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494 GCHQ GOES GLOBAL
carrying Cabinet rank. Britain was in the middle of another
expenditure crisis, and Aitken's main task was to look for savings.
One of the effects of the end of the Cold War had been to allow
the Treasury to strip away a little of the mystery of secret services
funding. For decades this had been grouped together as
the 'Secret Vote' and decided upon by the Prime Minister. In
1994 the Treasury managed to make some inroads here,
requiring each agency chief to face bilateral discussions with
the Chief Secretary like ordinary mortals. As a result, much
more of Britain's carefully hidden intelligence spending became
visible. At this point formal British intelligence spending was
about £1.1 billion per year, of which GCHQ claimed the lion's
share as ever, at £850 million. MI5 and SIS received the crumbs
from under the table, at £125 million each. 19
MI5 and SIS performed faultlessly in their meetings with
Aitken. David Spedding, the new chief of SIS, was a Middle
East expert and was at home in the post-Cold War environment.
He explained how his networks of agents were a longterm
business, and could not be rebuilt quickly in a crisis if they
were cut back. Stella Rimington, Director General of MI5,
together with her deputy, Stephen Lander, made a convincing
case for protection of its budget focused on the IRA. They argued
that while the Republicans were engaged in talks, they were
also secretly re-arming, so MI5 too escaped lightly. Aitken
confessed that he was 'actually convinced by some of the arguments
against cuts put forward by the spooks'.
By contrast, John Adye, leading the GCHQ team, performed
badly. Initially GCHQ produced 'bewildering countermeasures'
by moving into the stratosphere of 'technical incomprehensibility'.
As Aitken studied the agency more closely, burning the
ministerial midnight oil, he became convinced that there was
something wrong. GCHQ, he concluded, was 'suffering from
out-of-date methods of management and out-of date methods
for assessing priorities'. There was undoubtedly great technical
wizardry. GCHQ was monitoring communications between
Russian tank commanders in Chechnya - but what, asked