Читать книгу Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire - Calder Walton - Страница 12

In 1931 the British government finally drew an official distinction between MI5 and SIS’s responsibilities. Ever since the establishment of the two services in 1909, when MI5 was made responsible for ‘domestic’ security intelligence and SIS for ‘foreign’ intelligence-gathering, there had been confusion over whether the empire and the Commonwealth counted as domestic or foreign territory. The issue was finally resolved following a fierce turf war within Whitehall over intelligence matters. In 1931 the London Special Branch, led by its eccentric head Sir Basil Thomson, essentially attempted to take over MI5. Although the bid was unsuccessful, it led to a major review of intelligence matters within Whitehall, led by the top-secret committee responsible for them, the Secret Service Committee, chaired by Sir John Anderson, the Permanent Undersecretary at the Home Office. One of the recommendations of the Committee in June 1931 was that MI5 should have increased responsibilities. From that point on MI5 was given responsibility for all forms of counter-espionage, military and civilian – previously it had been limited to detecting espionage in the British armed forces – and a number of skilled officers were transferred from the London Special Branch to MI5, including Guy Liddell (a future Deputy Director-General of MI5) and Milicent Bagot (who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Comintern activities, and is thought to have been the inspiration for John le Carré’s character, the eccentric Sovietologist Connie Sachs). One of the other major decisions taken by the Secret Service Committee was that MI5 would assume responsibility for security intelligence in all British territories, including the empire and Commonwealth, while SIS would confine itself to operating at least three miles outside British territories. In other words, from 1931 onwards a three-mile demarcation line was drawn around all British territories worldwide, at the time covering roughly one-quarter of the globe, which acted as the official boundary between MI5 and SIS.³⁷

With this operational border established, MI5 was given more of a free rein to concentrate on imperial security matters – hence Holt-Wilson’s numerous trips overseas and his attempts to promote the view that MI5 was an imperial service. Throughout the 1930s MI5 collaborated with IPI and the Delhi IB to keep a close watch on the main anti-colonial political leaders in India, such as Nehru, whom IPI considered – accurately – to be, next to Gandhi, the ‘second most powerful man in India’. Whenever Nehru travelled to Britain in the 1930s, which he did on several occasions, MI5 monitored his activities, often imposing HOWs to intercept his post and telephone conversations, and instructed Scotland Yard to send undercover officers to his speaking engagements. Judging from IPI records, it also seems that IPI acquired a source close to Nehru himself: it obtained sensitive information relating to the death of his wife from tuberculosis in 1936 at a hospital in Switzerland following a trip Nehru made to Britain. The information reaching IPI included private arrangements that Nehru’s family was considering for the funeral, which most likely came from an informant within Nehru’s close entourage. MI5 and IPI also attempted to track the activities of the Comintern agent Narendra Nath Bhattacharya, also known as M.N. Roy – but were not always successful: on at least one occasion Roy was able to travel to Britain without being discovered. At the same time, MI5 and IPI also scrutinised the activities of the British Communist Party’s leading theoretician and anti-colonial Indian campaigner, Rajani Palme Dutt, who acted as a Comintern agent on at least one trip to India. They likewise kept a close eye on Dutt’s younger brother Clemens, who led the ‘Indian section’ of the British Communist Party, and even discovered the cover address that Clemens used to communicate secretly with underground communist sympathisers. Furthermore, although no specific file has yet been declassified, it is likely that MI5 also worked in conjunction with SIS to track the movements of the notorious German Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, who moved widely around Europe and even further afield, and in 1927 organised a conference in Brussels against imperialism.³⁸

However, MI5’s claim in the 1930s that it was an imperial service was more aspiration than reality, more chest-puffing than fact. Throughout the decade it had such limited resources at its disposal that there was no way it could have a meaningful supervisory role over imperial security intelligence as a whole. As late as 1938 it had a total staff of just thirty officers, only two of whom worked in its counter-espionage section, B-Division, in London – that is, a grand total of two officers formed the front line of detecting Axis espionage in Britain, to say nothing of the empire. However, a turning point for the involvement of British intelligence in the empire occurred in the late 1930s, when MI5 broke with its past practices and, instead of merely receiving intelligence from colonies abroad, began to post officers to British territories overseas for the first time. These officers were known as Defence Security Officers (DSOs) and were attached to British military general headquarters (GHQs) in British colonies and other dependencies. Their responsibilities were focused on coordinating security intelligence on Comintern activities, and as the Second World War approached, increasingly on the threat posed by the Axis Powers.³⁹

The first DSO stationed abroad was posted to Egypt. Egypt had gained independence from Britain in 1935, but in a manner that would be replicated over subsequent decades in other British territories – as we shall see – the British government had negotiated a series of favourable treaties for itself, which allowed for a continued British presence in Egypt. From 1935 onwards British military headquarters for the Middle East was based in Cairo, and London continued to have control over the Suez Canal, the strategic gateway to India – which would become a hotly contentious subject after the war, and the focus of one of Britain’s greatest ever foreign policy disasters, signifying the final eclipse of Britain’s imperial power in the Middle East. MI5’s first DSO in Egypt was Brig. Raymund Maunsell, an old India hand whose appointment in 1937 was followed by those of other DSOs in Palestine and Gibraltar in 1938. These officers would form the basis of MI5’s wartime security liaison outfit run throughout the Middle East, known as Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME), which would form the vanguard of countering wartime Axis espionage in the region. On the outbreak of war in 1939, MI5 increased the number of its DSOs permanently stationed abroad to six: in Cairo, Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, Singapore and Hong Kong.⁴⁰

Although the establishment of MI5’s DSOs was a watershed in the history of British intelligence, with just six officers stationed overseas, MI5 was still clearly not the imperial service that it claimed to be. As the official history of British intelligence in the Second World War noted, in 1939 MI5 was just a ‘skeleton’ of an imperial security service. It took the war for it to become truly the imperial service that it claimed to be. It was also the war that transformed the involvement of Britain’s largest and most secret intelligence services, GC&CS, in the British empire.⁴¹

In the pre-war years, MI5 claimed to be – but had not yet actually become – a service for the empire. Even at this stage, however, it was a service of the empire. This was most clearly shown by the high proportion of senior MI5 officers in the pre-war years who began their careers in the empire. Its first head, Sir Vernon Kell, and his deputy who served him for twenty-eight years, Sir Eric Holt-Wilson, had both previously served in British colonial campaigns. Its Director-General during the Second World War, Sir David Petrie, was similarly an old colonial sweat, having served as the head of IB in Delhi from 1924 to 1931, and carried scars of his service (literally) on his legs with wounds from a bomb attack inflicted by an Indian revolutionary in 1914. The sources that Petrie used for his classified official history, Communism in India, included intercepted correspondence of both Indian communists and the Comintern. The post-Second World War head of MI5, Sir Percy Sillitoe, likewise had a former colonial police career, having served in the British South Africa Police. One of the few pre-war British counter-espionage desk officers, John Curry, had served with the Indian police for a quarter of a century before joining MI5 in 1933. Curry was among the limited number of people in British intelligence, and in Whitehall generally, who recognised and warned about the threat posed by Nazi Germany after 1933. He had previously written a history of the Indian police, which attracted the attention of Sir David Petrie, and in 1945 was the author of MI5’s in-house history, which has now been declassified. MI5’s most successful wartime interrogator, Robin ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens (discussed in the next chapter), was also a former Indian policeman, as was MI5’s semi-senile septuagenarian wartime Deputy Director-General, Brigadier O.A. ‘Jasper’ Harker, later described by the notorious KGB spy Kim Philby as filling his position in MI5 with handsome grace, but little else. With such strong colonial connections in the pre-war years, MI5’s working culture and outlook undoubtedly also had a colonial feel. An examination of the CVs of MI5 officers before the Second World War reveals that several of them included ‘pig sticking’ among their hobbies, a hangover from colonial service in India of the pink-gin-and-polo type. Moreover, because pay in MI5 at the time was so poor, many of its senior staff, doubtless burnt out from too much sun, came from independently wealthy backgrounds.⁴²

These connections with the British empire did not only exist in MI5: they were also prominent in the rest of the pre-war British intelligence community. In fact, a remarkable number of Britain’s leading spooks in those years had previously served in the empire. In SIS, for example, the two most important counter-espionage desk officers st the time were both former Indian policemen. The first was Valentine Vivian, known to his friends as ‘Vee Vee’, the son of a Victorian portrait painter, who entered SIS in 1925 after serving in the Indian police and in an IPI station in Constantinople. Vivian had a glass eye, which he tried to shield by awkwardly standing at right angles to those he met. Philby – who had a vested interest in making his former SIS colleagues look as incompetent as possible – depicted him in his KGB-sponsored memoirs as being afraid of his subordinates in SIS, and acidly described him as ‘long past his best – if, indeed, he ever had one’. Vivian’s subordinate in SIS’s pre-war section dealing with counter-espionage, Section V, was Felix Cowgill, the son of a missionary, who had served as a personal assistant to Petrie in the Delhi IB. Cowgill’s colonial past gave him, as one of his wartime colleagues described, a ‘sallow face and withdrawn tired air that came of long years of service in India’. Philby poisonously described him as tempestuous and incompetent: ‘His intellectual endowment was slender. As an intelligence officer, he was inhibited by a lack of imagination, inattention to detail and a sheer ignorance of the world we were fighting in,’ but even Philby conceded that Cowgill had ‘a fiendish capacity for work’, sometimes toiling through the night, knocking an array of pipes into wreckage on a stone ashtray on his desk. Whether this was the case or not, he was certainly spectacularly outmanoeuvred by Philby for wartime promotion within SIS – with disastrous consequences for British intelligence, as we shall see.⁴³

There were similar colonial connections within GC&CS, the first Director of which, Alistair Denniston, began his career in India, where he successfully intercepted and decrypted Russian traffic. Likewise, the department in GC&CS that successfully broke Comintern radio traffic in the 1930s was led by a brilliant major from the Indian army, John Tiltman, who had been running a small but successful interception outfit in north-west India before being brought back to London in 1929. There were also colonial connections in Special Branch at Scotland Yard. Its pre-war head, Basil Thomson, had an eccentric colonial career: after being educated at Eton and dropping out of Oxford he joined the Colonial Office, and at the age of twenty-eight became the Prime Minister of Tonga, where – as he vividly noted in his memoirs – his first true friends were cannibals. He also went on to become private tutor to the Crown Prince of Siam and Governor of Dartmoor Prison.⁴⁴

Officers in Britain’s intelligence services brought to their new roles many of the practices they had acquired in their colonial postings. In GC&CS, Tiltman wholeheartedly incorporated decryption techniques pioneered in India. The Special Branch adopted the technique of fingerprinting, which became the most basic form of police and security investigations in the modern world, from India, where it had been invented. MI5 also embraced techniques pioneered in the empire. When its Registry collapsed during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 – essentially giving up under the strain imposed on it during an apparently imminent Nazi invasion – Petrie advised reforming it on lines that he had devised for card-cataloguing ‘revolutionaries and terrorist suspects’ in India.⁴⁵

The intelligence services of other major European powers had similar colonial hangovers, both in terms of staff and practices. Some influential French intelligence officers during the Second World War started their careers in the French colonial empire. More ominously, there were also colonial connections with the secret police and intelligence services of Europe’s murderous ‘totalitarian’ regimes before 1945. This was first identified by the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) argued that twentieth-century totalitarianism had its roots in European colonial rule in the late nineteenth century. Arendt believed that the type of savagery that European powers inflicted upon colonial populations, as graphically depicted in Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, modelled on Belgian rule in the Congo, was in the first half of the twentieth century brought back to its heartland: Europe. Although Arendt’s thesis was at first largely discounted by scholars, more recently it has been re-examined, and is now regarded by historians as having in many ways been proved correct.⁴⁶

The Soviet secret police, the NKVD – subsequently renamed the KGB – imposed security practices such as mass detention which had been forged by the British in India, the French in Algeria, and by the Russians in their own empire. In Spain, Franco’s 1936 rebellion against the democratic government was waged predominantly by former Africanista generals, who, as one study has noted, were steeped in a ‘colonial mentality’ and embarked on a ‘colonial clearing-up’, namely institutionalised repression, of a working class deemed to be ‘hardly human’. These colonial connections with authoritarian regimes are hardly surprising when it is considered that the nature of European colonial rule allowed for the development of new forms of bureaucratic domination of ‘inferior’ races, which involved the registration of entire populations, mass deportation and the forced separation of races. These were all hallmarks of mass murder in Europe in the twentieth century: cataloguing, controlling and massacring. Colonies also provided a testing ground for new forms of warfare, which could be freely deployed against expendable, lesser, races. Europe’s colonial ‘small wars’ gave rise to, or allowed for the first testing of, concentration camps, barbed wire and machine guns – which were all then re-imported for use in Europe itself. The genocidal war that the Prusso-German army waged in the German colony of South-West Africa (present-day Namibia) foreshadowed the extermination policies conducted by the Nazis on the Eastern Front a generation later. It is no coincidence that it was in German South-West Africa that one of the founders of Nazi pseudo-scientific ideas of ‘racial hygiene’, Eugen Fischer, conducted his first research experiments supposedly proving the ‘inferiority’ of certain races. Later Fischer led forced sterilisation programmes against racial ‘degenerates’ in Nazi Germany, which paved the way for and legitimised mass-murder programmes – Fischer was a teacher of the so-called ‘Angel of Death’ at Auschwitz, Joseph Mengele.⁴⁷

In the years before 1945, then, both in Britain and in a number of other European imperial powers, both democratic and non-democratic, there was a continuum between empire and ‘domestic’ intelligence services. However, as we shall see, in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century precisely the opposite occurred. In the two decades after 1945, Britain’s intelligence services posted a succession of intelligence officers out to the empire and Commonwealth. Recruits to MI5 at this time spent on average between a quarter and a half of their careers stationed in colonial or Commonwealth countries. It was the cataclysmic event of the Second World War that permanently transformed the imperial responsibilities of the British secret state. Ironically, the importance of MI5’s colonial responsibilities would increase after 1945, precisely when Britain’s imperial power began to decline.⁴⁸