conclude that it was mutually assured destruction (MAD) - and mutual destruction very many times over, too - that prevented nuclear annihilation.
Aldrich asserted in one slide that 'The Cold War was HOT!' He explained that some of the submarines and aircraft used to collect intelligence near Soviet bases became involved in actual fighting. Some of our submarines were depth-charged by the Russians while working on behalf of GCHQ. I noted down that he said, "GCHQ failed in its main mission to crack top level Soviet cyphers."
Aldrich gave so many examples of wasted effort by intelligent officers that I came away feeling that it was some sort of no expense spared, elaborate game that was played out between the secret services of both - the ever so virtuous Christian West and the very wicked Communist East.
I also came away thinking that the evil Communists did exactly what they liked and when they liked (just as our side did), without the West's secret service being able to stop them - even if they did know in time which, on so many occasions, they did not!
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