Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire. Calder Walton

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СКАЧАТЬ nor on MI5, that approximately half of the world’s then 270 million Muslims lived under either British, Russian or French rule.¹⁶

      At the beginning of the war, India was the only part of the British empire that MI5 was in direct contact with, communicating with the Director of Criminal Intelligence (DCI) in Delhi, Maj. John Wallinger. Previously, the main responsibility for dealing with Indian ‘seditionists’ or ‘revolutionaries’ (members of the Ghadr ‘revolt’ party) had fallen to the London Special Branch, but in the course of the war MI5 increasingly took a lead in dealing with Indian revolutionaries in Britain. After 1914 the German Foreign Ministry established an ‘Indian Committee’ in Berlin, which revolved around the exiled Indian academic and lawyer Virendaranath Chattopadhyaya, who had become a revolutionary while studying law at Middle Temple in London, and was a close confidant of the man who would later become the first leader of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru. One of the agents being run by Chattopadhyaya in wartime Britain, Harish Chandra, was identified by MI5 through intercepted communications and interrogated by MI5 officers in October 1915. They persuaded him to act as a double agent, and he duly passed over considerable amounts of information on German plots in India. Reassuringly for MI5 and the Chiefs of Staff, the intelligence produced by Chandra revealed that the German Foreign Ministry was making increasingly unrealistic and far-fetched plans for subversion in India. The intensive interception of the mail of 138,000 Indian troops serving on the Western Front likewise convinced MI5 and the War Office that there was no widespread support for revolutionaries or for pan-Islamism among those soldiers – though one censor did report a worrying trend among them to write poetry, which he considered ‘an ominous sign of mental disquietude’. It was judged that the best strategy was to let the German Foreign Ministry continue wasting time, money and energy on fruitless plans for subversion in India.¹⁷

      MI5’s main wartime expert on Indian affairs was Robert Nathan, who joined the organisation in November 1914, having spent twenty-six years in the Indian Civil Service and also serving as Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University before he was forced to resign due to ill-health. Within MI5, Nathan surrounded himself with a number of veterans of the Indian army, police and civil service. By 1917, MI5’s G-Branch, which was responsible for investigations, had a total of twenty-eight officers, eight of whom had previously served in India. This was an unusually large collection of Indian veterans for any British government department outside India itself. One of Nathan’s continual wartime concerns was possible political assassinations on British soil. In July 1909 an Indian Ghadr revolutionary had assassinated Sir William Curzon Wyllie, a former Indian Army officer and aide to the Secretary of State for India, on the steps of the India Office in London. Based in part on information provided by its double agent Chandra, MI5 feared that similar attempts might be made during the war. No such plot ever materialised, but MI5 continued to intercept and scrutinise the correspondence of known revolutionaries in London. In the spring of 1916 Nathan travelled to the USA, where his intelligence provided the US authorities with much of the evidence used at two major trials of the Ghadr movement, the first of which was held in Chicago in October 1916 and ended with the conviction of three militants. The second trial, held in San Francisco, came to a dramatic climax in April 1918 when one of the accused, Ram Singh, shot the Ghadr leader Ram Chandra Peshawari dead in the middle of the courtroom. The head of Special Branch in London, Basil Thomson, commented:

      In the Western [United] States such incidents do not disturb the presence of mind of Assize Court officials: the deputy sheriff whipped an automatic from his pocket, and from his elevated place at the back of the court, aiming above and between intervening heads, shot the murderer dead.¹⁸

      The Indian National Congress – the political body that would later become the main vehicle for anti-colonial nationalism in India – does not seem to have attracted any significant attention from MI5 or any other section of the British intelligence community during the First World War. This was partly because Congress had no significant wartime German connection, but also because before 1914 it was little more than a middle-class debating society that met only sporadically. There was nothing to suggest that it would emerge from the war as a mass movement that would become a focus for resistance to the British Raj. The main transformation of Congress’s fortunes would be due to Mohandas Karamchand ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi, an English-educated barrister of Inner Temple, who more than anyone else would set in process the downfall of the British empire in India a generation later. Nevertheless, in retrospect it is clear that in the pre-war and wartime years, MI5 and British intelligence authorities in India showed a remarkable lack of interest in Gandhi. When he returned in 1915 to India from South Africa, where he developed the technique of satyagraha, or passive resistance, which he later used against the Raj, the Department of Criminal Intelligence in Delhi described him as ‘neither an anarchist nor a revolutionary’, but just as a ‘troublesome agitator whose enthusiasm had led him frequently to overstep the limits of South African laws relating to Asiatics’.¹⁹

      Reflecting the worldwide nature of the war, that same year, 1915, the British Chiefs of Staff instructed MI5 to establish a department to deal with German-sponsored subversion in the British empire. This new department, D-Branch in MI5, led by an officer called Frank Hall, expanded rapidly, so that by 1917 it had nineteen full-time officers. For cover, D-Branch used the name ‘Special Central Intelligence Bureau’ when communicating with colonial and Commonwealth governments. According to a post-war report compiled on D-Branch, its responsibilities included undertaking visa checks on individuals travelling in the empire and providing colonial governments with information on known and suspected German agents. By 1916 D-Branch was in touch with ‘the authorities responsible for counter-espionage in almost every one of the colonies’. However, during the war MI5 did not actually station officers in British colonies or other dependent territories overseas. Instead, it operated as a ‘clearing house’ for security intelligence on German espionage and subversion by maintaining direct personal contacts with a number of colonial police forces, known as its ‘links’, and consolidating all the information it received from those links across the empire into a single registry, which contained around 45,000 records in 1917. By the end of the war MI5 could justifiably boast that it presided over a unique, empire-wide index of security intelligence information. One of the clearest manifestations of its dramatically increased responsibilities was its famous ‘Black Lists’ of German agents, which it circulated to all colonial and Commonwealth governments. These grew from a single volume in 1914 to a weighty twenty-one volumes in 1918, which included 13,524 names.²⁰

      The most famous example of German attempts to sponsor subversion in the British empire involved British counter-measures orchestrated by the now-legendary figure T.E. Lawrence, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ – Oxford historian, archaeologist, cartographer, linguist, intelligence officer and expert guerrilla fighter. Lawrence and his colleagues, a group of self-proclaimed ‘intrusives’, established the so-called Arab Bureau in Cairo in 1914, which pioneered the use of guerrilla warfare against Turkish forces fighting on the side of Germany and the Central Powers in Arabia. In many ways the efforts of Lawrence and British forces in the Middle East during the First World War represent the first modern intelligence war: Lawrence’s forces combined intelligence gained from human agents with intelligence from signals radio intercepts, processes which are now known as human intelligence (HUMINT) and signals intelligence (SIGINT) respectively. The use of aerial reconnaissance, now known as image intelligence (IMINT), was also pioneered by the Royal Flying Corps in the clear skies over Arabia.²¹

      The most important success of the Arab Bureau in its four-year wartime existence was to convince the War Office in London not to send an expeditionary force to Arabia. Lawrence and others in the Arab Bureau argued that a permanent British force landed in the Hejaz, the rocky province bordering the Red Sea, would inevitably be regarded by Arabs as an invading Christian, ‘crusader’ force – with disastrous consequences. Instead, the Arab Bureau insisted that the British should forge an alliance with the local Hashemite dynasty, who could take primary responsibility for fighting the Central Powers in Arabia, with the British providing assistance through intelligence and irregular warfare. This is precisely what occurred. British forces, led by Lawrence, collaborated СКАЧАТЬ