New 'old' blood in terror fight

John Sawers

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LONDON – The 2,500 agents of Britain's MI6 agency are to find themselves under a very different new "C," the initial that for a century has been used to identify the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, according to a report in Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

The new chief, the 15th to hold the post, is Sir John Sawers, currently Britain's ambassador to the United Nations.

With the suave manners of 007, the dance floor skills of Fred Astaire and a gourmet's appetite for the good life, he is an old-fashioned spook starting an unforeseeable future with a spy agency now in its 100th year of operations.

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He will return from New York to the chunky building overlooking the River Thames in time for MI6's black-tie centenary ball. Like everyone else, he will have bought his own ticket – at 100 British pounds – for a five-course dinner. The food will be accompanied by a band that could have his twinkling toes make him the beau of the evening.

But what will he turn into after midnight?

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The signs are that his office will be much the way it was 41 years ago when he began his career as a trainee spook: the grandfather clock the first chief had assembled still tick-tocking in its corner; a desk communications console that matches anything in the Oval Office; the inkwell on his desk filled with green ink with which he will sign all his orders. Those are known as "intelligence product" and each still will be marked with the prefix "CX," the code only a chief uses. There is the large oil painting on the wall of a group of French villagers facing a Prussian firing squad during the war of 1870.

But his communications to his worldwide staff will be very different from those of the present chief, Sir John Scarlett, who will remain in the post until November, briefing Sir John Sawers on "unresolved business."

"That will include recruiting more ethnic spies and getting rid of the last gin-and-tonic vestige of an Empire long gone," said Richard Tomlinson, a former MI6 officer.

Of primary importance, it is Sir John Sawer's task is to polish MI6's tarnished reputation, which climaxed this year with an embarrassing Scotland Yard investigation into allegations that the Secret Intelligence Service committed crimes by collaborating with the U.S. authorities on the "torture" of former Guantanamo Bay inmate, Binyam Mohammed.

Another task will be how his agents should deal with events in Iran. As U.N. ambassador, Sawers was known to be a hardliner on Tehran's claims to be needing nuclear power only for peaceful purposes.

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How will he brief his agents to deal with the ayatollah's accusation that Britain is the most "evil power on earth?"

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