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

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СКАЧАТЬ series of spectacularly successful guerrilla attacks on Turkish and German forces in the Sinai Peninsula, conducting diversionary raids on railways and assaults on isolated garrisons in the Hejaz, through Aqaba to Amman and Damascus. In his famous self-dramatising account of his wartime exploits, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence emphasised that intelligence-gathering was the key to successful irregular warfare: ‘The first line of guerrilla warfare,’ he wrote, ‘is accurate intelligence.’ Lawrence’s wartime mission was to divert Turkish forces from Palestine to protect the Hejaz railway. Assisted by Lawrence’s diversionary actions in the Hejaz, the leader of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, General Edmund Allenby, won successive victories in Gaza and Beersheba, which ultimately led to the capture of the city of Jerusalem in December 1917. Allenby was joined by Lawrence in triumphantly entering the Holy City on foot – the first Christian soldiers to capture the city since the time of the Crusades.²²

      As well as attempting to incite subversion against the British in India and the Middle East, the German military also sponsored unrest in one of Britain’s closest imperial possessions: Ireland. In fact, one of the most notorious cases that British intelligence was involved with in the entire First World War related to German attempts to forge an alliance with dissident Irish republicans. During the war, the signals department of the British Admiralty, codenamed ‘Room 40’, led by Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, grew in importance and size, and successfully intercepted and read many German communications. As with the rest of the British intelligence community, the war transformed the scale and nature of the British SIGINT, institutionalising code-breaking in ways that had not previously existed in Britain. One of the most notorious wartime German communications intercepted and circulated by Room 40 was the so-called ‘Zimmermann telegram’ of January 1917, in which the German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, offered the Mexican government the chance to retake lost territories in the United States, including land in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, if it declared war on the United States. Although the Zimmermann telegram is commonly known to be one of the causes of the US government’s entry into the war, the role that Room 40 played in the episode is still generally not properly appreciated in most histories of the First World War, despite having been discussed by intelligence historians for over thirty years: Room 40 intercepted the notorious telegram and passed it on to US authorities, who then publicly exposed it, while keeping secret the role of British code-breakers.²³

      In the two years after outbreak of war in 1914, Room 40 code-breakers decrypted at least thirty-two German cables relating to Irish nationalists. The most important related to the ‘Easter Rising’ of April 1916, and Germany’s support of an exiled Irish nationalist, Sir Roger Casement, to help carry out the uprising in Dublin. Room 40’s decryption efforts gave the British government foreknowledge of the uprising, and provided exact knowledge of Germany’s arms supplies to Ireland. On information provided by Room 40, in April 1916 the Royal Navy intercepted the U-boat carrying Casement to Ireland before he could carry out his mission. Casement was ultimately executed by the British in Dublin in August 1916. During his incarceration he begged the British authorities to allow him to communicate with the leaders of the uprising, and warn them to abandon their plans. However, it seems doubtful that even if he had made such an intervention it would have prevented the council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood from proceeding. Furthermore, we now know that the controversial ‘Casement Diaries’ – lurid details of which, including graphic descriptions of Casement’s homosexual exploits, were deliberately released by Blinker Hall to blacken Casement’s name during his trial – were not forgeries concocted by the British, as many Irish nationalists at the time and since have maintained, but were in fact genuine. The attempts by the German government to incite an anti-British ‘fifth column’ in Ireland, the ‘back door to England’, was a strategy that would be repeated by Hitler a generation later, in the Second World War.²⁴

      While the British secret state expanded rapidly during the First World War, the years after the war saw an equally quick deterioration of its resources. MI5 and SIS both had their budgets slashed, and MI5’s staff shrunk from 844 in 1918 to just twenty-five officers in 1925. It should be stressed that the dwindling resources of the British secret state after 1918 lay in sharp contrast to many states in post-war Europe, which turned to various forms of bloody authoritarian rule. In Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, secret police forces expanded rapidly, and their leaders applied security practices forged during the First World War, such as mass registration and detention, to their populations even in times of peace. While the British government had interned at least 32,000 ‘enemy aliens’ on security grounds, largely on MI5’s advice, between 1914 and 1918, such drastic methods were taken only as wartime ‘emergency measures’ in Britain. The ‘totalitarian’ states of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, however, which were effectively at war all the time, and mobilised their populations along wartime lines, applied wartime security practices even while at peace. The head of Germany’s intelligence service in the First World War, Walter Nicolai, summarised this view when he wrote that for Germany to become a world power again it had to behave as though it was at ‘war in peace’, and would have to gather intelligence on all its enemies, at home and abroad. By contrast, the resources of the British secret state were cut so dramatically in the post-war years that by 1925 MI5 had a total of only twenty-four mail and telephone interceptions operating in the whole of Britain. Its staff consisted of just sixteen officers by 1929, and as MI5’s in-house history noted, its resources were so inadequate in the 1920s that its operations ‘reduced to a minimum’. Between 1919 and 1931, MI5 was relegated to investigating subversion in the British armed forces.²⁵

      Despite the dwindling of its resources, throughout the 1920s and 1930s MI5 continued to pride itself on its imperial responsibilities established during the First World War. During the interwar years the overwhelming thrust of MI5’s duties was focused on the threat posed by the Soviet Union. With hindsight, we can see that MI5 and SIS both miscalculated, and were slow to react to, the growing threat posed by Nazi Germany after Hitler came to power in 1933. That said, MI5’s focus on the Soviet Union was hardly irrational. Soon after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, the Soviet Union became just as much of an empire as the former Russian tsarist empire which it replaced – and posed a similar threat to the British empire. Immediately upon coming to power, Lenin pledged his support for a worldwide revolution against imperialism, which he famously described as the ‘highest form of capitalism’. The threat posed by the Soviet Union to the British empire was exposed by the head of the Intelligence Bureau in Delhi, Sir David Petrie, who went on to become the Director-General of MI5 from 1941 to 1946. In the late 1920s he wrote a classified official history, Communism in India, 1924–27, the circulation of which was limited to a small number of senior British officials in London and Delhi. Petrie warned that the Soviet Union posed a double threat for the British empire, especially in India: Soviet expansion was a strategic threat along the traditional lines of the ‘Great Game’ with Russia, but it also posed a subversive threat, with Moscow supporting anti-colonial movements inside the British empire. As it turned out, Petrie’s forecast was remarkably accurate: for over seven decades following the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, interrupted only by the Second World War, the Soviet Union became the main supporter of anti-colonial movements in the British empire and other European colonial empires. The reality was therefore that throughout the 1920s and 1930s the British government was engaged in a low-level ‘cold war’ with the Soviet Union, long before the real Cold War set in after 1945.²⁶

      During the interwar years, Britain’s armed forces (the army, Royal Navy and RAF) all maintained intelligence departments that focused on the empire and Commonwealth. However, it was MI5 that was responsible for overall imperial security intelligence, maintaining direct contact with British intelligence authorities in India, the Delhi Intelligence Bureau (DIB), or Intelligence Bureau (IB) as it was also known, through a small London-based outfit known as Indian Political Intelligence (IPI). IPI was officially part of the India Office, which paid its budget, but from 1925 onwards it was housed in MI5’s headquarters at 25 Cromwell Road in London, opposite the Natural History Museum. The office space that MI5 rented to IPI (at rates that IPI often considered exorbitant) was by any standards pitiful: it consisted of three small, low-ceilinged, poorly-lit, dingy rooms in the attic of MI5’s СКАЧАТЬ