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

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СКАЧАТЬ with the Japanese, show an affinity with many of the tenets of National Socialism. As a corollary to the wartime ‘Jewish Brigade’ of the British Army, during the war some 3,000 Indians joined a special division of the German army (the Wehrmacht), which was later absorbed into the notorious Waffen-SS. Facing a ‘fifth column’ threat, the British authorities in Delhi arrested and detained its supposed ringleaders. Bose was imprisoned in late 1940, as was his main rival in India’s Congress Party, Jawaharlal Nehru. However, in January 1941 Bose escaped incarceration in Calcutta and fled to Afghanistan, where he made contact with German forces, including the Abwehr.³⁹

      Bose and Ram’s fortunes were transformed by Nazi Germany’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, on 22 June 1941. Hitler’s disastrous decision was the result of his desire to establish a slave empire and ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) in the east for ‘pure’ Germanic races. One of its results was that previous diplomatic alliances were instantly overturned, with the Soviet Union and Britain becoming allies overnight. While Bose, India’s so-called ‘man of destiny’, remained a supporter of Nazi Germany, Ram held his allegiance to communism and the Soviet Union even higher, which led him to side with the Soviet Union’s new ally: his old foe, Britain. Ram started to work as an agent for British and Soviet intelligence – one of the few double agents shared by the two nations during the war. He presented himself to the Abwehr station in Kabul as a kind of modern-day Rudyard Kipling or Lawrence of Arabia figure, and started passing misinformation to them in October 1942.⁴⁰

      As in other parts of the British empire, local security agencies in India looked to Britain’s homeland intelligence services, particularly MI5, for guidance on how to run double-cross agents. Early in 1943 a senior MI5 officer, John Marriott, who was secretary to the ‘Twenty Committee’, travelled to India – with the honorary rank of Major, in order to afford him ‘better treatment’ than a civilian – to help coordinate the running of double agents, particularly Silver. Marriott was given a warm welcome by the IB in Delhi, but as his reports back to MI5 in London reveal, he was far from impressed with the IB. Between bouts of dysentery and suffering from the extreme heat in India – there are still apparently sweat marks on some of the pages of his reports – he noted that the IB had only fifty officers in total, stationed across the various provinces of India. With just twelve officers at its headquarters in Delhi, the IB was, according to Marriott, ‘understaffed and overworked’. Moreover, apart from Silver, it lacked any other meaningful double-cross agents. However, as Marriott conceded, part of the problem was that he often found it difficult to understand the details of cases in India – a former London solicitor, he undoubtedly had an English ‘home counties’ outlook. As he explained in one report to MI5 in March 1943:

      I quite honestly find myself unable to recall the name of the man whose file I am reading sometimes, and anything like association of ideas or even being able to recall a name which appears on the previous page is for the moment beyond me. Place names are even worse. I don’t pretend to be awfully good at the geography of western Europe so you can imagine the lack of response I feel when I read that a man has travelled from Monywa to Kalewa and thence has followed the Tamu Road.⁴¹

      Despite the meagre resources the IB in Delhi had at its disposal, together with MI5, it ran the Silver case – perhaps so named because one of the IPI officials working on it in London was a Mr Silver – remarkably successfully. Overall control came under the military intelligence unit led by Lt. Col. Peter Fleming, attached to the staff of the Commander in Chief in India, Wavell, who showed as much appreciation for intelligence there as he had in the Middle East. However, the day-to-day running of the case was carried out by William ‘Bill’ Magan, then a British Army officer attached to the IB, who would go on to play an important role in MI5’s involvement with anti-colonial movements, and broader issues of British decolonisation, in the post-war years. Magan had begun his career as an Indian cavalry officer, and was described to his wife before their marriage in New Delhi in 1940 as ‘a cavalry officer who has actually read a book’. With Magan’s assistance, Ram successfully portrayed himself to the Abwehr in Kabul as the head of a totally fictitious ‘All India Revolutionary Committee’, and depicted India as on the brink of disintegration due to Axis subversion and propaganda. In reality, the ‘All India Revolutionary Committee’ was nothing more than a figment of Ram and Magan’s imagination, and the wireless communications despatched to the Abwehr every night actually originated from Magan and Ram in the garden of the British High Commission in Delhi. As a subsequent MI5 report noted, through Ram British intelligence established a ‘direct line’ to Berlin. The disinformation provided by Ram, portraying India as on its last knees, helped to persuade the German High Command not to transfer more military divisions to India. Ram also made contact by wireless with Japanese intelligence in Burma. Documents captured after the war revealed that, thanks in part to the deception information he provided, the Japanese military judged that Allied troops in South-East Asia numbered fifty-two divisions, a staggering 72 per cent higher than reality. Subhas Chandra Bose died in an air crash in August 1945, never aware that Ram was secretly working for British and Soviet intelligence. In his posthumously published memoirs he misguidedly described Ram as his trusted comrade, ‘who secretly passed messages to comrades in India’ against the British.⁴²

      FORCE 136: THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE

      At the same time that Britain’s intelligence services were running double-cross agents like Silver in India, its special forces were also actively thwarting Axis plots in the empire. British territories in the Middle East, particularly Egypt, occupy as important a place in the history of British irregular warfare as they do in that of British strategic deception. As with modern strategic deception, the Middle East was the birthplace of Britain’s modern special forces. Dudley Clarke, the founding father of strategic deception, was also one of the founders of the modern British special forces. In 1940 he was instrumental in setting up a self-sufficient and highly mobile new unit which he termed the commandos, and in July 1941 he helped to establish one of the most famous of all special forces units: the Special Air Service (SAS). The SAS was founded in Egypt by Colonel David Stirling, under the British Commander in Chief of the Middle East, General Claude Auchinleck, but Clarke provided valuable input to the new regiment: he explained to its leaders the benefits of strategic deception, as he had done to the LCS, and he even helped to create its emblem, featuring the sword of Damocles, which it retains to the present day. During the war the SAS successfully used groups of men and jeeps, known as Long Range Desert Groups, to harry German forces, and after the war it would perform a valuable role in anti-colonial revolts, or ‘Emergencies’ as they were termed, in various parts of the globe.

      Along with the commandos and the SAS, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) also conducted sabotage operations against the Axis Powers in various parts of the British empire. SOE is commonly associated with Europe, but in fact it was an empire-wide service, operating in the Middle East, Africa and the Far East. It was very much the stuff of ‘Boy’s Own’ adventure stories. Strictly speaking, in the British tradition at least, it was not an intelligence agency at all, but a paramilitary organisation, established in July 1940 with the aim of waging a supposedly ‘new’ type of irregular warfare against the Axis Powers – apparently the lessons of guerrilla warfare that existed from Lawrence of Arabia’s days had been forgotten by the Chiefs of Staff in London. SOE picked up where Lawrence had left off. Its remit was, to use Churchill’s famous phrase, ‘to set Europe ablaze’. Its headquarters in Electra House, Baker Street – earning its personnel the nickname ‘the Baker Street Irregulars’ – were inconspicuously identified by a brass plate on the front door that merely read ‘Inter-Services Research Bureau’. From there SOE organised paramilitary and sabotage operations in enemy-occupied territories in Europe and further afield, as well as establishing communications networks in those countries and arranging escape routes from them. In total, during the war it probably employed close to 10,000 men and 3,000 women across the globe.⁴³

      At first SOE’s operations in the Far East were run out of Singapore, but with the Japanese advance in late 1941 and early 1942, its headquarters СКАЧАТЬ