Upbeat spy boss leads with his chin in central Europe’s city of espionage

If Prague’s cobblestones could talk, they would have stories to tell from a pivotal place in the history of the Cold War — not least as an entrepot of East-West espionage. Demonstrators, security forces and secret police thundered across Wenceslas Square in the heady tumult of 1989.

Notebook in hand, I watched a regime imposed by a foreign power and sustained by fear totter and fall. The dissidents were suddenly in control of their country’s destiny.

Returning this week to host an interview with the head of MI6, Sir Richard Moore, has felt poignant.

The liberation of central Europe now faces a shattered reflection in the war in Ukraine. And Prague, which Soviet tanks rolled into to quell the uprising of 1968, is a reminder that it can take a long time for bad stories to end well.

So you could say that Sir Richard, as head of a secret intelligence service which provides vital support to Kyiv, was leading with his chin in laying out an upbeat take on why the recent turmoil in Russia bodes ill for the stability of the regime.

The MI6 boss’s readiness to engage in debates and share more than his predecessors (even allowing for operational secrecy) means Britain hears more open discussion with a spy-in-chief than any other European country.

Sir Richard has said he wants to be the last Chief from an all-male shortlist and today the technology chief “Q” is a woman, as are many station chiefs.

If that form of progress has come at speed, where does AI leave the world of intuition and cultivating human sources, and what Sir Richard (who likes an angling metaphor) called the “well-cast fly”?

According to sources working in and around China, the use of facial recognition by the authorities has made it much harder to recruit sources directly in mainland China, so a lot of intelligence activity has shifted to Africa and other regions.

And as much as I agree with Sir Richard’s belief that an intelligence service with a decent oversight system is part and parcel of a robust democracy and its defence, stakes rise and calculations become more complex in a time of conflict.

When I joined the Velvet Revolution revellers in 1989, there was a feeling that things could not go backwards. There was also a fair dollop of optimism bias.

But the unquenchable “human factor” still matters. It is the dogged, even perverse, belief in better outcomes, the right to say “Enough” and the bravery to act on it.

If I have faith in something reliable, at a time of stresses, fractures and new dictatorships, it is that.

Anne McElvoy is executive editor of Politico. Her interview with the head of MI6 can be viewed at politico.eu/event/interview-richard-moore-mi6