letter, nations turned out to be extremely nasty. vicious, nasty in their different ways and they were meant to show what jonathan swift thought was how societies and politics can go. both of these early writers of fiction were using the fiction form to put across ideas which is not radical were certainly designed to promote discussion as was a bit later in the nineteenth century charles dickens. he was using his novels to raise the conscience of a nation to the social evils of poverty and deprivation but all of them were more interested in promoting their political ideas, raising the issues than they were in creating credible, real-life characters. think about oliver twist and fagan who runs a gang of kids

who go around picking pockets. he is not at all a realistic character and couldn't have been when dickens was writing about him. he is no more real than robinson crusoe was. they were all stereotypes in those days rather like the eighteenth century cartoon characters like wrecks progress. those characters would not pass muster with the literary critics of today. when your literary characters are expected to be realistic. novelists are now praised for their ability to observe and analyzed and reconstruct the characters they write about. having given a nod to our forebears' as novelists i want to say something about these three types of modern extremists i mention that the beginning. spies, radical protesters and

terrorists. i am going to talk about some of the real people i have come across during my career at longworth house office building -- at mi5 and their fictional alter egos. i joined mi5 in the 1950s and my first job was in counterespionage. in those days the greatest threat of espionage came from the intelligence service of the soviet union and their allies in eastern european countries. the most famous group spies of that period came to be known as the cambridge spies. five young men from middle-class backgrounds, radicals in that they convince themselves or allowed themselves to be convinced that a socialist worker state such as soviet communism was an inspiring

alternative to what they saw as a class ridden stagnant west where in the u.s.a. and the united kingdom millions of people were out of work. those young men were different in what they did but were not alone in that view of soviet communism. in number of prominent intellectuals in the 20s and 30s among them the playwright george bernard shaw who was founder of the london school of economics all believe the same thing. that somehow some kind of golden era was being created in the soviet union. they visited the country in their streams during the year >> host: 30s and came away persuaded that the agricultural revolution being conducted was selected farms and such like was some sort of return to a golden

age. a few of them saw what the results of that revolution were which was mass starvation in the countryside and that is what it had produced. later, many of them did learn what was going on in the soviet union and became disillusioned as they learned more about it but the cambridge spies, the five young men were different from the ideologues like george bernard shaw. they didn't just talk about it. they took action. hand while still at cambridge university or shortly after they left they accepted a clever recruitment approach by russian intelligence officer and for years supplied the soviet union with a stream of information from inside the british establishment.

government departments and intelligence services and joined the foreign office and handed over atomic secrets among other things. guy burgess who joined the bbc and pleaded for an office where he became private secretary to the minister with all the access that would have given him. and kim philby who rose to the head of the department and revealed all these forces mi6 had in the soviet union, anthony blunt who joined mi5 and photocopied documents for the russian embassy and john cancrofts who joined the equivalent of your nsa. the cambridge spies, motivation, characters, similarities and differencess have fascinated novelists ever since they were exposed and continue to

fascinates me. why did a group of bolden boys fall under the sway of a kgb recruiter from a brutal regime and the trade their own country? what was it about them, the society they live in, their relationship with each other, their relationship with their recruiter that turned them into the most successful group of spies ever. by the time i joined mi5 in the late 1960s three of that group had fled and were living in the soviet union no doubt having a dreadful time and hankering after the delights of the west but they have gone. they went together in 1961. when they were alerted by can philby who was working for mi6 at the british embassy in

washington and who knew the russian code had been broken and burgess and maclean were about to be exposed and he told them and off they went to the soviet union. he later followed on when he himself felt under suspicion. when i joined mi5 in the early 70s when i knew what was going on british and u.s. intelligence were still haunted by those be trails. by the wholesale penetration of the british establishment by the kgb. there was a sense that you couldn't trust anybody. nobody was who they seemed to be. anybody might be working for the other side. the only one of the cambridge spies that i personally met with john canprof, the fifth man who was the latest, the last to be uncovered and i conducted a

series of interviews with him in the 1970s. he had gone to live in france. he had been given immunity from prosecution by the british government on terms that whenever he came to britain he would make himself available for interviews by the intelligence service. i can remember the point was what he was supposed to do was tell us all about his recruitment and spying and how it came about, illuminate for us the security situation we still haven't plumbed. we were very -- to discover whether any other young men had been recruited at any of our universities during that period and might still be in senior positions so it was an important investigation. i remember the interviews took place in the early evenings in a

room in a government office in the early 70s in london. those places were gloomy. the lights were dim. the furniture was dark wood and old fashioned and a sense of gloom about the place and when i think back about these interviews in my memory it was always raining in the evening. on the evenings when i saw him and i can recall this fin stooping figure coming in after the rain looking downcast and depressed and wearing a raincoat and he presented himself to me as an intellectual of conscience, a young man who worked in the soviet union because of anti nazi sentiments. and a sparring match. he was not going to tell me anything more than he was absolutely forced to do and it was so long ago he could cover

up quite easily. in this depressed looking -- conducted this sparring match and off we went. and was all an act. i got to know his niece. just a bit younger than me. a british economist. at the time, anything about the spying. i talked to her about it. on the evenings when he went into the rain, he went to stay with her at her house in north london and we compared notes about this and she was amazed at my representation because she

saw him glamorous charming lady's mannan and conversationalists and teller of interesting stories. hard to believe this was the same man. not at all down from the character that i met. in the course of a short journey on a bus in north london he changed himself from this great intellect will in due a lady's man that she remembered. he was truly a man of two faces and two faces on the same evening. i use my experiences. i imagined a young man being recruited. i would like to bring my plots

up-to-date. my heroine, is carlyle who is an mi5 officer investigate the same way we did when we trying to find out if there were any remaining spies, any remaining members of the cambridge spy group. she digs into the path of the candidate she has and looks at all the contacts and what they did and what they used and that is the way they do it in my novel and other novels about infiltration. about moles. this theme has provided the raw material for much fiction. the novelist's ask why would someone be trader country or their colleagues or both? the answer most novelists come up with it is the personality of the spy rather than their extreme ideology and that is what interests novelists.

if you think about the book about infiltration, moles and the trail he has no doubt that the trigger for espionage is hubris, arrogance, the feeling that one is clever, that one knows better than anybody else. the spy draws nourishment from his sense of superiority. of self worth. that comes from having a secret life playing a role and deceiving everybody. if you haven't seen the new film you should. it is really great and it gets over both of the gloom of that period that he is writing about. the gloom that i remember when i first joined the service. this uneasy sense and also gets over this wonderful character who is -- a sense of his own

righteousness. his own arrogance. the secretive personality of the spy is brought in a number of books that there's another one called the untouchables. and irish writer, i know this book was published in the u.s.a. because it was here in the u.s.a. that i first read it. it is a fictionalized recreations of anthony blunt, the fourth man in the cambridge spy, who didn't flee to russia. and a respected figure in the art world in britain. he became a keeper of the queen's pictures. and that came as a shot to the queen as i can tell you. in the untouchable, john

banville portrays an old man living a solitary life in the institute of art in london clutching to him the secret of his treasury dreading the moment when it is going to be haunted by this fear of discovery. it is very real and though it is fiction it is extremely good and readable. unlike the enigmatic cambridge spies with their arrogance and sense of superiority, the genuinely convinced radical, true ideological spy does not make such material for the novelist because with the true ideological spy you don't have self analysis, no hubris. just unquestioning conviction that they are right and because they serve is the right cause.

there was a british woman called norwood who was just such a spy. a truly gray lady. a perfect spy as it turned out. she was a secretary in a british research institution who was a convinced communist from the 1940s onward and she quietly spotted for moscow for 40 years completely undiscovered. she was the longest serving soviet spy in the u.k.. and we had no idea what she was doing. she was recruiting other people to spy and handed over atomic secrets that she has access to in the research institute where she works as secretary. the kgb in the end awarded her a pension. and the red banner because she served so long completely

undetected. when she was exposed in the 1990s she was an absolute gift for the media. there was a startled looking lady clutching a shopping bag totally unexpected and not at all the kind of spy the media, the novel's taught us to expect. she was a real hangover from the cold war. by the time the newspaper with their tongue in their cheek characterized her as the spy who came in from the co-op. [laughter] >> with her shopping bag and her car again. that is what she was. she was not a character in a spy novel. she with a true radical extremists. at the other extreme the james bond books give us radicals, extremists, whatever you like to call them of a glamor and evil.

just true mindless evil. think of below field, inspector. he is plotting in a laboratory on the top -- conveniently in switzerland and has a laboratory up there and is plotting to spread botulism and swine fever and all kind of mother hideous diseases throughout the united kingdom. then you go drafts in moonraker destroying london with a nuclear missile. goldfinger plotting to steal the gold from fort knox in order to finance smirch. these characters absolutely incredible. you would never meet anyone like that. but i have to say that in recent

years -- in recent months really i have begun to wonder whether those bond dylan's are actually as incredible as i thought they were. living in london at the moment we have quite a number of russian oligarchs, those people who got very rich when yeltsin started selling off the national assets and all kinds of skulduggery they were able to get loads of them into their hands and make billions and billions of dollars. these guys, many of them multi-billion harris as they all are have begun to come to live in london and they bought up large parts of real-estate in hampstead and other desirable places. the interesting thing is they have begun to sue each other in our courts and the latest case concerns what the media describes as the blood soaked

wars, struggle for control of mineral wealth between these characters. character who is billed as one of the kremlin's favorite oligarchs courted by the world's elite and possesses billions of pounds of fortune and an enormous yacht, the biggest in the world of course. he is being sued by an equally unsavory character who is described as a criminal godfather russia's maggio organizations. detail of extortion, bank fraud, bribery of politicians and murder. unfortunately for us these characters as i say, seem to have great taste in justice. more faith than they have in justice in russia. we have this spectacle of them airing their dirty linen in our courts.

side there's another ian fleming out there, he's got belinsky hand. i could go on about spies and the next ian fleming has ready-made villains. i could go on but i should stick to the subject and move on to my second category of radicals which are those with a personal grievance against society. india >> host: 90s a new form of radical begins to appear on this side of the atlantic in the shape of radical student groups. people -- the war in vietnam, they have concerns about human rights in the liberty movement etc.. like the cambridge spies most of those who got involved in the 60s and 70s came from comfortable, highly educated backgrounds but seem to feel the need to escape from their

sheltered life that they were being brought up in. and they sold resources and out of bounds. many of them did no more than a protest on the streets and sometimes more and sometimes less and broadly in the name of civil rights. and the kind of protests that concerned the intelligence service in britain. some of the most extreme took weapons training, to explode and make and explode bombs and carry the attacks with bombs or shootings even. one of the most violent was in germany, another -- there was a red brigade.

the first of may and in the usa, some of you may remember. different groups buried in the degree that they posed to society. the weather man group was one of the most extreme. violent left-wing radicals who planted bombs in chicago, washington and new york in the 70s. the longer lasting and most damaging, who cared more than 30 people in that 60s and 70s including business men and bankers. they kidnap them and murdered them and they were still active in the 1980s and rename middle class youngsters whose of themselves as fighting a capital establishment where former nazis were running businesses and this was the grievance they had. this was the concern we felt in

mi5 when we discovered we had a group like that at all. they called themselves the angry brigade. in france they didn't do much harm but cause a lot of alarm by planting small bombs in offices of government ministers and industrialists. the ring leaders were arrested so not a great deal of harm was done. and they were on the group, a very intelligent woman. long after prison when i met her, a very respectable charity in britain and looking at her and talking to her now is hard to credit that even when she was young she really believed planting bombs at the homes of government ministers would -- was actually the way to serve her cause whatever the cause

might be. novelists have been fascinated by urban revolution, just as they have as spies. the background, different motivations, interplay of characters, provides massive material. and in the beginning of the 20th century a novelist called joseph conrad wrote a secret agent in which he explored t he exploredn of anarchists and he tells the story of somebody who infiltrated one of these groups and is controller persuaded them to blow up greenwich observatory so that they will get the blame and a very complicated tale of mixed motives and personality. more recently many of you will

have read philip roth's book american pastor in which he explores the psyche of a young woman who joins the weather men. the story hinges on a woman called mary. the 16-year-old daughter of a successful land at the jewish businessman in europe. she is an only child of this very successful household. exception of the weatherman and blows up the post office and kills the local doctor. it is 1968. mary goes into hiding. she becomes destitute. she gets involved in further bombings in oregon and wind up back in europe but she is sticking and filthy and has a veil over her face. he has become a jane. now she is dedicated to such extremes of nonviolence that she

can scarcely bring herself to eat anything because it is potential murder of plant life. she is taking her janeisn to great extremes and the novel revolves around what mary has done. the debt she caused. the question of how this respectable jewish businessman and his w lie who was a former miss new jersey, how could they have given birth to this dislocated character. of course the question can't be answered. but philip roth floats bserious persons -- possibilities. because the parents are so respectable? so decent, so liberal and as much against the war in vietnam at their daughter's? the girl had to turn out this way? or is there some kind of american allegory, groups rising to prosperity only to fall into violence and despair?

or he asks, have the parents done everything they possibly could and should have done? is she a changeling reminds us the inexplicable exists? what is wrong with their lives? as the novel ends he asks what is less reprehensible than lives? he provides no answer. the book exposes the issues but doesn't give us any answers. just a boonswof brilliant ridin which i think is enough. we had a british novelist who won and nobel prize for literature in 2007 when she was 87 so there's hope for a small i feel. and she became a feminist icon when she wrote the golden notebook. sea-tac abstain theme in her book the good terrorist which he published in 1985.

she shows how with certain people at certain times all of the hopes and hertz and disappchentments in l lie can still over into a desire to hit back. to be noticed almost. to ts tae some kind of violent action against a system whenever the the pstem is and the peoplo have disregarded you and hurt you. her radicals are and assorted group of dysfunctional characters who live in a rundown ãherterelict house in london. group something like the angry brigade that i remember. vaguely incoherent, angry about society's inequalities but in fact thepat oal gotten where they are. disaster strikes this group when they n cevely offer their services to the i r a and

crossover into terrorism. mention of the i r a brings me to my final category of radical extremism and these are political and religious terrorists and i can see a sharp ãhert liferegrye between these . politically motivated terrorists are seeking change in circumstances whether a new form of government or land or freedom to establish their own state whatever it is. religiously motivated terrorists seems to me to want to wipe out the society they live in completely and sometimes themselves with it. journalists portray terrorists in the most frightening terms aren't fast with their one idea, whether it's getting the printout of northern ireland in the case of the ira are whether it's to destroy what they see as an evil western was patient to

destroy israel and whatever it might be. this is what is so obsessed that how this is what the journalists tell us. they're so obsessed that any amount of violence, any deaths of unconnected people, children autobus or train, all those deaths are justifiable to them. to novelists, the question is more complicated and interesting. how did they get to that point. actually rare and they are not born. they are made. so why and serve people are not born. they are made. so why and how? take the i r a as an example because that is something i know well. an example of the first category. politically motivated terrorists. a terror leader presents himself now as a most reasonable,

thinking politician and enjoys it. mcginnis, prime minister in northern ireland once was and i are a commander, looks comfortable in his smart suit meeting politicians and statesmen. he would stand does say that in their desire to get the brits out of northern ireland and establish a unified country of ireland they have no option but to resort to violence. he conveniently forgets that although he blames the british army for the reason why they have no option, in order to deal with the violence of the ira but be that as it may even if what he says is true does it explain why under their leadership the i r a became one of the best organized and well equipped terrorist groups ever with teams devoted to the development and acquisition of weaponry of all kinds, long delay uses and that

they received shiploads of arms and money from colonel gaddafi in the 1980s. how is that explained? difficult to get away from the feeling that terrorism itself became the purpose of their lives and they wanted to be good at it if that is the right way of putting it just as they now want to be good at being statesman. there is no doubt the ira and their loyalist counterparts attracted and created brutal killers but the most interesting people i think are the more complicated multifaceted people. i met some members of terrorist organizations on both sides of the divide it when i was responsible for counterterrorism in mi5. we were trying to recruit members of these organizations to work for us. to stay where they were and tell us from inside what was going

on. these people had a multitude of personalities. they were not just brutal killers. they were much more complex than that. they were people with all kinds of issues. people who had grown up in families where for generations the men. following the ira who had become sickened some times by everything that happened, people who had grievance against a colleague in the organization, who thought they hadn't been promoted in the way they thought they should have been. grievance against someone who had done and down. people who had married and didn't want their children to go the same way and become terrorists as they had done. they were multifaceted group of people. very few of them work for us for money. they were all scared about what they were doing not surprisingly and they needed constant reassurance and support of all

kinds. i and my colleagues became their psychiatrists, guidance counselors and financial advisor s and hand holders as they went through this difficult period. they were more interesting and complex than the classic journalistic representation and there are some good novels written about the i r a and many of the best try to explore this complexity of motivation that leads people to join organizations and behave that way. they're not just stories of violence. to move on to my final category, islamic extremists or islamists. i have no direct experience with these people because they emerged after 9/11 and the declaration of war on iraq. apart from the horror of what they do like the attack on the london underground in 2005 which

we call 7-7 the indiscriminate killing of ordinary people, passengers on a tube, train or bus, kids at a nightclub, what particularly horrified is this all and fascinates us all is the fact that the people who did this, particularly who did 7-7 and many of the other terrorist attacks in britain that my colleagues managed to prevent, these people were mostly born and brought up in the united kingdom. they are educated in british schools and universities, apparently rational people from respectable hard-working families. sometimes married with small children. the question for the security service and the novelist who portrays them is why do they do it? what persuade them to hate their own environments of much that they want to attack it in an almost casual haphazard sort of

way, to abandon their loved ones and life itself for this one idea that they must punish the state, the british state in this case through revenge for the deaths of muslims in iraq, chechnya up legal afghanistan, palestine, whatever it might be in the forefront of their mind. people say that the policy of multiculturalism, come and lived here and bring your own religion and culture and way of life and get those in maryland and other cities. and it is produced, and the culture they belong to. it was exacerbated by youth

unemployment, the search for purpose and it is true to some extent as well. it is true that radical done in english-speaking imams have been allowed to come to our country and preach in mosques and free to preach hate, largely unobserved when most people don't speak english and people didn't know what they're doing until recently and until the damage had been done. none of those explanations seemed to be wholly satisfactory or to fully explain the phenomenon. i have written two novels about such people. the first was written a couple years after 9/11. was published the year before 7-7. was called at risk. it was before we had seen the development of these homegrown terrorists i have been talking about and when most of us were still unaware what was going on and i imagine young afghan who

had a personal grievance coming to bring to conduct a terrorist attack against those he specifically blamed for something that happens to his family and he is helped by a british girl. a character comes out of the radical student culture and joined the extremists. she is indicated and i did -- a grievance against her parents and becomes interested in islam and she is picked up by those controlling this young man because she is not the kind of person the security authorities will be looking for. the same topic again recently where after we knew about homegrown terrorists who carried out the bombings on 7-7 in a book called riptides. i read that young british men largely from the northern and midland cities were now turning up in somalia and my imagination started working on how and why

they repair. and i chose the motivation of my character a stern and traditional fodder, subservient mother, radical imam, strong radical fringes and rather weak and scared young man. that seemed to be a mix that might credibly explain what happens in the loss and what might happen in real life. time is pressing. that has inevitably been a broad sweep approach to radicalism and the reality and romance. some of you will have different examples that i haven't even read. none of what i have said should be taken as excusing the behavior of any of these people i have been talking about. for all my working life i have been trying to find them out, to protect the state against them. to make sure that they are

prosecuted and imprisoned and prevented from what they're trying to do. now i wear a different hat and i look at it from a different angle. novelists are fascinated by radicals and extremists of all kinds. although radical extremists believe that they are motivated solely by issues, novelists on the whole take a different view. that it is as much human activity as in much inactivity, it is personality, background and the interplay of characters that affect their behavior and it is that that makes a good story. thank you. [applause]

>> the ushers will be around to collect your questions. if you do need to leave please do so quietly so that we can move along with the question and answer session. our american spies such as rick ames and british spies such as kim philby similar characters? >> canes as i understand it was motivated by money. he is one of those people that i am not so interested in because he seems selfishness, the search for a better life was far more what motivated. philby was a more complex character as i have been explaining.

he had a dominant father who was a middle eastern experts. you might say a young man dominated by his father. he was a man of great arrogance who thought he knew better than anyone else and obviously enjoyed clutching his secrets to him. he denied, even when it was pretty obvious that he had been working for the soviet union he denied it in a series of interviews with my service and press interviews and you could see by the look on his face that he was getting enormous enjoyment out of this. serve different characters and philby was more subtle and more interesting and games was a more classic financially motivated spy. >> what is your opinion of the exploits of julian assange? >> my opinion is low.

[applause] it is rather sickening that he is still in britain and using every recourse of the law to prevent himself being returned to scandinavia where he faces charges of rape. julian assange strikes me as a diluted young man who seems to feel that it is necessary to have total openness of everything which is a ludicrous concept. you cannot run any aspect of security without some kind of secrecy and confidentiality. we all do need to have some kind of security in a dangerous world. mindless self promoting it seems to me the way he has gone on but i have a criticism i dare say of the u.s. authorities who created what they call a secret database

which appears to have been accessible to enormous numbers of people. including this young man who is accused of being one -- looking at any of the things that have been leaked it is clear that some of what was on the database wasn't really secret at all and i do believe the security and secrecy you have got to distinguish clearly between what you need to protect and what you don't need to protect and you mustn't one the whole thing together and dish it out to -- all disaster will ensue. >> what is the difference between a terrorist and a revolutionary? >> they can be the same. a terrorist is one who has resorted to killing people. revolutionary doesn't necessarily have to do that. you can be a revolutionary

without killing people. revolution comes in all kinds of different ways. you can promote revolution by gathering people around you and taking political action. a terrorist is somebody who sets about to kill people. they say one man's freedom fighters another man's terrorists but there is a firm view about this. once you start randomly killing people and your objective, era terrorist. not a true revolutionary. [applause] >> how do we judge the morality or normality of agents hired to kill or use violence by states rather than operating for now on stage or anti state

organizations? >> this is complex because i come from a country where our intelligence services are not authorized to kill people. if there is killing to be done in my country is done by the military. when you have a situation, hostage situation where people buy taken hostage by armed terrorists to try to free them, that is taken by our special forces. i don't know if any of you can remember we had an iranian embassy siege in the 1970s. first time we saw a special forces operating on the television cameras as they broke into the embassy, killed those who were holding hostages and freed the hostages. so i personally have a difficult way of relating to states sponsored killing and i know that the cia has got the

authority to kill people and there are a lot of unmanned drones going around killing people but we take a different attitude. we regard terrorism as a crime, terrorists to be arrested and put in a court. easy to say that when dealing with terrorists in your own country but when dealing with terrorism a long way away is more difficult but i believe armies have to fight wars. intelligence services don't kill people and that is my position. [applause] >> what do youth ascribed the rise of islamic extremism? do you believe we are in a protracted conflict with such extremism and if so are you concerned about the ability of our society to survive and maintain its character? >> i hope we are not in a prolonged conflict between the muslim world and the western world. i hope that we are living

through a period of -- that is going to go away as other similar things have. the reasons behind all this are really very complex and very difficult to deal with. i mentioned a few that i know about in my own society. in the broader sense, there are a range of issues that have got to be dealt with and one is the israel/palestine issue which provides continuous -- provides a reason for people to take terrorist action. there are other reasons, disparity of economic progress between different parts of the world. the disillusioned young people looking for a cause, some sort of mode of. some reason for being important

and clearly you find this in africana and countries of the middle east. it is very complex and have got to be dealt with on many levels and one of them is the political level. there is the economic and social levelland the intelligence level. we are making progress but we have a long way to go and the world is a dangerous place. but i don't see the end of the world. this will go -- something of a come up. >> does literature glorify the radical who becomes an extremist? >> i hope not. i think the best literature raises questions rather than glorifying anybody. i don't personally like thrillers etc. that portray

radical extremists as almost heroes, as brutality and violence as being something that we should admire and enjoy reading about. that is not the kind of book that i enjoy. the more sophisticated novelists is raising questions about radical extremism, not saying this is a wonderful thing but saying why is this happening and answer it yourself like philip roth's book the american pastoral is raising questions and that is what a novelist should be doing. >> can you compare the fbi to the work of mi5. another question goes to whether or not british intelligence reflects the u.s. intelligence service. >> british intelligence regards u.s. intelligence service as their closest ally and they have

done ever since -- intelligence services were created. they're the closest intelligence ally and we are there's. they respect their ability to do what they do. that doesn't mean we share intelligence. and share information about how to tackle issues but stress and strain undoubtedly a arose during the war in iraq. torture for example which in my country, and there were difficulties and we have various inquiries. and the complicity to torture.

it is true that every day on the ground are they know each other. that is -- may long continue. it is very close. mi5 and the fbi are different in that the fbi is a police service and mi5 isn't. we work closely with the police but if there's action to be taken to arrest people on the streets then that is the job of the police service, not of mi5. mi5 is an intelligence gathering assessment and action service but it does not have police powers. that is the difference. we relate closely with the fbi and did during the cold war and are doing now. >> can you comment on the security issues during the

recent olympics that concern you the most and your observations about how everything was handled? >> there was a huge security operation surrounding the olympics and it will have been going on from the day it was announced that london was awarded the olympics at the moment. my former colleagues, police and military and all the foreign liaisons' putting their heads together to decide where the threat was likely to come from and how to deal with it. that is a bit of a security action you didn't see. then there was the kind of physical side where the military block flat in london, great war of the citizenry and those who lived in the flats who thought they were -- a large -- that was the sort of superficial thing

designed to reassure the citizens and then there was the day to day security on the olympic site which caused something when the company got a contract to provide to the people who were going to search your bag when you came in and there hadn't been able to recruit enough people. panic but not panic because the military moved in and did the job in conjunction with civilians. so i think the security operation went extremely smoothly. i know my former colleagues in mi5 were not allowed to take any leave for the last year so that was what was occupying them and obviously successful. they have got it taped. >> please describe the personalities and characters -- characteristics of people who

join intelligence agencies. [laughter] >> that is an interesting one because all intelligence agencies are different as i have said and i can only comment on the personalities and characteristics of people who join the british intelligence service. my former service looking for people who are able primarily able to be discreet. who are sufficiently self confident that they don't feel the need to go around blabbing about what they're doing and talking to everybody about the wonderful secret operation they have just been involved in. they all are looking for people with two aspects. people who are bright and able to analyze a complex information and make sense of it, and use common sense to make judgments about what is likely to be true and what isn't. the other aspect is they are

looking for people able to go out on the street and persuade people to work for us like those people in the eye are a that i was mentioning to do things that no sane person would actually do. they have to have the kind of personality that can convince people that this is the right thing to do and if they work for us they will be looked after and their information will be dealt with carefully and so forth. two aspects to a personality. you need people who actually want to work for the state. who regarded as important that the state is protected and defended against serious threats but who also do not want to live in a police state because you have to have people who will obey the law and regarded just as important that we preserve our civil liberties as we are kept safe and that is two

essentials sides of intelligence services in democracy. [applause] >> how did you balance your career and family life? >> when i was working in mi5 ahead and still have two daughters and working in mi5. delivery crude in and running human-resources isn't a 9-5 job. you can't really foresee when you are going to be there and when you are not. that cause difficulties when my daughters were growing up and we will look after by nannies and all kinds of people including grannies which i supervise with being a granny myself. is not easy. is more difficult because i joined a service that was male-dominated and women had to

fight to be allowed to have a proper career. that took dedication as well. the worst time was when i became director general and was made a public figure by the government. the time had come to announce the name of the person who was holding this job and that resulted in a big focus from the immediate at a time when the i r a was active on the streets of london. and the other one was living with me and trying to do her public examinations and she suffered a lot. this was the mother of my granddaughter here today. she suffered a lot from media intrusion outside the house and the fear that all this attention might bring the i r a creeping up the stairs in the back. in the end we had to sell our