By Shaun Waterman

October 28, 2010

“Precisely because we are having some success in closing down the space for terrorist recruitment and planning in the U.K., the extremists are increasingly preparing their attacks against British targets from abroad,” John Sawers told newspaper editors in London. MI6 is also known as the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS.

The assessment appears to differ from that of U.S. intelligence and Department of Homeland Security officials who have highlighted the threat to the United States of so-called homegrown plots — hatched domestically by Americans or legal residents.

On Monday, for example, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said at a police conference in Florida that “the increased role of Westerners, including U.S. citizens” in terror plots meant that “a real turning point in how we approach our nation’s security” had been reached.

Mr. Sawers said al Qaeda is not restricted to the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The group’s affiliates in “Yemen, Somalia and North Africa pose real threats to the U.K.,” he said, highlighting the “propaganda and terrorist instruction in fluent English” broadcast over the Internet by Yemen-based al Qaeda-linked cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen.

“We need to be steady and stand by our friends” in the Islamic world, said Mr. Sawers, even those countries that practice repression against their own populations. And pressure on Western allies in the Middle East for democratic change might be counterproductive, he said.

“Over time, moving to a more open system of government in these countries … will help. But if we demand an abrupt move to the pluralism that we in the West enjoy, we may undermine the controls that are now in place and terrorists would end up with new opportunities.”

Mr. Sawers said that more than one-third of the secret SIS budget was spent on counterterrorism and that it was “the largest single area of SIS’ work.”

However, he added, “The dangers of proliferation of nuclear weapons — and chemical and biological weapons — are more far-reaching” than the threat of terrorism, and “the risks of failure in this area are grim.”

He said that “intelligence-led operations” to stop or delay Iran and other rogue nuclear states from building nuclear weapons helped create time and space for “a political solution to be found.”

Success in intelligence relies on partnerships, sometimes with undesirable individuals or governments.

“We can’t do our job if we work only with friendly democracies,” Mr. Sawers said.

Nonetheless, there were limits, and the practice of torture was a red line, he said, adding that his agency withheld information about terrorist suspects from other countries because they would be tortured if that information were shared.

“If we know or believe action by us will lead to torture taking place, we’re required by U.K. and international law to avoid that action,” he said. “And we do, even though that allows the terrorist activity to go ahead.”

To longtime observers of Britain’s secretive intelligence establishment, the speech, before a gathering of high-powered journalists and live TV cameras, was a watershed in MI6’s long history, Mr. Sawers acknowledged.

The existence of SIS, established in 1909, was not formally acknowledged by the British government until 1994. The identity of the agency’s director, referred to only as “C,” after the first holder of the post, Capt. George Mansfield Smith-Cunningham, remained a secret for many years — albeit an increasingly poorly kept one — and Thursday’s was the first public address by a serving head of the agency.

It follows a similar debut earlier this month by the head of the British electronic and signals intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters. On Oct. 12, the agency’s director, Iain Lobban, spoke to a defense think tank in London.

Mr. Sawers, in a departure from the usual public tone struck by senior intelligence officials in Britain and elsewhere who normally praise the bravery of their own national intelligence operatives, highlighted the importance and the courage of the foreigners that were recruited by his agency.

“We at SIS obtain our intelligence from secret agents,” he said. But lest there be any confusion with James Bond or other fictional agents, he added, “these people are nearly all foreign nationals.”

These foreign agents “are the true heroes of our work,” he said, “working today in some of the most dangerous and exposed places, bravely and to hugely valuable effect.”

“Many of them show extraordinary courage and idealism,” he added, “striving in their own countries for the freedoms that we in Britain take for granted.”