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

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СКАЧАТЬ of MI5, and was falsely accused of being a Soviet agent. In reality, he, arguably more than anyone else in the British intelligence community, took seriously and attempted to investigate wartime Soviet espionage, arguing that the leopard had not changed its spots. Rather than the Soviet embassy in London, which was now a forbidden fruit, the main priority for Hollis’s F-Division was surveillance of the British Communist Party. This was never going to be sufficient to detect Soviet espionage, for Soviet agents knew to distance themselves from overt communist organisations, but given the restrictions imposed on F-Division, it was the only legitimate avenue left open to it. One of Hollis’s personal triumphs was in 1942, when he organised the installation of bugging equipment in the headquarters of the British Communist Party in King Street, London. These eavesdropping microphones, codenamed source ‘Table’ or ‘special facilities’ in MI5 records, were almost certainly telephone receivers modified so as to be always switched on, thus picking up ambient conversations. As we shall see, they would provide MI5 with crucial intelligence in the post-war years about various anti-colonial ‘liberation’ leaders who communicated with the British Communist Party.⁶⁴

      Towards the end of the war, SIS also started to focus on the Soviet threat. In 1944 it set up a new department, Section IX, the precise remit of which was the ‘collection and interpretation of information concerning Soviet and communist espionage and subversion in all parts of the world outside of British territory’. Unfortunately, the second head of Section IX (after John ‘Jack’ Curry, seconded from MI5 to SIS) was none other than the high-level Soviet penetration agent Kim Philby. Philby was arguably the most successful of the five so-called ‘Cambridge spies’ – the others were Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – who had been recruited by Soviet intelligence before the war and then manoeuvred themselves into sensitive positions in the British wartime administration, including its intelligence services, by portraying themselves as trustworthy members of the Establishment – four of the five went to Trinity College, Cambridge. In fact, because so few pre-war MI5 and SIS officers had university degrees – most had military backgrounds, often with colonial experience – the perverse situation was that at the start of the war Soviet intelligence actually had more recruits from British universities working for it than Britain’s own intelligence services did. Coupled with their respectable backgrounds, another reason Philby and the other members of the ‘Cambridge Five’ were able to penetrate to the heart of wartime Britain was that MI5’s background checks at the time were totally inadequate: they were based on a process called ‘negative vetting’, meaning that they depended on whatever information MI5 had in its Registry. It did not carry out its own active background checks. This process overlooked a simple fact: that it was possible for agents to make themselves invisible to MI5 by deliberately distancing themselves from organisations whose membership would lead to their names being filed in its Registry – which is exactly what the five Cambridge spies did.⁶⁵

      The story of how Philby got himself appointed as the head of Section IX is the epitome of deception and subterfuge. By a process of skilfully outmanoeuvring his rivals, particularly his immediate superior, Felix Cowgill, and playing one faction in SIS off against another, he made himself the most obvious candidate for the post. As one of Philby’s wartime colleagues in SIS, Robert Cecil, later recalled of his appointment, ‘the history of espionage contains few, if any, comparable achievements’. From his position as the second head of Section IX, Philby was able to betray all of the most important British efforts to counter Soviet espionage in the immediate post-war years to Moscow. In the years to come he would establish himself as Whitehall’s leading expert on Soviet espionage. Before his eventual exposure in the early 1950s, he was even being tipped as a future Chief of SIS – the consequences of which for Western intelligence in the Cold War can scarcely be imagined. The post-war diaries of MI5’s Guy Liddell, only declassified in October 2012, show that he struggled to come to terms with the defection of Burgess and Maclean, and the suspicion cast upon Philby, whom he trusted. Philby has justifiably been described as the greatest spy in history.⁶⁶

      HORIZON SCANNING

      As Britain’s wartime intelligence machine began to refocus on the Soviet threat, one area provided more information than anywhere else about the operational methods used by Soviet intelligence. From 1940 onwards, the two states of Iraq and Persia (Iran) were jointly occupied by British and Soviet forces, and this led to exceptionally close collaboration between the two Allied intelligence services. Iran’s capital Tehran was also the setting in November 1943 of the famous meeting of the ‘Big Three’, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, which symbolised, at least outwardly, the collaboration between the Allies. However, as Churchill later claimed, it was in Tehran that he realised for the first time how small the British nation was:

      There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo, and between the two sat the poor little English donkey …⁶⁷

      From late 1944 onwards the British collaborated with Soviet intelligence in running a double agent, codenamed ‘Kiss’ – one of only two double agents run by British and Soviet intelligence together during the war, the other being Silver (see pp.50–3). Kiss, an Iranian national recruited by the Abwehr in pre-war Hamburg, was run from the inter-service British intelligence centre based in Baghdad, Combined Intelligence Centre Iraq (CICI). Under the guidance of his British and Soviet controllers, he radioed false information on British and Soviet troop movements in Iraq and Iran to the Abwehr. However, the real importance of the Kiss case, as is revealed by his MI5 file, was the proximity it gave British officials to their Soviet counterparts, allowing them to study their methods at close quarters – as the Soviets doubtless did to the British too. MI5’s DSOs in Tehran and Baghdad used the opportunity to gather as much information as they could on their Soviet opposite numbers, particularly the names and backgrounds of intelligence officers, and passed this information back to F-Division in London. MI5’s DSO in Tehran, Alan Roger, explained in one report in December 1944 that although gathering information on Soviet intelligence was not part of his official mission – the Foreign Office ban still outlawed it – he nevertheless thought that it might one day become useful. He was more right than he could have known. The Kiss case collapsed in March 1945, apparently due to bitter mutual mistrust between Soviet and British officials – a forewarning of events that were to follow with the onset of the Cold War.⁶⁸

      Occupied Iraq and Iran gave an early indication of the kinds of problems Britain would repeatedly face in the post-war years, as relations between Western countries and the ‘great bear’ to the east deteriorated. Towards the end of the war, the head of CICI in Baghdad despatched back to London a series of stark warnings about the consequences of Britain pulling out of Iraq and Iran too quickly at the end of hostilities. If it did so, he predicted, both countries would soon be overrun by Soviet intelligence officials, who would seek to turn them into Soviet satellite states. As we shall see, this fear would greatly colour London’s reaction to colonial ‘liberation’ movements in the post-war years, as the Cold War set in.⁶⁹

      As the war in Europe wound down, MI5 and SIS began to address the problem of the Soviet Union in earnest. In December 1944 Sir David Petrie noted that for a long time he had been ‘a complete convert to the view that the role of F. Division will appreciate in importance after the war’. After the end of hostilities in Europe in May 1945, as Petrie was preparing to leave his position as MI5’s Director-General, he circulated a long memorandum ‘on the shape of things to come’, in which he forecast – pessimistically but accurately – that one form of totalitarianism in Europe would be replaced by another. In August 1945 he held a high-level meeting with the Chief of SIS, Sir Stewart Menzies, about the problem of crypto-communists employed on secret work – on which Philby in SIS would certainly have been briefed – and on 5 September 1945 he, Hollis and other F-Division officers discussed at length, the ‘leakage of information through members of the Communist Party’. Their meeting was more significant than either Petrie or Hollis realised. Later that same day, a cypher clerk working at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Igor Gouzenko, defected to the West, bringing with him СКАЧАТЬ