Charles Farr aims to become head of the GCHQ

You will not see a photograph of Charles Farr on his profile page on the Home Office website. The director of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) was appointed to his post in 2007, the profile reveals, and had previously "served at British embassies" before taking on a number of senior Whitehall positions "dealing with security and counter-terrorism".
But there are no details of his education or wider biography, and where a photograph might appear there is only a grey, faceless avatar.

This is not because we don't know what Farr looks like. Sandy-haired and balding, he wears his hair with a floppy fringe that can give him a foppish air, and sports invisible-rimmed spectacles that once led Keith Vaz, chair of the home affairs select committee, to describe him in one of his appearances before the panel as resembling "a grown-up Harry Potter".

But though Farr has been at the heart of government anti-terrorism strategy for seven years, and is the architect of some of the most controversial policy initiatives of the last two governments, this most secretive of Whitehall mandarins would much prefer to carry out his work far from the public gaze. Even on internal staff charts, on which others are pictured, say insiders, his face is blacked out.

Farr will face a great deal more attention if he finds himself in a new job in the coming weeks, all the same. He is one of three people shortlisted to take over the directorship of GCHQ, the Financial Times reported last week, a critical appointment after Edward Snowden's revelations of mass internet and telecoms interception by the government's surveillance HQ.

While the agency insists the departure of the current director, Sir Iain Lobban, has been long-planned, it is striking that none of the three men shortlisted is a Cheltenham insider. One, a serving intelligence officer, has not been named; the third candidate is Robert Hannigan, the director-general of defence and intelligence at the Foreign Office.
"Historically, appointing an outsider to GCHQ tends to be interpreted as criticism," says Richard Aldrich, professor of international security at the University of Warwick. "It's rarely done with agency heads, one can count the instances when it has happened on the fingers of one hand  … There will be a substantial number at GCHQ who will interpret it [as a criticism]."

If going outside would raise eyebrows enough, appointing Farr would be read as Whitehall trying to get a grip on the agency by placing its man at the helm, according to security analysts. Since he was brought into the Home Office from MI6 by John Reid in the aftermath of the 2006 airline bomb plot, the spy turned bureaucrat has centralised command of the UK's anti-terrorism strategies in a way that his supporters say was timely and necessary, but which profoundly troubles some of his critics.

Even if you do not know Charles Farr's name, you will be familiar with his handiwork. Under the previous Labour government, Farr played a crucial role pushing for the 90-day and then 42-day detention limits, along with what was then known as the "interception modernisation project", which morphed, under the coalition, into the communications data bill.
He was a key figure behind the operation of control orders and their successors, Tpims, and was in overall charge of security during the Olympics, handing air traffic control over London to the military during the Games and siting missiles on east London residential rooftops.
The OSCT, the hundreds-strong agency that he runs within the Home Office, leads the Prevent strategy, which seeks to counter Muslim radicalisation. David Cameron's new focus on the Muslim Brotherhood in Britain will almost certainly include close input from Farr and his team.

The problem for some is that Farr is not a politician, answerable to parliament, and is certainly not a conventional civil servant. Instead, critics say, he has never stopped acting like a spy.
The man who should be assessing recommendations from the security services and offering advice to policymakers, they say, behaves instead like MI6's man in government, driving forward policies that suit his hawkish agenda.

For a long time, Farr resisted giving evidence before MPs in public, until compelled to do so by the home affairs select committee. One critical close observer describes his position as "unaccountable and highly dangerous""This is the sort of stuff they make TV dramas about," the source says. "Someone who doesn't get hauled over the coals at parliamentary committees, doesn't get called to account on TV news, but is pulling all sorts of strings."
Others are more relaxed about the democratic mechanisms doing their job, however, pointing out that Farr has suffered as many defeats – on detention limits and the snoopers' charter, for instance – as victories, and suggesting the G4S Olympic security debacle shows he is far from all-powerful.
Who is Charles Farr? As befits his previous employment status, there is a great deal we do not know. Now in his mid-50s, he was educated at Monkton Combe, a private boys' school in Somerset, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he stayed on for a PhD – unusually for a spy, not in mathematics or languages but the philosophy of aesthetics.

He joined MI6 in the 1980s, working in southern Africa and the Middle East, but attracting the particular attention of his superiors, one contemporary told the Sunday Times in 2012, "flying around Afghanistan in a helicopter with thousands of dollars in bundles, doing deals with farmers to not grow opium".
He had risen to be the agency's director of security and public affairs when Reid, Tony Blair's final home secretary, came calling. By the summer of 2007, Farr had consolidated the government's counter-terrorism operation into the OSCT, based in the Home Office with 160 staff – a number that has since increased.
He is, says everyone who has worked with him, in possession of an intimidating intellect – and is not afraid to use it to that effect. "When you are in the presence of someone who has a really big brain like that, you notice," says Aldrich.

Patrick Mercer, the former Tory MP who chaired the Commons sub-committee on counter-terrorism shortly after Farr's appointment, is an open admirer of his "competence and leadership", but describes him as having a ruthless streak.
"There were obviously a number of government departments that resented the setting up of OSCT and the losing of certain assets and departments to it. I know he pushed those through ruthlessly. He's an operator," he said.

"Charles is not just an effective operator in the field, he is one of the most committed civil servants you will come across," says Charlie Edwards, director of national security and resilience at the Royal United Services Institute. "Yes, he is robust, but first and foremost he is fair and most importantly he gets the job done."
One well-placed observer adds: "He is very unused to being challenged or having to defend himself, so he often implicitly takes the attitude that people should just listen to him because he is right."
Some say they have encountered a temper. Asked to comment on her dealings with Farr, Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, emailed a short statement: "An irritant to six democratically elected secretaries of state, I was generally treated with courtesy and even kindness in their company. By contrast Mr Farr is the only person ever to shout at me in the Home Office. I prefer awesome power to be wielded by humbler hands and officials to be both civil and servants."

He will not be the first Whitehall mandarin in possession of a brusque manner, but in Farr's case it may have already hampered his career. He was overlooked for the top job at MI6, his old service, and also failed to win promotion to the permanent secretaryship at the Home Office.
According to one well-informed source, a number of officials at the department threatened to resign if Farr were promoted to the top job, and some suggest a nervousness about his manner could also scupper his appointment to lead the 6,000-strong team at GCHQ.
Complicating matters further is the anti-terrorism chief's private life, after the obsessively private former spy was revealed by the Mail on Sunday in 2012 to be having a relationship with Theresa May's special adviser Fiona Cunningham ("If the person who is giving the advice is also sleeping with the person who is supposed to be judging that advice, then that is rather alarming," noted one observer).
The key question is what kind of director Farr would make at GCHQ. In the judgment of one former senior MI6 officer, "he would be terrific, because he knows about the operational requirements of GCHQ now.
Whether he would be politically acceptable is a different matter."

A man who shuns the public eye would also have to come to terms with a new degree of scrutiny.
"Clearly one of the challenges is going to be the fact that the agency is likely to see the drip drip drip of further Snowden revelations in future," notes Edwards. "The new director of GCHQ will take on the role knowing that they will no longer be behind the veil of secrecy that perhaps they once were.
"They will be committed to supporting Whitehall and ministers, and ensuring that when the next Snowden revelation comes out, there is a response to that. That feels like it is going to be a permanent challenge."
Filling the top post at GCHQ – which commands the lion's share of the UK's vast security budget, to the extent that MI5 and MI6 are routinely referred to as "the tiddlers" – is clearly a big choice, notes Aldrich, but "whether the job is big enough for [Farr] is the question. OSCT is a big job, it's bigger than being a chief of one of the agencies. Would he regard GCHQ as a promotion?"
He does have quite a lot of influence where he is, after all.


Potted profile
Age Mid-50s

Career Joined diplomatic service in 1985. Served at British embassies in South Africa and Jordan, before beginning a series of senior posts in Whitehall dealing with security and counter-terrorism.

High point Made director-general of Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism in July 2007.

Low point Did not get the top job at MI6 and apparently Farr was passed over for role of permanent secretary at the Home Office last year.
What he says "At a time when our law enforcement and security agencies are facing new challenges in dealing with multiple terrorist threats, exposure of their methods and techniques has made their task much harder." -
Referring to Edward Snowden's disclosures, during his annual report published last week.

What they say "… Mr Farr is the only person ever to shout at me in the Home Office. I prefer awesome power to be wielded by humbler hands and officials to be both civil and servants." Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty.