Читать книгу Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire - Calder Walton - Страница 23

As Britain’s wartime intelligence machine began to refocus on the Soviet threat, one area provided more information than anywhere else about the operational methods used by Soviet intelligence. From 1940 onwards, the two states of Iraq and Persia (Iran) were jointly occupied by British and Soviet forces, and this led to exceptionally close collaboration between the two Allied intelligence services. Iran’s capital Tehran was also the setting in November 1943 of the famous meeting of the ‘Big Three’, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, which symbolised, at least outwardly, the collaboration between the Allies. However, as Churchill later claimed, it was in Tehran that he realised for the first time how small the British nation was:

There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo, and between the two sat the poor little English donkey …⁶⁷

From late 1944 onwards the British collaborated with Soviet intelligence in running a double agent, codenamed ‘Kiss’ – one of only two double agents run by British and Soviet intelligence together during the war, the other being Silver (see pp.50–3). Kiss, an Iranian national recruited by the Abwehr in pre-war Hamburg, was run from the inter-service British intelligence centre based in Baghdad, Combined Intelligence Centre Iraq (CICI). Under the guidance of his British and Soviet controllers, he radioed false information on British and Soviet troop movements in Iraq and Iran to the Abwehr. However, the real importance of the Kiss case, as is revealed by his MI5 file, was the proximity it gave British officials to their Soviet counterparts, allowing them to study their methods at close quarters – as the Soviets doubtless did to the British too. MI5’s DSOs in Tehran and Baghdad used the opportunity to gather as much information as they could on their Soviet opposite numbers, particularly the names and backgrounds of intelligence officers, and passed this information back to F-Division in London. MI5’s DSO in Tehran, Alan Roger, explained in one report in December 1944 that although gathering information on Soviet intelligence was not part of his official mission – the Foreign Office ban still outlawed it – he nevertheless thought that it might one day become useful. He was more right than he could have known. The Kiss case collapsed in March 1945, apparently due to bitter mutual mistrust between Soviet and British officials – a forewarning of events that were to follow with the onset of the Cold War.⁶⁸

Occupied Iraq and Iran gave an early indication of the kinds of problems Britain would repeatedly face in the post-war years, as relations between Western countries and the ‘great bear’ to the east deteriorated. Towards the end of the war, the head of CICI in Baghdad despatched back to London a series of stark warnings about the consequences of Britain pulling out of Iraq and Iran too quickly at the end of hostilities. If it did so, he predicted, both countries would soon be overrun by Soviet intelligence officials, who would seek to turn them into Soviet satellite states. As we shall see, this fear would greatly colour London’s reaction to colonial ‘liberation’ movements in the post-war years, as the Cold War set in.⁶⁹

As the war in Europe wound down, MI5 and SIS began to address the problem of the Soviet Union in earnest. In December 1944 Sir David Petrie noted that for a long time he had been ‘a complete convert to the view that the role of F. Division will appreciate in importance after the war’. After the end of hostilities in Europe in May 1945, as Petrie was preparing to leave his position as MI5’s Director-General, he circulated a long memorandum ‘on the shape of things to come’, in which he forecast – pessimistically but accurately – that one form of totalitarianism in Europe would be replaced by another. In August 1945 he held a high-level meeting with the Chief of SIS, Sir Stewart Menzies, about the problem of crypto-communists employed on secret work – on which Philby in SIS would certainly have been briefed – and on 5 September 1945 he, Hollis and other F-Division officers discussed at length, the ‘leakage of information through members of the Communist Party’. Their meeting was more significant than either Petrie or Hollis realised. Later that same day, a cypher clerk working at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Igor Gouzenko, defected to the West, bringing with him alarming and dramatic evidence of wartime Soviet espionage. It confirmed Britain’s worst fears. The Cold War had begun. However, before MI5 could deal properly with the new situation, it first had to deal with a different and even more urgent threat: international terrorism.⁷⁰