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

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СКАЧАТЬ Bertram Mills. Probably the best working relationship that developed during the war between an agent and an intelligence case officer was that of the ‘amateur’ MI5 wartime recruit Tomás Harris and his double agent Garbo. Harris joined MI5 from the unlikely background of an antiquarian art dealership in London. His fluency in Spanish made him the obvious handler for Garbo, and the two worked brilliantly together, building up an extremely detailed but entirely fictional espionage network, consisting of twenty-eight sub-agents in various parts of Britain, who in reality were ‘nothing more than a figment of the imagination’. Garbo had to make use of a guidebook when describing the locations of these bogus agents to his German handlers, because he had not travelled widely in Britain. As Harris later commented, Garbo’s imagination was worthy of Milton.²⁸

      Another benefit of ‘amateur’ wartime recruits like Harris was that they were less concerned with careerism, and staying within the corridors of power of the secret state, than their professional colleagues, which meant they were more free to come up with creative ideas and less worried if those ideas did not work. That said, it should be noted that ingenuity and creativity only go so far in the mechanics of agent-running: there comes a point when it has to involve tiresome, but necessary, methodical research. One former SIS officer who worked closely with MI5’s Section B1a recalled that his day-to-day business involved such mind-numbing tasks as reading a Madrid telephone directory backwards in order to find an agent’s name from an intercepted telephone number.²⁹

      BRITAIN’S INTELLIGENCE EMPIRE

      During the Second World War Britain’s intelligence services essentially faced the same kind of threats as they had in the First World War. The intelligence services of the Axis Powers attempted to incite revolt and unrest across the British empire just as the Central Powers had done. To counter these threats, Britain’s secret state built up unprecedented imperial intelligence capabilities. The Second World War was when Britain’s imperial intelligence came of age, and MI5’s pre-war vision of being an imperial security service became a reality. It increased the number of officers (DSOs) posted to colonial and Commonwealth countries from six at the start of the war to twenty-seven by its end, supported by twenty-one secretarial staff, stationed across the globe, from Trinidad to Aden to Kuala Lumpur. DSOs communicated with the ‘Overseas Control’ section in MI5’s headquarters in London, run by an officer named Col. Bertram Ede, using secure cyphers and under the cover address ‘Subsided’. During the war several senior MI5 officers made trips to British territories overseas to oversee and help reform local security. Both Dick White and Tar Robertson visited the Middle East, and recommended ways in which MI5’s inter-service outfit there, known as Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME), could function more efficiently, particularly in running double agents. MI5 also maintained highly secret laboratories in two outposts of empire, Bermuda and Singapore, run by specially recruited scientists – real-life James Bond Q-types – whose responsibilities included testing intercepted letters for secret inks.³⁰

      Along with MI5’s expanded imperial role, the war also revolutionised SIGINT operations in British territories overseas, and led to GC&CS’s direct involvement in colonial and Commonwealth countries. GC&CS’s regional hub in India, the so-called ‘Wireless Experimental Centre’ in Delhi, dramatically increased the amount and quality of traffic it intercepted, obtaining volumes of enemy communications once the Enigma code had been cracked. GC&CS did the same in other parts of the empire, in Hong Kong, Cyprus, Malta and the British Army’s wireless station at Sarafand in Palestine, which acted as a local collection point for GC&CS in the Middle East. A similar surge in intercepted traffic occurred in the largely civilian outfit that GC&CS ran at Heliopolis, in Egypt, and in the SIGINT station that the RAF ran for GC&CS in Iraq, which was occupied by Britain and the Allies during the war. The massive expansion of GC&CS’s overseas wartime operations led to some ingenious developments. When a tall antenna was needed to intercept radio communications in Egypt, workers at the Radio Security Service (RSS), the outfit under MI5’s control responsible for intercepting illicit radio communications sent to and from agents, came up with the idea of sticking one on top of the Great Pyramid – effectively making this wonder of the ancient world the largest wireless receiver on the planet.³¹

      As in the First World War, during the Second World War it became a strategy of Britain’s enemies to forge alliances with anti-colonial groups campaigning for independence within the British empire. Once again, Ireland was an obvious target for Germany to incite anti-British revolt, and the Abwehr attempted unsuccessfully to forge links with the Irish Republican Army in a plan codenamed Operation Kathleen. The IRA took full advantage of Britain’s weakened domestic security during the war, launching a bombing campaign in 1939 in which London’s Hammersmith Bridge was among the targets attacked – which increased MI5’s fears of a ‘fifth column’ operating in Britain. At the time, security threats posed by the IRA were not the responsibility of MI5, but fell squarely on the shoulders of the Special Branch at Scotland Yard – which had originally been established in the 1880s as the ‘Special Fenian Branch’. In the immediate pre-war years, MI5 did have a link with the police in Dublin and Belfast, and also maintained a liaison with military intelligence (G2) in the Irish Free State (or Eire as it was called after 1937). During the war it opened a desk devoted to Irish affairs, led by Cecil Liddell, brother of the wartime Director of MI5’s B-Division, Guy Liddell. However, MI5 only really became involved in dealing with the IRA during the war if there was a clear German connection. Luckily for MI5, all of the German agents sent to Ireland to link with the IRA proved to be spectacularly inept. They were either identified by other agents already in MI5’s custody, tracked down by the Irish police, or identified in Ultra decrypts provided by Bletchley Park. One agent, Herman Görtz, was parachuted into Ireland in the summer of 1940 wearing full Luftwaffe uniform and regalia. His wireless set was destroyed on landing, he nearly drowned while crossing the river Boyne, which also claimed the bottle of invisible ink he was supposed to communicate with, and he was totally unsuccessful in contacting the IRA’s leadership. Although he was not tracked down by the Irish police until November 1941, while he remained at liberty his mission was a complete failure. After his arrest he was imprisoned in Dublin for the rest of the war, and when told that he would be repatriated back to Germany he committed suicide in a Dublin police station.³²

      THE FAILURE OF AXIS INTELLIGENCE

      It is easy to romanticise the story of the wartime successes of British intelligence, and to forget a fundamental point: for all of Britain’s wartime intelligence achievements, its secret services were fortunate to face opponents who were generally ineffective, in some cases spectacularly so. The failures of the Nazi intelligence services were ultimately due to the authoritarian nature of the Third Reich itself. Like the intelligence services of all one-party authoritarian regimes, they were extremely good at intelligence collection: keeping detailed records on their enemies, conducting surveillance and using the fear of denunciation to terrorise populations into submission. They enforced the racial conspiracy theories of the Nazi leadership with ruthless zeal, orchestrating the ‘Final Solution’ with a cold, bureaucratic efficiency. They also mounted some successful operations against the British: the notorious Venlo incident was followed by the ‘Cicero’ spy affair, by which classified information was obtained from the British consulate-general in Istanbul from 1943 to 1944. In the Netherlands they identified and overran resistance groups working for the British Special Operations Executive, and recruited double agents from among their members. However, these successes were the exceptions, not the rule.

      Just like the Soviet Union’s NKVD operating at the same time, the Nazi intelligence services were astonishingly poor at intelligence assessment: their activities were more concerned with furthering the racial conspiracies of the leadership than with gathering critical information. The Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (‘Security Service’ – SD), for instance, had an entire division devoted to researching church records to identify Jewish and Slavic ancestry, while the SS, Hitler’s murderous elite corps, devoted its resources to researching bizarre subjects like the significance of top hats and СКАЧАТЬ