In an exclusive interview, Director General of the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism, Charles Farr outlines to Mandy Rhodes his plans to keep Britain safe
Almost a year ago to the day, Scotland’s psyche was rocked to the core. A terrorist attack on Glasgow airport woke a nation up to a threat on its own doorstep.
For decades Scotland had harboured a belief that terrorism happened somewhere else, to someone else.
Domestic terrorism in the shape of the IRA had traditionally and callously focused on symbolic symbols of powers south of the border, leaving Scotland relatively immune to its horrors.
Of course, there had been Lockerbie but it was easy to argue that that terrible tragedy had been an attack on America, not us, and that Scotland was simply an unfortunate and tragic victim of timing and geography.
All of that changed on Saturday June 30 2007, at 15:11 when a dark green Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane canisters was driven into the glass doors of the main Glasgow airport terminal and set ablaze.
It was the first terrorist atrocity to take place in Scotland since the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, and the first ever to directly target Scotland.
Glasgow-born Gordon Brown, had been in office for just three days and while Downing Street was quick to dismiss any suggestion of a connection, the attack must have resonated even more acutely with a Scottish Prime Minister who would have understood only too clearly what such an abomination meant to the collective Scots’ conscience. Terrorism was now up close and personal and our bubble of blissful naivety was well and truly burst. Things would never be the same again.
Of course, Scotland being Scotland, initially reacted in the way only it knows how; to make light of a difficult situation and in John Smeaton, we could focus on the comical ‘gonnae no dae that’ and the have-a-go-hero frivolities rather than the gravity of the situation. How different things would have been that day if it had ended with hundreds of Glasgow holiday makers killed or injured as was undoubtedly planned.
A month after the attack, Charles Farr took up office as the UK’s first anti-terror chief. The former senior diplomat who had clocked up more than 20 years in the civil service was given unprecedented co-ordinating powers in Whitehall to fight terrorism.
Farr is supported in that quest by a raft of anti-terror legislation including the four Acts of Parliament specifically dealing with terrorism passed in the last seven years, control orders (virtual house arrest), restrictions on protest and free speech and offences of acts “preparatory to terrorism”. He also co-ordinates a network of intelligence and security services from MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, significantly boosted by increased numbers and budgets and has handpicked 200 plus additional staff to counter Muslim radicalisation. The results of all of this can, say the security services, already be seen with, they claim, more than 20 Islamist terror plots in Britain foiled, with one, sadly, succeeding; more than 1,000 people arrested under terrorism laws and more than 200 of them convicted.
In his first interview since being appointed the UK’s terror chief, he says that while there is no reason to be at all complacent, there is a lot to applaud.
For obvious reasons, little is known about Farr or his recently set-up department and he has agreed to this interview simply because he thinks Scotland ‘is a special case’, having been all but untouched by terrorism until last year and as a result, he feels that there is more to be done in informing those of us north of the border about what the UK Government is doing to keep us safe. He also believes that the rest of the UK has a lot to learn from Scotland in terms of community cohesion and intelligence on the ground.
What we do know is that Farr’s remit as the key figure behind the Government’s drive to develop strategies to counter international terrorism is a broad one. He is undoubtedly a powerful and influential character but by the very nature of what he does, requires to remain relatively elusive. He is considered one of Whitehall’s brightest and best and is well respected enough to be able to handpick personnel and have the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ work closely with him. At the most basic, he is a security co-ordinator and at the most complex, he is a sophisticated strategist that can drive intelligence enough to root out the causes of terrorism and prevent it before it happens.
Disappointed that I hadn’t been given Farr’s office directions on a piece of rice paper that I would then have to digest, I walk into the Home Office building hoping to be frisked or at least have my retinas scanned but after a check of my parliamentary ID and a cursory look through my handbag – I apologise to the security guard who has to poke through the detritus of tissues, leaked lip gloss and the inevitable stray tampon – I am ushered into a waiting room. A ‘Who’s Who in the Home Office’ chart is on the wall, Farr isn’t pictured. A slight flutter of anticipation…who is this man, what does he do and why does he do it?
I had previously been told that I wouldn’t be able use a photograph of Farr in the magazine or use recording equipment during the interview because his office was wrapped in some metal band that prevented its use…later, when I tell him this, he laughs (on tape) and says there is a lot of mythology associated with what he does and says that when he was initially told that he couldn’t have electrical devices in his office, he had said, “So, what do you mean? I can’t have my computer then?” He laughs again at the absurdity. Ah, well, another fantasy is laid to rest.
So what do the offices of the man charged with protecting us from terrorist attack look like? Well, really, really, ordinary apart from the sign below the fire escape exit which indicates the way to the office bomb shelter.
The man himself looks…well, really, really ordinary, like a bespectacled, respectable, civil servant. He’s charming, well spoken, smartly dressed; well cut stripy shirt, matching tie, tasteful knotted fabric cufflinks and a remarkably basic watch, and very open. Damn, this is not the Boy’s Own adventurer that I had hoped for.
Basically, Farr is the mastermind behind the Government’s counter-terrorism strategy. His appointment, as Director-General of the new Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, may have been a low-key affair but the significance of the appointment of a dedicated national security adviser is huge.
So how does he describe to people what he does?
“Oh,” he says, clearly teasing me, “we don’t tell people what we do…
“No, seriously, The OSCT is not a secret organisation, and our positions in it are not secret.
The OSCT is not a secret organisation, and our positions in it are not secret. 
We do talk about what we do to interested groups and it is actually quite important for us that people do understand what we do because often the people that we are talking to are part of the solution, not part of the problem and that is actually one of the reasons why we are keen to do this [interview] particularly because Scotland is a long way from London and people there are even less aware of what we do than others.
“Basically, we were set up in the period after what we now call Operation Overt – the alleged plot to bring down airlines over the Atlantic in 2006 which is still at trial at the moment. The Government looked again at arrangements for counter-terrorism and how we could best develop and deliver our CT strategy – ‘Contest’. It concluded, driven by the then Home Secretary John Reid, that there were things that we could do that were not being done and to cut a very long story short, it was agreed to establish the OSCT as an organisation with three functions: strategic planning, oversight and delivery of aspects of the CT strategy; 300 people, plus or minus and a rather big budget. We are still defining some of it and we are still growing a bit. When I arrived in July last year, we had about 160; we are now at about 275, and we will be a bit more than that in the near future.”
Given our history of domestic terrorism with the IRA, why did things need to change structurally so radically?
“Well, because the counter-terrorist strategy that we had been evolving since 2003, which is when “Contest” was started, had become and was becoming ever more complicated, involving many Government departments, ever greater resources of the police, a very significant proportion of the security services’ resources and the intelligence agencies, local government, regional government, devolved administrations, of course, and the international picture. And that is a whole lot more complicated than the strategy that we had to develop to deal with the Irish, which was much more focused - every bit as serious in its own way, but much more focused. It didn’t have, for example, the multiple international dimensions; it didn’t have the cohesion and community issues that we have got now. So I think, in short, the strategy is just a huge lot bigger, more expensive, more complicated and that demanded a hub which was bigger too.”
Is that the justification for the much contested 42-day detention without charge move?
“Well, you will have heard that argument, I’m sure, in the context of the 42 days and yes, it is a whole lot more complicated. It is quite interesting to consider why it is more complicated. I think the answer, in very simple terms, is that any operation that is conducted against us, typically involves more people, operating from more countries, with often more sophisticated technology and with a degree of ruthlessness and ambition that we had not seen before and all those things do make our life much more complicated than has been the case with earlier Irish terrorism but actually, also, remember that we had earlier terrorism from the Middle East. It was not Islamist in nature; it was by and large secular, driven by Palestinian issues rather than by what al-Qaida now stands for, global jihad, if you like, but for all those reasons, it is more complicated than it used to be.”
Is the average Joe in the street any more at risk than he ever was before?
“We have a threat level in this country and it’s currently ‘severe’, which means that an attack could take place very quickly. I don’t think of the threat level in terms of people being frightened. I think people should be reassured that we have got the apparatus that we have got in this country to deal with the threat we face and shouldn’t be worried about the threat because I think the apparatus has tremendous abilities to manage it. But, at the same time, you never quite know what might get through, what we might miss. And that is always something we live with.”
People seem to forget so easily, don’t they?
“It is not just that they forget; it is that they get accustomed to things which, five years ago and certainly ten years ago, would have seemed truly extraordinary. The Home Secretary did a speech in January this year on some stuff we are doing and she said that we had faced several operations where the people had tried to acquire and use radiological material against us. I thought, ‘That’s a really important point to say,’ but it wasn’t picked up at all. To me, that was a really good example of the extent to which people have now factored all of this in to the way they live. But we have to just stop sometimes and say, ‘Hold on, we’ve just said that two groups of people sought to gain radiological material that they planned to use in cities in this country.’ Pause. Think. What conclusions do we draw from that? Let us not just hurry on. There is something really profoundly significant about that. So I don’t think it’s just forgetting; it’s that the sheer weight of activity, the complexity of it and the difficulty of following it all means that people can get accustomed to it or find it hard to put it in the right perspective.”
Does he have his own responses in perspective or is he still shocked?
“I should be. I mean that quite deliberately. I should be shocked, but I’m rather a victim of the trend that I’ve just been talking about. I myself get accustomed to it in a way that I probably shouldn’t. And I sometimes look through the list of things that are going on, and, yes, I do have to consciously think - consciously work to get it into perspective because it is serious.
“It is one of the slight frustrations that we have that we have a threat level that is severe in this country but I’m not sure that people necessarily believe it. In some cases, I think it’s because people think that it’s not really got a great deal of substance, but it has. We’re not messing around.”
Does he use public transport?
“Yes, six times a day. I don’t get on a bus or a train thinking about the possible terrorist threat.”
What about planes?
“Absolutely. One of the key issues in our mind is that we must preserve the way of life to which people have become accustomed and to which they have a right to expect in this country. Anything that we do has to keep that key principle firmly in mind – preservation of values, preservation of legal structure, preservation of the physical environment in which we all live and work, the preservation of the arrangements of the transport infrastructure so that we can go about our lives in a normal way. So we don’t want an obtrusive fortress. It’s about balance.
“How do we balance? Well, we start by looking at the threat we face and the threat we might face over the next two or three years. We then consider whether we have the powers, capability necessary to deal with it and we consider what additional powers or capabilities might be required. Of course, it goes without saying that there is no clear answer to that balancing exercise; anyone who suggested otherwise is being somewhat disingenuous. We provide the best assessment that we can.
“Two words that are often used when one considers that balancing exercise are ‘necessity’ and ‘proportionality’. How necessary are additional powers for us? Are there other ways in which the end-result could be achieved? And how proportionate are the additional powers and capabilities that we might consider to the threat that we are projecting?”
But in a job that is so governed by the vagaries of politics, doesn’t he find it frustrating that sometimes all the intelligence gathering and recommendations in the world can fly out the window because of parliamentary debate?
“On the particular issue that is with us at the moment about the number of days that people should be held without charge, the police and in particular those bits of the police that deal with counter-terrorism, believe that the provisions that are being sought in the Bill are necessary. Broadly speaking, we support that. That is, people working in this office support their recommendation and have worked with ministers to try to bring it into law.”
With all the knowledge and resources available to him, does he understand why someone would be driven to become a terrorist?
“God, that’s a really good question. As you know, we have spent a lot of time, over the past year in particular, trying to address that issue. Lots of other people have spent a lot of time on it as well, both within Government and outside Government – there has been a lot of academic work that is really good around the world so we have certainly tried to answer that question. Have we answered it? Well, it’s difficult to come up with a single theory. The answers that we have given we set out in a book that we have just published and they give our best guess as to what drives people to violent extremist groups in this country. There is not one single factor but four or five factors that are really key; their relative importance is determined by the particular individual location, time and year. I don’t think we’re doing badly in trying to understand it but we don’t have a definitive answer yet.”
Where will the next threat come from? A continuation of al-Qaida or something new?
“Both. That is one of the challenges we face. It’s certainly not the case - various academic works have advanced this thesis but we don’t agree with it -that we’re now dealing with something called ‘leaderless jihad’, in other words, where there is no vertical hierarchy any more and you’ve just got a lot of people acting on their own or in small groups. There is a hierarchy; there is an organisation called al-Qaida; it does direct operations; and it does think about what happens in this country and it does try to do us damage. That’s a really important point for us. On the other hand, there are also people who want to do us damage who have no direct contact with al-Qaida. It’s important to recognise that and to factor that into our response. So I’m afraid the answer to your question is both. You will get threats from traditional organisations and you will get threats from new organisations and you will get threats from individuals who do not belong to organisations at all. It’s the full range.”
How unhelpful is it when people make comments, like John Major did recently, that elements of the Counter Terrorism Bill actually encourage terrorism rather than prevent it?
“Well, I’m waiting for John Major to publish the evidence. Quote me on that. One, let’s see the evidence. Two, quite what are you arguing on the basis of fact? I have no doubt that there are a variety of reasons why people become terrorists in this country and no doubt some Government actions can inadvertently encourage people to join extremist movements or, at least, the perceptions of Government actions, the perception of foreign policy and of what we are trying to do overseas but the idea that the extension of pre-charge detention is going to be a single driver for radicalisation in this country is, frankly, not supported by a single piece of academic or Government evidence and is really rather a simplification of the rather complicated situation that we find ourselves in.”
Surely a different foreign policy would help?
“There are countries around the world that have faced threats of terrorism that have had foreign policies very different from our own. There are countries in Europe that have had foreign policies very different from our own but have faced threats. My view is that al-Qaida and its associated organisations find something inherently objectionable in the sort of society that we live in, irrespective of the policies that we might hold overseas.”
Talking of possible future foreign policy, we move onto the topic of an independent Scotland, would it make the country inherently less safe?
“It is not something that has crossed my mind that there is something inherent about independence that would make Scotland unsafe. I would add that there is nothing inherent about independence that would make Scotland more safe, either. That’s quite an important point.”
Has devolution and the matter of what is reserved – national security - and not reserved – policing and counter radicalisation and resilience work - confused or hindered the way counter terrorism operates in the UK?
“Devolution is something that we obviously have to factor into how we handle relations so we have to work hard with our Scottish counterparts to explain to them what we are doing in this country and for them to explain to us what they’re thinking in Scotland to ensure that there is a consistency of strategy and objectives despite the fact that we’re dealing with devolved powers. Terrorists, by and large, are not hugely interested in devolution and will tend to ignore it for the purposes of targeting. So we had better do so, to some degree, as well.
“Counter-terrorist policing here is very joined up with counter-terrorist policing there. There is a representative of ACPOS who sits on the key CT policing board that we chair here and there is very close contact between the investigation of counter-terrorism here and the investigation of it in Scotland – evidenced by the speed with which Glasgow was handled and the effectiveness as well. Counter-terrorist investigations work very smoothly – they don’t require much intervention from us and we integrate as far as we can investigators in Scotland with investigators here when we are discussing policy and strategy.”
I explain that the Glasgow airport attack was a seminal point for Scotland because there had always been the belief that it wouldn’t happen to us.
Scotland faces a threat like other parts of the UK. It’s not immune from it. Terrorists don’t recognise devolution.
Scotland faces a threat like other parts of the UK. It’s not immune from it. Terrorists don’t recognise devolution.
They will look for symbols, and there are symbols in Scotland just as there are symbols in this country and in other parts of the UK. And there are targets and people that they will be interested in attacking. Therefore, Scotland needs the sort of strategy that has been developed on this side of the border, and I think that Scotland is developing that. In other words, a strategy that is partly based on developing an investigative capacity, maintaining it in policing; it is partly based on protecting your infrastructure – not only airports but other key sites; and it is partly based on preventing – or working with communities, on which the track record in Scotland, for rather interesting reasons, is very good, to ensure that people are not suborned into violent extremism.
“I’m off my area of expertise here, but I think the nature of communities in Scotland is discernibly different from the nature of communities south of the border. You have an ability to reach in and develop a strategy of this kind.
“I don’t want to give you the impression that, in talking to our counterparts in Scotland, we are saying just look at what we are doing here. We are very interested in looking at how you have and are planning to develop your own strategies in the area of community cohesion and counter-radicalisation. The nature of your communities is different - the size, apart from anything else – so you have opportunities that we don’t always have here. The dialogue that we have got with our Scottish counterparts is quite good for that reason.”
So he could actually learn from Scotland?
“Absolutely.”
How does he measure success?
“That’s a very good question, and one we’ve asked ourselves rather seriously, strategically, quite a lot. Success is reduction of the threat. That’s it.”
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