Coincidentally with my appointment as Cabinet Secretary in 1987, Michael Herman retired from GCHQ and took up a research fellowship at Nuffield College Oxford.

This marked a transition from Michael's active involvement in intelligence work – in addition to his career at GCHQ he had served in the Cabinet Office as Secretary of the Joint Intelligence Committee and in the Defence Intelligence Staff – to academic research into the organisation and use of intelligence. A product of this research was his highly praised book Intelligence Power in Peace and War and he has subsequently authored many other papers on aspects of intelligence, some of which are published in this book for the first time.

Michael was also the founding director of the Oxford Intelligence Group, which brought together practitioners and academics to discuss intelligence matters. My post as Cabinet Secretary carried with it at that time the chairmanship of the Permanent Secretaries’ Committee on the Intelligence Services and responsibility as Accounting Officer for Government Expenditure on the Secret Vote. In that role I attended and benefited from several events organised by Michael and the Oxford Intelligence Group.

After I retired from the Cabinet Office in 1998 my next involvement with Michael was when he gave very valuable evidence to the Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, which I chaired in 2004 following the apparent failure of British intelligence on Iraqi WMD in the lead-up to the Second Gulf War. Michael had published his recommendations for the future of the British system of intelligence in 1997 and this was a key issue in our review. Michael's evidence on the role of assessment and the constitution and functioning of the Joint Intelligence Committee played a key part in our review's recommendations, particularly on the development of appropriate training. A transcript of his oral evidence to the committee is published for the first time in this volume.

Michael's career at GCHQ and his subsequent interests have concentrated on the organisation and management of the use of intelligence rather than on the technicalities of collection and decryption. As my 2004 review showed, intelligence, however good, is only as valuable as the way in which it is used.