Speech by Sir Richard Moore, head of SIS, 19 July 2023

Sir Richard Moore, head of the Secret Intelligence Service, spoke about the current focus of the Service and the value of the “human factor” in the age of AI.

Good morning everyone, Your Excellencies, Ministers, ladies and gentlemen, I’m delighted to be in Prague and to be visiting such a close friend and ally of the United Kingdom.

In particular, I’m grateful to be joined today by my friends and colleagues in the Czech intelligence services with whom we have an outstanding partnership.

It was here in this beautiful capital, almost exactly 55 years ago, on the 18th July 1968, that Alexander Dubcek broadcast to the nation at a moment of supreme crisis.

Millions were daring to hope that the liberalising reforms of the Prague Spring would genuinely change what that great Czech Vaclav Havel would later call the “contaminated moral environment” of Communist rule.

Dubcek voiced that optimism by saying, and I quote:

“We shall finish the democratic process that we have begun….Today, after many years, people can come out openly without fear for their opinions.”

Those were fateful words, because we know what happened next: one month and two days later, columns of Russian tanks rolled through the streets around us, re-imposing by brute force another generation of oppression on the Czech people before they finally regained their freedom.

No-one described those years with greater skill or originality than the late Milan Kundera, a giant of European literature, whose passing we all mourn.

So any visiting British official should come to the Czech Republic in a spirit of humility, particularly when Russian tanks have, once again, invaded a European nation.

Our Czech friends know better than we British ever will the realities of dictatorship, and the bleak, pitiless mentality of conquest and domination that lay behind the tragedy of 1968 and drives Vladimir Putin today.