Talking pints with author Rupert Allason AKA Nigel West

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcNLPTym7Pw"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]is of course talking pints and joining me tonight is rupert allison rupert good evening and cheers you're very good health thank you for coming good to see you now you were a conservative member of parliament for 10 years you went in in 1987 when i guess margaret thatcher was pretty much it was the third election she'd won pretty much at the height of her powers and and there you were a sort of mid-thirties back there she was stabbed in the back and abandoned by her own cabinet her back benches would have backed her i think how did you feel about her as leader and i mean was she impressive or was she i mean by 1990 was she coming towards the end she was i think the difficulty was that she was became increasingly isolated and she surrounded herself with people who gave her i think very poor advice including her pps but the difficulty was the election itself and i remember her she was always very suspicious of me because i had taken an interest in the security and intelligence debates and you remember the 1989 security service act that i had advocated and she was very suspicious she didn't think that people had could have a legitimate interest in the intelligence community she came round eventually but it was a while and she was she was very cautious about that whole subject because she'd been duffed up if you remember when she first came to power in 1979 the first big issues were all intelligence failures intelligence related anthony blunt in november 79 the falklands war classic failure of intelligence so she was very nervous about the intelligence community and she was uh slightly suspicious of me too fair to say but one issue in which you had very much common cause was europe or the eec which then turned into the ec and then at the maastricht treaty turned into the eu and you were one of those maastricht rebels i remember it all i mean i was in business at the time but i was following the debate very very closely and indeed the passing of that treaty is what directly got me involved in politics i thought well but it was the end of my politics well i remember because in the 97 i lost the torbay parliamentary constituency by 12 votes yes but it was ukip that stood against you yes and a delightful man graham who was became a friend and had been a constituent he stood against me and i begged him i said you will you're never going to win this seat and by standing against me and he did get about 1900 votes you will split my vote i think that's right i think in that case ukip did cost conservative votes and what we got in was an enthusiastic european but in the end what ukip did was to destroy the labour party absolutely so if you take the long view of this yes you were a casualty and i and i no no i'm i'm happy to have been there you were a hero of mine because when it came to the the final vote john major couldn't get this through without without the lowest trick in the book using a motion of confidence debate and all of them bill cash and all the others who'd said it was the end of our independence all traipsed in and voted for this treaty which they advocated against and dennis skinner the labour backbencher shouted it's a bloody good job euler won here in 1940 and dramatic scenes but there was one mp missing a certain member for tour bay rupert allison and i think you'd gone to new york with somebody for a long weekend hadn't you no i what happened was that i decided that i was never going to be put in the position of the prime minister and this is what john major used to do he he would put his arm around you and push you through the wrong lobby now because there were 15 others who said they were going to vote against the government in the motion of confidence uh i thought nobody's going to notice me but i'm not prepared to be bullied by john major and i'll just i'll just stick it out and i won't actually attend and little did i know you were in new york weren't you uh i was with a friend no no no with with my wife as it happens okay but um but it was the day beforehand and i could have come back and uh i decided not to and good for you well good for you it created some difficulties but and i lost the whip obviously yeah um but it was restored to me and that's why it made it so difficult for me in 97 yes to espouse uh a ukip position yeah and i tried to explain that to graham yeah in torbay but but uh well we are where we are as i say in the end i'm a battlefield casualty yeah yeah yeah no i think that's right i think that genuinely is right but rupert you're better known as nigel west you're better known you know that is your pen name you've written book after book after book you've written historical books about spy operations in world war ii you've written books about mi5 books about mi6 are you the unofficial historian of british secret services in a strange sort of way yes when i originally started working in the 1970s on the intelligence community there was great hostility from mi5 and from sis and i was injuncted at one stage by the attorney general and the consequence of that was that i just was more interested in the community than ever and i continued writing and those books stand up rather well today i think but i'm continuing to write in that particular field yeah no absolutely and you've sold a lot of books and you've done pretty well out of it i think and you've had one or two legal cases and you won some and lost some and i mean i know that's the way life is but let's just talk about intelligence i mean was it the cold war that got you into all of this where where was your interest no it was the second it was the second world war and i was educated in a benedictine monastery and one of the monks had taken holy orders after a lifetime in the intelligence community okay and he used to tell us extraordinary stories he'd escaped from a prisoner of war camp in silesia walked literally across europe across france had got to spain then to portugal joined sis and he became a monk because he'd killed somebody and this had prayed on his conscience forever afterwards and he was a wonderful man and his great friend in sis who used to visit the school driving down to cornwall was john le carre and so he would come and talk to us boys and so there was a a group of boys from that same monastery who went into the intelligence community and one of them mark allen was responsible for negotiating with colonel gaddafi in libya and [Music] negotiating the deal that gave united nations access to all the chemical biological and bacteriological sites in libya so there were several people who got involved in the intelligence community and intelligence is always so important isn't it i mean the massive row we've had over iraq and whether the intelligence was right over that and one wonders what intelligence joe biden had before he made this i decision to bring you right up to date and ask you you know is this a big intelligence failure it is in the sense that we are where we are the difficulty is that people expect the intelligence community to predict the future that's not what it's there for it provides a snapshot of what is going on today and perhaps as common figures used to say offers sort of cat size into the dark for the future and for guidance but it's not there to tell you what to do options are given but what was so shaming about joe biden and the decision to withdraw from background is that the afghan national army the way that they fought and the way that they were taught was with an ipad they would go out on patrol with a piece of intelligence that gave them real-time reconnaissance through drones overhead they could call in airstrikes when they needed to they could get on their devices the patrol area that they were going to visit they could see where the ieds had been placed in the past two months they had all the aerial reconnaissance overnight they were stripped of that intelligence capability so they were being asked to go out on patrol without any idea of what they were going to face whether or not there was an ambush around the corner which had drone hitherto had given them advanced warning so for joe biden to go on television and say that the afghan national army wasn't prepared to fight when the americans had withdrawn from bagram overnight yes and taken away that air cover without warning anybody that was that was wicked and the afghan army had taken what 45 000 casualties since 2014. i mean they were fighting damned hard yeah um and that brings me on to the other big subject of the day china the chinese communist party more specifically i mean when we talk about espionage you know we think i think i think joe public thinks in terms of the cold war and berlin and spy swaps and many of the things that you've written about in world war ii that happened we don't think about china in general terms or we should tell us why we should partly because every business that enters into a partnership any kind of commercial undertaking in the people's republic will have a relationship whether they like it or not with the ministry of state security and the difficulty about looking at the mss is that they do intelligence in a very different way they don't pay many of their agents they don't have stations or residenturas under diplomatic cover overseas they run their agents in a very different kind of way using guangxi which is family obligation they'll go to uh ethnic chinese usually invite them back to the people's republic and then say that they've got an obligation to the chinese people so their recruitment methods are very different but they pose a serious threat bear in mind that the longest and the deepest penetration of the cia over 32 years by the leading cia china analyst was a man called larry wu taichin this was a chinese case it wasn't soviet it wasn't russian so when you're dealing with the chinese you're dealing with the government and the government is there to represent and to protect the uh the communist party of the people's republic of china it's not about the chinese people it's about the communist party and when you're dealing with these people you lose all proprietary information they will steal everything because they think they're entitled to do so and much of this much of this intelligence that china wants to gather as i understand it isn't so much about military equipment or government strategy important of course all that stuff i'm sure will be but much of it is what i think we term industrial espionage it's industrial espionage it's commercial secrets it's information shortcuts software all of that is very attractive to the ministry of state security which has a relationship with 300 university research centers in the people's republic so again when you think you're dealing with a legitimate company you're not you're dealing with mss when you're dealing with a university or a research center you're dealing with mss it's a very strange way of doing intelligence and from a western perspective is not legitimate their priorities are the uyghurs to the tibetan nationalists um the people who uh are involved in falun gong which is this really different culture entirely isn't it at every level it's like people who've never been to russia appointing themselves criminologists and pontificating about what's going on in the kremlin without the slightest idea and the same for china because it's so different the way they collect intelligence and the way that it's so fragmented and there are 750 000 students in north america who are chinese and all of them have a relationship whether they like it or not with ms this is what i was thinking about this i mean you know our boarding schools in this country our private boarding schools are filled with uh very high achieving academically high achieving chinese students we see universities like cambridge taking very large endowments from chinese organizations i mean is there a danger that this is a form of spying yes um it's it's cultural uh appropriation and it's commercial appropriation but it's done on an industrial scale by mss who very often will recruit people they pitch everybody instead of taking just one individual and concentrating on that individual they'll pitch 300 people and they don't take no for an answer they'll come back there was a case in new york uh where they had a sleeper for 21 years before they have they pitched him again and again and again and finally activated him so they do intelligence in a very different way so how it's difficult for us to understand how is it rupert how is it that so many senior figures in this country and across the west and i'm talking about former bosses of big companies i'm talking about former senior civil servants i'm talking um about many um in the political world um i noticed a link actually between those that were pro brussels who've now become pro china i genuinely do why did boris johnson think that huawei were fit to play quite a major role in our telecoms industry i i can't speak from what went through his mind but i think that it's fairly obvious that he took the view that they were there already and that we didn't have the capability in this country of being able to run any kind of an organization without chinese components and participation and if we'd gone to somebody else it would have been a foreigner it would have been probably two companies in finland who were potential um contenders for this yeah and the difficulty there is that they might have been taken over by a foreign country so uh you deal with the devil that you that you know and we do understand the chinese and they have not made an attempt to run the kind of political campaigns and political espionage that they did in the united states particularly during the clinton era when they got very badly burned in california yeah so what next for nigel west does he go on writing books about espionage happily the intelligence business is booming and i think there is another entire book to be written about uh intelligence failures and failures of strategy why didn't we keep bagram uh why that would have been i mean those hellish scenes outside kabul background would have been very different wouldn't it i disapprove of people sitting in armchairs telling the taliban what people are likely to do or you know just like in the falklands campaign do you remember the admirals who were always on television explaining to buenos aires exactly what the next step was going to be so yes i don't think that we should talk about um afghanistan too much except to say that it is a tragedy that we lost by graham it might have been possible to have an armored corridor it's what uh it's an hour and a half from kabul to bagram uh it would have been possible and to leave our future in the hands of joe biden and can i just remind you that when the director of central intelligence bob gates was undergoing his confirmation hearing he said that joe biden had been on the wrong side of every major foreign policy decision and it was joe biden by the way who prevented the cia from going after osama bin laden i've been asking the question all evening of our public is joe biden fit to be leader of the free world i think you've just answered the question haven't i think it's one of the great tragedies if we go back in history in 1956 during the series crisis that was a moment when the american ambassador was withdrawn from london it's the only time in our post-war history that that happened and yet during that period although the relationship between anthony eden and eisenhower and nixon who was running on a re-election campaign of peace and freedom the idea that this particular operation would compromise politics forever was nonsensical because all the joint intelligence committee meetings during the suez campaign even though there was frostiness from washington they were all attended by dan de la bardlian who was the cia station chief in london yeah and our attack on egypt and destroying the the air force on the morning of the attack on suez that was all provided based on intelligence provided by u2 aircraft flown by the cia from british bases yeah we need that right we need that relationship rupert that was rupert allison on talking pints we could have gone on for hours<br><!-- wp:image {"id":1776,"sizeSlug":"large","linkDestination":"none"} -->rn<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img class="wp-image-1776" src="https://en.videoencontexto.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Talking_pints_with_author_Rupert_Allason_AKA_Nigel_West_wcNLPTym7Pw.jpg" alt="Talking pints with author Rupert Allason AKA Nigel West" /></figure>rn<!-- /wp:image -->[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]