Читать книгу Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire - Calder Walton - Страница 25

The essential problem for the JIC was that between 1944 and 1946 it lacked any useful intelligence on the Soviet Union, either from SIS, GCHQ (the new name given to GC&CS at Bletchley Park after 1945) and MI5, or from their counterparts in US intelligence. This is not entirely surprising, given how difficult it was to gather any objective intelligence on the Soviet Union. As with the Third Reich, British and US intelligence found it virtually impossible to penetrate the heavy police and surveillance presence in the Soviet Union, run as a police state, and London and Washington also found it virtually impossible to understand the mindset of the post-war Soviet leadership. Churchill was close to the mark when he famously remarked in October 1939 that the Soviet Union was ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. At the end of the war, MI5’s in-house historian John Curry lamented that the position in which MI5 found itself regarding the Soviet Union in 1945 was the same as it had been regarding Nazi Germany in 1939: it faced a complete dearth of intelligence. In reality, the situation was even worse than Curry and MI5 assumed. From his position as head of Soviet counter-intelligence in Section IX within SIS, Kim Philby almost certainly helped to prepare some of the post-war JIC papers on the Soviet threat. Through the Cambridge spies and other well-placed agents in the West, the Soviet Union was able to obtain the most sensitive secrets of Britain and other Western governments in the post-war years.⁵

One of the priorities for British and Allied intelligence in 1945 was dismantling Axis intelligence networks. As the end of the war approached, a stream of apparently reliable reports stated that the Nazi leadership was making megalomaniacal plans to rise again if Germany were defeated. These schemes focused on Hitler’s so-called ‘Werewolf’ organisation, through which SS officers planned to orchestrate guerrilla warfare against the victorious Allies. Meanwhile, the German security service (Sicherheitsdienst) was apparently planning to disperse sabotage sleeper agents across Europe and the rest of the world to help create a Fourth Reich out of the rubble of the Third ‘Thousand Year’ Reich. The first alarming reports along those lines came to MI5 in March 1945, when a four-man team of German sabotage agents was captured and interrogated in Allied France. They had been flown in a German-captured US B-17 Flying Fortress deep behind Allied lines in France, from which they parachuted in with instructions and equipment to organise sabotage networks. The agents revealed that their sabotage colleagues had been equipped with a number of poisons, ‘not the usual ampoules of hydrocyanic acid, with which agents have been equipped in recent months to commit suicide after arrest’. Instead, they were planning to kill Allied officers with poisons infused in everyday commodities such as sausages, chocolate, Nescafé, schnapps, whisky and Bayer aspirin. They had also been instructed on how to leave arsenic and acids on books, desks and door handles.⁶

Alarm was heightened when the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) discovered sabotage plots involving secret weapons such as poisonous cigarette lighters which would kill the smoker; a belt buckle with a silver swastika that concealed a double-barrelled .32 pistol; and germ warfare ‘microbes’ that were to be hidden in female agents’ compact mirrors. SHAEF also obtained some mysterious pellets and brown capsules that would emit fatal vapours when placed in an ashtray and heated by a cigarette. These were forwarded to MI5 in London, where they were tested by the service’s expert on counter-sabotage, Lord Rothschild, and its in-house scientist, Professor H.V.A. Briscoe of Imperial College London. Although SHAEF was sceptical about some of the supposed sabotage plots, the conclusion of one of its reports in March 1945, entitled ‘German terrorist methods’, was that Allied personnel should be forbidden from eating any German foods or smoking German cigarettes, ‘under pain of severe penalties’.⁷

However, contrary to all of the warnings and intelligence assessments made in London and Washington, the Nazi threat – and that of imperial Japan – disintegrated far more quickly than predicted. As it turned out, neither Nazi Germany nor the Japanese secret police (the Kempeitai) organised any effective stay-behind networks after the Allied victory. British intelligence nevertheless devoted significant resources to hunting down and capturing Nazi war criminals on the run. The Oxford historian and wartime SIS officer Hugh Trevor-Roper was sent by SIS to Berlin to make a detailed report on the final days of Hitler and the attempted escapes of Nazi leaders. His report eventually became a best-selling book, The Last Days of Hitler. One of the leading figures in the ‘Final Solution’, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, for example, was captured in Austria disguised as a huntsman and was then secretly transported to Britain. Though it has not been acknowledged in historical accounts to date, Kaltenbrunner’s interrogation by MI5 at Camp 020 played a significant role in his successful prosecution and execution at Nuremberg. Likewise, the notorious leader of the SS and architect of Nazi mass murder in Europe, Heinrich Himmler, was captured by the Allies as he attempted to flee across the German border in disguise. However, Himmler committed suicide in British detention, by biting into a cyanide pellet hidden in one of his teeth, before he could be brought to trial.⁸

The political situation in post-war Britain did not create an easy atmosphere for its secret services. The new Labour government of Clement Attlee, elected in July 1945, made an election promise to keep them on a tight leash. The Labour Party had experienced difficult relations with Britain’s intelligence services ever since the scandalous ‘Zinoviev affair’ in 1924, which had led to the downfall of Britain’s first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald. The affair involved a letter supposedly sent by one of the Soviet leaders, Grigory Zinoviev, to the British Communist Party, in which Moscow apparently implored communist fellow travellers to spread revolution to Britain and its colonies. MacDonald’s government suspected that the letter was a forgery, concocted by conservative elements in British intelligence, but the Conservative Party pounced on the scandal, and implicated the Labour Party in the affair. It is now known that the letter was indeed a fake, but it was not devised by MI5 or any other part of British intelligence: it was forged by anti-Bolshevik White Russians, probably in one of the Baltic countries.⁹

Meanwhile, Churchill’s parting shot before he left office as Prime Minister in 1945 was to warn that a ‘socialist’ government in Britain would inevitably establish a ‘Gestapo’ and a ‘police state’. To nip Churchill’s prediction in the bud, when MI5’s wartime Director-General Sir David Petrie retired in 1946, Attlee attempted to keep MI5 under his control as much as possible, choosing a former policeman, Sir Percy Sillitoe, as Petrie’s successor. Many within MI5, probably with good reason, regarded Attlee’s choice of an outsider as a vote of no confidence. The fact was that MI5 emerged from the war judged not for its triumphs, like the Double Cross System, which remained secret, but instead on claustrophobic wartime security measures, including the temporary curtailment of civil liberties and, perhaps most notoriously, mass internment in Britain.¹⁰

For Britain’s intelligence services, as for many other departments in Whitehall, the transition from war to peace witnessed a rapid wind-down. Just as after the First World War, in the years after 1945, in ‘Austerity Britain’, funding of the nation’s intelligence services was slashed, their emergency wartime powers removed, and their staff numbers drastically reduced. Many of the brilliant amateur outsiders who had joined the ranks of the intelligence services during the war returned to their pre-war professions. MI5’s staff numbers were reduced from 350 officers at its height in 1943, to just a hundred in 1946. Its administrative records reveal that it was forced to start buying cheaper ink and paper, and its officers were instructed to type reports on both sides of paper to save money. Combined with all this, MI5 also soon became demoralised. The officer who had been responsible for skilfully running its double agents section during the war, Tar Robertson, was so disheartened with the service after the war that in 1947 he took early retirement and went off to become a sheep farmer in Gloucestershire, hardly ever speaking publicly of his secret wartime exploits. There were some serious discussions within Whitehall, as there had been after the First World War, about shutting MI5 down altogether. Unfortunately for MI5, in the post-war years it faced the worst possible combination of circumstances: reduced resources, but increased responsibilities. After the war Britain had more territories under its control than at any point in its history, and because MI5 was responsible for security intelligence in all British territories, it acquired unprecedented overseas obligations.¹¹