Sir John Sawers: US spies 'got so obsessed' with right answer they resorted to torture Sir John, who is paid £170,000 a year, said: "There's always a danger that, as a bunch of secret squirrels, you can get involved in something that takes you down a pathway where you end up in the wrong place. The Americans have done that over their interrogation techniques after 9/11. They got so obsessed with getting a right answer that they drifted into an area that kind of amounted to torture. We've never been there, we've never been involved in that, and I think our accountability, our disciplines, have helped us keep on the right side of these lines. It's not always been easy. There are investigations gong on about things which are close to the line. In January, Justice Secretary Ken Clarke said Scotland Yard detectives had taken three years to decide there was insufficient evidence to bring charges in relation to claims by Guantánamo Bay detainees. The Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan police said they would look into claims that MI5 and MI6 were involved in the secret rendition of two Libyans back to Muammar Gaddafi's regime in 2004. Sir John told an audience of senior civil servants at Civil Service Live, an event in Olympia, west London, it was important "to address the genuine challenges about the legality of the work we were doing immediately after 9/11." He added: "Countries were facing a huge new threat and all our people were out there trying to deal with that, but were they as well-prepared as they should have been? There are one or two chilling cases that are involved in a criminal investigation. We have to front up and say "yeah okay the police think this is sufficiently serious for them to investigate it and we have to co-operate 100 per cent."" Sir John also commented on the death in 2010 of Gareth Williams, the GCHQ official whose body was found in a holdall in the bath of his flat in London when he was on secondment to MI6 at its Vauxhall headquarters. In comments reported by Civil Service World magazine, he said: "We admit our weaknesses in SIS and one of the first things you have to do when a management failure [occurs] is face up to that, not give a series of explanatory reasons. There is always an explanation. Sir John also said in the wake of Mr Williams" death he had instructed his senior staff to spend up to a quarter of their time managing other people. He said: "Sometimes there's an attitude - and I find it in parts of my service - where management is seen as something for your spare time, not the day job. The day job is operations, or delivering intelligence, or whatever it is. But actually I tell people: "management is the core of your job, and you can deliver a whole lot more through other people than you can through yourself on your own.""