As Cold War Britain came under the terrifying shadow of nuclear destruction, secret government plans were underway to ensure the survival of a chosen few …

Peter Hennessy’s sensational book draws on recently declassified intelligence and war-planning documents, and interviews with key officials to reveal a chilling behind-the-scenes picture of the corridors of power when the world teetered on the brink of disaster. Who would have gone underground with the Prime Minister in the event of an attack? Where is this secret bunker? Under what circumstances would we retaliate? Where were the Soviet’s UK targets thought to be? Whose finger was – and is – on the button? And what kind of world would have been left when the had dust settled and ‘breakdown’ had occurred…?

A good part of the huge rethink about the vulnerability of the UK and the contingency planning needed to improve the country's resilience to serious terrorist attack which took place in Whitehall in the months following 11 September 2001 was led by veterans of the Cold War secret state. They were fascinating on two things: the lessons, skills and perceptions that could be transferred from their past experience during the great East-West confrontation; and the limits to those lessons in post-11 September circumstances. One of the senior defenders of the realm was given to quoting Sir Percy Cradock, the highly influential and respected former Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, on 'the hand that history has dealt us'. (What Sir Percy, in fact, said in a 1992 interview with me for the BBC Radio 4 Analysis programme about Britain's place in the early post-Cold War world was: 'We exercise disproportionate influence for a medium-rank power ... We come to the table with certain cards having been dealt and the skill in the game is making use of the cards and playing them as well, as forcefully, as cleverly as we can.')

Applying the Cradock test to the guardians of national security in the ten months after 11 September 2001 was intriguing and anxiety-inducing in equal measure. To take the chapter themes of this book in order - intelligence, vulnerability of the home base, bunkerdom and retaliation (I have removed strategic nuclear capability from the list though not lesser retaliation options, as I shall explain in a minute) -what are the similarities and the differences?

To take intelligence first, one of the professional deformations of the Cold War is no longer a problem. As Sir Michael Alexander, a former Ambassador to NATO (who had spent much of his professional life on Cold War politico-military matters) put it to me shortly before his death in 2002, the danger in dealing with the Soviet Union was that: 'You look through that dirty window into the future and . . . see your own reflection - that you assume the minds of the people you are trying to penetrate think as you do.' For much of the time, there was a good deal in this. As Alexander's friend and colleague. Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a former Ambassador to Moscow who became Chairman of the JIC, put it: 'Governments tend not to choose to commit suicide.' But, in the early 1980s, the 'seeing one's own reflection' in the intelligence effort against the Soviet Union became dangerously distorting.

It took the MI6 agent-in-place within the KGB, Oleg Gordievsky, to persuade Western leaders that (a) President Reagan's 'evil empire' rhetoric was seriously alarming to the Soviet leadership, (b) they had convinced themselves that the US Administration in the early 1980s was planning to launch a surprise and pre-emptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, and (c) KGB residencies were tasked to look for evidence of this ('such as the number of lights on at night in government offices [in Washington and London] and military installations, the movements of key personnel and meetings of committees.')

This third activity was Soviet Intelligence's equivalent of the JIC's 'Red' and 'Amber' lists. But Gordievsky warned his MI6 controllers in the early 1980s (and Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in person after the Secret Intelligence Service smuggled him out of Russia in 1985) that though the KGB professionals in their service's residencies in the West's capitals were very sceptical about 'Andropov's apocalyptic vision of the nuclear threat from the West', none of them 'was willing to put his career at risk', and they fed back 'alarming information' that they did not themselves believe to the Moscow Centre, which 'was duly alarmed by what they reported and demanded more'. As one senior British intelligence officer explained, MI6 and the British intelligence community heard about this and did not believe it at first. Equally, they discounted Soviet rhetoric about the new and menacing threat from Reagan's Washington as so much propaganda. But for Gordievsky, the reflection-in-the-window syndrome might have continued with the ever-greater anxiety levels building up in Moscow unrecognized and unappreciated.

This, however, is not a problem now with the current 'first order' priority target of British Intelligence. Not only is the Al Qaeda phenomenon in all its forms utterly different from the old Soviet Union, with its huge state apparatus and military and intelligence infrastructures: Al Qaeda's thought processes cannot be mistaken for those in the West who seek both to understand and counteract it. And the old intentions/capabilities problem is reversed. Al Qaeda's overall intentions are plain enough. Its capabilities are far harder to divine and here, like its counterparts in the United States, British Intelligence was taken by surprise in September 2001.

A JIC assessment circulated in July 2001 indicated that terrorist attacks organized by Osama Bin Laden and those around him in Afghanistan 'were in their final stages of preparation', that American or Israeli targets were at greatest risk ahead of UK ones, but that British interests were in jeopardy possibly from 'collateral damage' to assaults on US targets. In fact, the JIC believed that the Americans were far and away the most likely target through attacks on their facilities and interests in the Middle East and the Gulf (rather than the USA itself). Britain's secret agencies told ministers that Osama Bin
Laden was 'a notably hard target' to penetrate and that collecting intelligence on him was a 'pressing need'. The JIC warned its customers that 'plans for attacks were in their final stages but that the timings, targets and methods of attack were not known'. On the basis of their knowledge of that JIC assessment and of oral evidence given them by the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, the Parliamentary oversight Intelligence and Security Committee concluded 'with hindsight, that the scale of the threat and the vulnerability of Western states to terrorists with this degree of sophistication and a total disregard for their own lives was not understood'.

So how 'hard' a target was Bin Laden and his entourage and were there any comparisons with the world of those tasked to penetrate the inner Soviet leadership during the Cold War? (Though it would be wrong to assume all this stopped in 1991; it is quite plain, for example, that though MI6 doubled the share of its resources going to counter-terrorism after 11 September, the 'Former Soviet Union' still attracted the attention of a proportion of its best officers, the same applying to GCHQ.) The former US intelligence analyst, political scientist and historian of deterrence, Philip Bobbit, claimed in the spring of 2002 in his much-discussed book, The Shield of Achilles, that Al Qaeda was 'a kind of virtual state' possessing, as non-virtual states do, 'a standing army; it has a treasury and a consistent source of revenue; it has a permanent civil service; it has an intelligence collection and analysis cadre; it even runs a rudimentary welfare program for its fighters, and their relatives and associates. It has a recognizable hierarchy of officials; it makes alliances with other states; it promulgates laws, which it enforces ruthlessly; it declares wars.'

British intelligence, which, unlike its American counterparts, has long experience of dealing with terrorism thanks to the protracted and grim task of confronting the consequences of the Northern Ireland problem, does not see it in Bobbit-like terms (though his book had an impact in London when it was published). A particularly well-placed and thoughtful Whitehall intelligence figure pointed out that:

We've faced terrorism in various forms for quite a while. It has always contained an element of unpredictability. But we are dealing here with a very adventurous and ambitious form of terrorism. It's very difficult to impose a structure on the opponent. Bobbit is overdoing it to see Al Qaeda as a 'virtual state'. Though there's a lot we don't know and we are learning all the time.

The special shock of 11 September, for those whose job it had been to watch Al Qaeda for several years already, was partly the degree of ruthlessness and operational sophistication that lay behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - but only partly. Bin Laden's earlier attacks on US embassies in Africa had also been simultaneous and meticulously planned. But the assault on the Twin Towers 'opened up whole swathes of vulnerability' within the UK that led to the serious rethink about what the Cold War generation called Home Defence.

‘Riveting … an often terrifying account’ 
Observer

‘The insider’s insider, if ever there was one’ 
Anthony Howard, New Statesman

‘Hennessy has discovered a few things about the “Secret State” which even British Prime Ministers during the Cold War did not know … Riveting, path-breaking and wonderfully readable’ 
Christopher Andrew, The Times

‘Effective and vivid … One of the fascinations of this book is the bureaucratic aridity to which Whitehall reduced concepts of bloodcurdling awfulness’ 
Philip Ziegler, Daily Telegraph

‘Excellent … rich and illuminating … with fears that a rogue nation might now have the capacity and the desire to attack Britain, Prof Hennessy has unwittingly produced a work that, sadly, may be of more than purely historic or academic interest’ 
Simon Heffer, Country Life

‘A detailed and disturbing account of how our masters proposed to protect us from the dangers of communism and nuclear war’ 
BBC History Magazine

‘One of the many qualities of Professor Hennessy’s fascinating new history of Whitehall and the Cold war is that it never underestimates the depth of fear that existed among those in the know … charts that neatly tot up the likely number of British deaths in an atomic war still retain the capacity to shock’ 
Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

‘A mind-boggling tale’ 
Glasgow Herald

‘Hennessy shows that those responsible were not in the grip of the paranoid fantasies often assumed to be the hallmark of the cold warrior … few can match him when it comes to recreating the cast of mind and the thought patterns of the old establishment’ 
Lawrence Freedman, Evening Standard

‘A valuable guide to our knowledge of Cold-War intelligence’ 
John Crossland, Sunday Times

‘Peter Hennessy has built a fine reputation as an explorer of the darker corridors of Whitehall … We should be grateful that Hennessy continues to mine the Whitehall seam that he has made his own, and look forward to his next delivery from the coalface of British government’ 
Max Hastings, Sunday Telegraph

Here, Peter Hennessy, Professor of Contemporary History at Queen Mary and Westfield College, talks to Penguin.co.uk about all things political, the secret state and the Queen's drill for the end of the world.

You have previously been given the honour of giving the Penguin lectures. Why did you choose the subject of Secret State, Whitehall and the Cold War?
Come back with me to the early nineties; the Cold War has been over a couple of years and William Waldegrave, a very scholarly politician, is Minister For Open Government. I said to him, could we not have the intelligence assessments that the joint inelegance (sic) committee produce which analyses the Soviet threat? When they came out William Waldegrave said 'If you and your historian colleagues would like to ask me for more I'll have it looked at', so we got together twice, and we gave him shopping lists. Then, the departmental record offices from Whitehall came, and there was this wonderfully fruitful symbiosis.

As a result of the Waldegrave initiative, as it's called, there's a hundred thousand files that have been re-reviewed and declassified. Some of them had amazing sensitivity, featuring the intelligence world, the security vetting world, the bomb and the letting off of the bomb; there's never been a better time to be a contemporary British historian. That's why I wanted to write this book, The Secret State, which covers the span of the declassifications - this amazing treasure-trove of very revealing documents should go wider. It's a terrifying story on one level, when you get deeply immersed in war drills it can get fatally depressing, but then you have to say it didn't happen, it's alright, and you feel immensely cheerful.

We've still a long way to go but we can now, for the first time, piece together what the extra state we had to build to fight the Cold War looked like. It was literally a new state bolted under the existing one. Large numbers of really gifted people had to deploy their best working years on this, watching it, planning it, and looking at the nightmare possibilities. If there were a nuclear attack, at what point would society break down irretrievably, how could you keep a microcosm of government going, where would the war cabinet go?

I've been let into virtually all of the World War III bunkers underneath the Cotswolds and have some lovely pictures, which will be displayed in the lectures. It was an extraordinary experience. When you go down into that bunker in the Cotswolds you find the nuclear biological chemical warfare room. There are little discs and on them the squaddies had stencilled 'Gas, Bio or Atom'; they were to go into slots to inform the people in 'Turnstile', as it was code- named, that the world had gone up above. That's when it comes home to you; you need something as mundane as that. It is going to be very difficult for generations down the line to 'get' what it was like when you wondered if war come, what would it be like?, who would survive?, what the civil defence was? - the answer is actually bugger all.

Has any episode or file particularly intrigued you?
Yes. As late as 1965, 17 years after the Berlin airlift, nearly three years after the Cuban missile crisis, a new chap, a naval officer in the Cabinet Office is going to have to perform the transition to war job; the planning of it, keeping it all up to speed. He's reading his way in and he realises the Queen has never been fully told about the drill for the end of her kingdom. Would she like to know? Yes indeed, she would, came back the word. He was told to keep it short, a little summary for the Queen from the government war book, which is still not declassified. I was allowed in to see one of the background files on this, not the government war book itself, and I was warned that some sensitive stuff had to be removed. What was removed was the summary for Her Majesty the Queen of the end of her kingdom and the world. But, there is a god in the archives. I was in there with one of my students with sharp eyes, and packed in amongst pretty boring letters was a little scrap of paper, and therein a biro with pencil overlays and corrections, this navy man has done his first draft of that paper that was sent to the Queen about the end of her world and our world, and they'd left it in by mistake - because it is so small and scruffy and so tightly packed between boring letters they'd over looked it. So, we've got the Queen's drill for the end of the world. Essentially The Secret State is the kind of short history that would have been written on the inside. If the Queen had asked in 1965 for a historical explanation of what that little bit of paper meant, right to the last bit, 'Operation Visitation', which is the code name for letting it off, the end of the world, my little book is the sort of thing that they would have produced.

Can you tell us a little bit about the Shellmex building [where Penguin is based] and its part in the Cold War?
There was a time when it housed the most secret bit of the secret state. In World War II, and for a while after, it was the Ministry of Supply. The Ministry of Supply looked after weaponry and was the lead department in making the first British atomic bomb, from January 1947, when a cabinet committee which Mr Atlee chaired decided to make one, right through to 1952 when it was tested off the Australian coast - it was all run from the Shellmex building.