Diversity is not a diversion —
it’s the West’s secret weapon
to combat Putin’s groupthink
Joe Biden’s
supporters
play down his
mis-steps, but
the president’s
latest approval
rating stands at
40 per cent. The
vice-president,
Kamala Harris, is
even less popularThe Sunday Times April 3, 2022 17
Biden has been able to rely on his compe-
tent foreign affairs team, led by Antony
Blinken, the secretary of state, and Jake
Sullivan, the national security adviser, to
do a lot of the heavy lifting. Senior offi-
cials in London and Paris now often look
to Sullivan in particular for direction.
But at a moment of intense interna-
tional crisis, America and the world need
to hear directly from the president. As
with the withdrawal from Afghanistan,
this is a problem for Biden and is
reflected in polling. A recent survey by
Ipsos found that only 36 per cent of
Americans say Biden is doing a good job
in response to the war in Ukraine, while
52 per cent say he is not.
The irony is that Biden can make a fair
case for having had a decent war so far,
one generally defined by firm caution,
not the reckless militarism expressed in
his gaffes. America has rallied the west-
ern alliance to some effect. Serious sanc-
tions have been imposed, arms have
flowed into Ukraine and nimble intelli-
gence work by the US and its British allies
— releasing much of their knowledge
about Putin’s intentions — has helped to
neutralise Russia’s information war
strategy.
“I would give Biden quite high marks
for his handling of this crisis,” said
Charles Kupchan, a former senior adviser
on European affairs in the Obama admin-
istration. “The intensity of diplomacy has
been impressive and appropriate. For
now at least, Biden has found the sweet
spot between helping Ukraine and not
leading America into World War Three.”
But whatever his achievements, Amer-
ica is simply not sold on its error-prone
commander-in-chief, who is increasingly
looking his age. “At this point, I think
Trump is more likely to be the Republi-
can nominee than Biden is to be the Dem-
ocratic nominee,” Lowry said. “This
Ukraine crisis would age a 45-year-old.
What’s it doing to Biden?”
The second problem the Democrats
have is that Kamala Harris, the vice-
president, herself a far from compelling
public speaker, is even less popular than
her boss, with a favourability rating of
37.3 per cent, according to the Real Clear
Politics average.
This is considerably lower than
Trump, 75, who is at 45 per cent and still
contemplating another crack at the
presidency.
If Biden doesn’t run again, then the
unpopular Harris is likely to face a pri-
mary challenge, meaning all hell will
break loose. There’s no obvious replace-
ment waiting in the wings. Pete Buttigieg,
the glossy transport secretary, attracts
plenty of press attention but has few fans
among the Democrats’ crucial African-
American voting bloc.
Other names being bandied around
are Stacey Abrams, the powerhouse
activist from Georgia, Elizabeth Warren,
the tough-on-Wall-Street senator from
Massachusetts, or even Hillary Clinton.
The fact that betting websites are taking
money on the Duchess of Sussex demon-
strates just how wide open the field is.
Democrats will struggle to move Harris
aside, particularly given her symbolic
power as the first woman of colour to
become vice-president. But few are con-
vinced by her presidential qualities.
“You either have that charismatic X
factor that makes people like you, or you
don’t,” Lowry said. “There’s zero
evidence that Harris does, which puts
Democrats in a real bind. You’d rather be
where Republicans are, I think — even
with Trump.”Vladimir Putin
and, far left,
Sergei Shoigu,
his defence
minister, in 2014
as Russia moved
into Crimea.
GCHQ operatives
spend a lot of
time “putting
ourselves into
the minds of our
adversaries”been. On a grey street on the
northern outskirts of Kyiv,
Natalia Sugakova, 67,
plodded towards a rundown
apartment block, ignoring
the loud bangs from artillery
on the front line 12 miles
away. “I’ve heard worse,” she
shrugged. “I’m busy working.
I can’t get distracted by
noises. I’ll do the job and
then I’ll think about the noise
later.”
Her job, she said, provided
a vital role in wartime,
particularly to older people
without families. “People hug
me and they act like they
haven’t seen me for a long
time. They’re very happy to
see me,” she said.
As another boom sounded,
she walked into the stairwell
of the apartment building and
took the lift up two floors.
Lyudmila, 58, who lives with
her 90-year-old disabled
father, was waiting at the top,
shivering in a thin cardigan.
Sugakova had brought
them extra assistance money
from the government — about
£75. For Lyudmila and her
father, it meant the difference
between eating and going
hungry.
“I’m so thankful to her for
delivering this money, for
doing this job,” Lyudmila said
in a choked voice, hugging
Sugakova. “We don’t have
any other visitors here.”
@LouiseElisabet
Additional reporting: Anna
Mosinianfor a letter within Ukraine still
costs the equivalent of 75p to
£1, with delivery taking three
to ten days. From Kyiv to
London is about £5 for a
similar delivery timescale.
As well as keeping the
economy alive, the
maintenance of the postal
service, Smilyansky said,
provided a dose of stability.
“If people see that the post
is working, they can order
packages on the internet,” he
said. “They can order trees to
plant, they can order seeds. I
think it’s important to
maintain that: even small
pieces of normal life.”
Russia, clearly, sees this as
a threat. Early in the conflict,
Smilyansky said, someone
emailed thousands of people
across Ukraine falsely
claiming that Ukrposhta
would be taken over by the
Russian postal networks.
Yet it manifestly has notThey are
walking
secret
forest
pathssleep before checking the
safety conditions for the
morning’s deliveries. He does
not publicise his
whereabouts because he has
been told by security services
that he is a Russian target.
“I could have left, but it’s
my country,” he said. “I have
65,000 employees and
millions of clients. And my
decisions impact their lives,
in some respects whether
they live or die, and in many
respects how they maintain
their families.”
His staff have gone to
extraordinary lengths to keep
the postal service working.
They have walked secret
paths through forests, guided
by local leaders, to take
pensions, humanitarian aid
and post to people living in
areas under Russian
occupation. Last week they
put on bulletproof vests and
helmets to go to the eastern
town of Severodonetsk,
which lies right by the front
lines and has been shelled
relentlessly.
Some have paid with their
lives. Last month Russian
troops attacked a delivery van
in the eastern Zaporizhzhia
region, killing two young
Ukrposhta employees.
Some areas remain
impassable. In Mariupol,
large parts of which have
been almost levelled,
deliveries stopped after the
first few days of war.
Elsewhere, first-class postageDodging gunfire, Ukraine’s postwomen keep delivering hope (and cash)
Postal worker Natalia
Kuhta walks past bomb
craters and destruction
on her rounds in Kyivservice for which Kuhta
works, said that despite the
enormous challenges it had
delivered 85 per cent of the
country’s pensions since the
war started. Some were even
smuggled, at huge risk, to
Ukrainian territories
occupied by Russia.
Behind the postwomen
and men is a logistical
machine that, the moment
the Russian bombs started
falling, set about adapting to
work in wartime. Igor
Smilyansky, the general
director of Ukrposhta, said its
offices closed for only the first
day of the war, February 24.
By the next morning they had
reopened and deliveries
resumed a few days later.
Since then pensions have
been delivered to three
million people, along with
food and humanitarian aid.
“We understood that if we
don’t deliver the pensions,
these people will be without
means to survive,”
Smilyansky said.
Ukrposhta has also battled
to keep Ukrainian exports
going — re-routing them from
a logistics hub in Kyiv to Lviv
in the west, from where they
are taken to Poland and flown
onwards — to try to help
Ukrainian businesses survive.
Since the war began,
Smilyansky, 46, has taken to
working almost the entire
night, arranging deliveries
and talking to his colleagues,
then catching a few hours’Natalia Kuhta was getting
ready to go out on her postal
round when a Russian shell
hit a street corner 600ft away.
It turned the stretch of road
she was about to walk down
into a snarl of blackened
metal, gouged asphalt and
splintered wood.
But once the 58-year-old
grandmother realised the
post office hadn’t been hit she
picked up her bag and went
out as usual, walking past the
gaping wreck of a bus,
crunching over glass from
blown-out windows.
“I thought, ‘That was
scary’,” she said last week, a
fortnight after the shell hit,
when I accompanied her on
her round in northern Kyiv.
Loud booms from fighting on
the city’s outskirts sounded
every few minutes. “But then
I thought that since it hit this
area once, maybe it wouldn’t
hit twice. So I’d better go and
deliver the pensions.”
Kuhta is one of more than
50,000 postal workers, most
of them women, who are
risking their lives to deliver
letters, parcels and pensions
— which are often distributed
in cash — to people across the
country.
Though large areas of cities
have been destroyed in
Russian attacks, the posties
continue to walk along
bombed-out streets and
through darkened apartment
blocks, negotiating
checkpoints to reach the
most vulnerable.
“Some of the pensioners
don’t have anyone except for
me,” Kuhta said. “That’s the
only support they have
sometimes.”
One older woman, she
said, had given her an entire
frozen duck — an
unbelievable extravagance —
as thanks. “Maybe she didn’t
have enough for herself. But
she still shared with me,”
Kuhta said.
Since the war began more
than four million people have
fled Ukraine and 6.5 million
have been internally
displaced — about a quarter of
the population. Yet some
people, particularly among
the older generations, are
unwilling to leave their
homes, or too infirm or poor
to do so.
Ukrposhta, the state postalLouise Callaghan Kyiv
Post
offices
closed
for only
one dayJOHN BECK‘D
iversity is one of the
greatest strengths of the
West.” This was the
message of Sir Jeremy
Fleming, head of GCHQ,
an intelligence agency
built upon what he calls
“the right mix of minds”.
During a day at the famous doughnut in
Cheltenham last week, spending time
with the heads of the Russia, China and
cybersecurity sections, as well as some
of its most talented young analysts, I
could see what he meant. This is an
organisation where diversity is about
finding — and using — the intellectual
cutting edge to access, analyse and
disrupt the communications of the UK’s
most feared adversaries.
“This isn’t just a soundbite,” Fleming
said in a meeting room adjacent to his
office on the first floor of the top-secret
compound. “The history of Bletchley
Park [an early incarnation of GCHQ] was
about bringing together diverse people
to meet the toughest intellectual
challenges. It is impossible to solve
complex problems when you have one
mind, or one perspective, or one point
of view. This is why Russia is failing in
Ukraine. Vladimir Putin was certain he
would capture the capital in days, he
was confident the Ukrainian people
would yield and he grossly
underestimated the West’s response.
“This war is by no means over, but
those miscalculations could be blamed
on blind spots caused by group-think
and the values that underpin the
controlling nature of his leadership,” he
added. “His handful of advisers are too
afraid to tell him the truth. The regime
has built a house of cards on a
foundation of lies to keep the Russian
people in check and from challenging
Putin. And those values are a key point
of difference between us and autocratic
regimes.
“Diversity of thought and speaking
truth to power are some of our greatest
strengths – not just in GCHQ but as a
western coalition. It helps us to refine
our decision-making, challenge our
assumptions and – from an intelligence
perspective – use the truth to counter
disinformation.”
As I walked around the building,
meeting analysts from different races
and backgrounds, Fleming’s point
struck me with particular force. I met
Amina (not her real name), a
twentysomething of Bangladeshi
heritage who went to a “normal
university — definitely not Oxbridge”,
and who has made huge strides since
joining GCHQ. “I’m eager to be a quick
learner,” she said. “I suppose nothing
feels impossible... which is one of the
coolest parts of working here.”
Is it difficult to work alongside people
with different backgrounds and ideas?
Doesn’t it lead to antagonism when your
perspective is challenged? “We do it
quite well,” she said. “There are various
rules that you play by. One of those is
‘assume noble intent’. So when
somebody is challenging you, youWe see
patterns
others
might
missassume that they’re not challenging you
for the sake of it. This is really healthy.
Because when we’re making decisions
about difficult things, it’s important that
you’re willing to listen and to know what
they’re actually saying. That is how you
get to solutions more quickly.”
Later I spent time with Charlotte, who
is dyslexic and whose talents were
welcomed by GCHQ. She handed me a
cognitive test given to new recruits.
Using a dossier of information, phone
records and biographies of suspected
spies, I was supposed to identify the
agents. As I laboriously worked through
the documents in alphabetical order,
Charlotte solved it in five minutes flat.
“Don’t worry,” she said with a smile.
“The point of recruiting people from
different backgrounds — including
neurodiverse backgrounds, like me
— is that we see patterns that others
might miss.” In this case, idiosyncratic
“tells” in the phone numbers.
“Collectively, we are more than the
sum of our parts.”
One of the most fascinating things for
an outsider at GCHQ is the juxtaposition
of surrealism and normality. To get in
(which is rarely permitted), you have to
go through a number of security barriers
and surrender mobile phones and
laptops. You are constantly man-marked
by an official. Yet this is a place of work.
Staff may be under instructions to
conceal what they do from friends and
family, but while in the building, it is
critical to exchange information quickly
and efficiently. I noted intense
conversations taking place in the
corridors, cafés and the lovely courtyard
(the hole in the doughnut).
There is also a visceral awareness of
the importance of the work. The head of
the China section, who can’t be named,
pointed out that the future of democracy
cannot be taken for granted in the great
power struggle that is set to dominate
the coming century. One of GCHQ’s
leading Russia analysts made the same
point, though he noted the shifting
global alliances and the need to
understand their dynamics to come up
with countermeasures. “We spend a lot
of time putting ourselves into the minds
of our adversaries,” he said. “That is the
only way to anticipate threats.”
There is also a rapidly evolving
approach to cybersecurity. Paul
Maddinson, a director at GCHQ’s
National Cyber Security Centre, said themain dangers come from Russia, China,
North Korea and Iran. “They put a lot of
resources into it. The problem isn’t the
Hollywood example, where a hacker
presses a button and something
catastrophic happens. It doesn’t work
like that. The biggest damage is years
and years of cyber-espionage, stealing
intellectual property, which undermines
our ability to stay ahead in science.
“The other strategic intent is to
influence the broader political
landscape. The 2016 hack of the
Democratic Party in the US and the
subsequent release of information
during the election is a very clear
example of that.”
One of the most exciting moments of
the day was being handed the personal
diary of Alastair Denniston, the first
director of GCHQ, who assembled the
team that cracked the Enigma code. It
chronicles the early stages of the Second
World War, Pearl Harbor and other
landmarks. Even back then, this was a
group fizzing with diversity:
mathematicians (such as Alan Turing),
linguists, cultural historians; more than
half the staff were women. They also
recruited a brilliant crossword-solver
called Stanley Sedgwick, aware that he
could make unusual leaps of logic.
“Denniston was a visionary leader,” said
David Abrutat, GCHQ’s resident
historian, a former military man now in
a wheelchair after a motor accident.
“The culture reaches back to him.”
As I left the building, two thoughts
struck me. The first is the shallowness of
the contemporary debate over diversity.
GCHQ has grasped that it is a
tremendous strength provided people
share a sense of mission. The second is a
sense of gratitude that this eclectic
group, representing the best of modern
Britain, is working so hard on our behalf.
“We’re all here for one thing,” Amina
said. “And that is to protect the UK.
Nobody’s out for themselves. Nobody’s
out to be the champion because... if you
do well, the only people that can pat you
on the back are the people who work
here. You can’t go home and tell anyone
about it.”ST DIGITAL
Stories of our Times: Inside GCHQ.
Matthew Syed talks to its director,
Sir Jeremy Fleming
Go to sundaytimes.co.uk
MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/AFP/GETTY IMAGESWith GCHQ solving
problems using staff
from all backgrounds,
Matthew Syed goes into
the famous ‘doughnut’ILLUSTRATION: JAMES COWEN