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

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       ‘The Red Light is Definitely Showing’: MI5, the British Mandate of Palestine and Zionist Terrorism

      A bomb outrage to have any influence on public opinion now must go beyond the intention of vengeance or terrorism. It must be purely destructive.

      JOSEPH CONRAD, The Secret Agent¹

      I have always been clear that the best method of dealing with terrorists is to kill them.

      GENERAL SIR ALAN CUNNINGHAM, High Commissioner for Palestine and Transjordan²

      Despite all of its wartime successes, the British secret state did not emerge from the Second World War in a strong position. Reports from the ‘high table’ of the British intelligence community, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), stated frankly that it had little available intelligence on its ‘new’ enemy, the Soviet Union. The JIC’s immediate post-war reports are revealing as much for what they do not say as what they do. Although it seems incredible with hindsight, between December 1944 and March 1946 – that is, at precisely the time when we would imagine that the JIC would have been focusing on the re-emerging Soviet threat – the JIC was totally silent on the Soviet Union. Taken as a whole, JIC reports from this period do, however, shed light on the origins of the conflict that would shape the whole second half of the twentieth century: the Cold War. We can now see that in the immediate post-war period, during the transition between World War and Cold War, the JIC was relatively optimistic about Britain’s future relations with Moscow. It was certainly not expecting a war to break out between Britain or its allies and the Soviet Union.³

      However, by 1946 JIC reports, which were circulated to Britain’s leading military figures, a small circle of cabinet ministers and top civil servants, had begun to take a much more pessimistic and hard-line approach, and were warning that a war with the Soviet Union could erupt as the result of a series of mutual miscalculations between Western governments and Moscow. This supports the most recent research on the origins of the Cold War, offered by historians such as John Lewis Gaddis and former intelligence practitioners such as Gordon Barrass, which suggests that it arose essentially because of conflicting signals given by the West and the East, and a range of mutual misinterpretations.⁴

      WINNING THE WAR, LOSING THE PEACE

      The essential problem for the JIC was that between 1944 and 1946 it lacked any useful intelligence on the Soviet Union, either from SIS, GCHQ (the new name given to GC&CS at Bletchley Park after 1945) and MI5, or from their counterparts in US intelligence. This is not entirely surprising, given how difficult it was to gather any objective intelligence on the Soviet Union. As with the Third Reich, British and US intelligence found it virtually impossible to penetrate the heavy police and surveillance presence in the Soviet Union, run as a police state, and London and Washington also found it virtually impossible to understand the mindset of the post-war Soviet leadership. Churchill was close to the mark when he famously remarked in October 1939 that the Soviet Union was ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. At the end of the war, MI5’s in-house historian John Curry lamented that the position in which MI5 found itself regarding the Soviet Union in 1945 was the same as it had been regarding Nazi Germany in 1939: it faced a complete dearth of intelligence. In reality, the situation was even worse than Curry and MI5 assumed. From his position as head of Soviet counter-intelligence in Section IX within SIS, Kim Philby almost certainly helped to prepare some of the post-war JIC papers on the Soviet threat. Through the Cambridge spies and other well-placed agents in the West, the Soviet Union was able to obtain the most sensitive secrets of Britain and other Western governments in the post-war years.⁵

      One of the priorities for British and Allied intelligence in 1945 was dismantling Axis intelligence networks. As the end of the war approached, a stream of apparently reliable reports stated that the Nazi leadership was making megalomaniacal plans to rise again if Germany were defeated. These schemes focused on Hitler’s so-called ‘Werewolf’ organisation, through which SS officers planned to orchestrate guerrilla warfare against the victorious Allies. Meanwhile, the German security service (Sicherheitsdienst) was apparently planning to disperse sabotage sleeper agents across Europe and the rest of the world to help create a Fourth Reich out of the rubble of the Third ‘Thousand Year’ Reich. The first alarming reports along those lines came to MI5 in March 1945, when a four-man team of German sabotage agents was captured and interrogated in Allied France. They had been flown in a German-captured US B-17 Flying Fortress deep behind Allied lines in France, from which they parachuted in with instructions and equipment to organise sabotage networks. The agents revealed that their sabotage colleagues had been equipped with a number of poisons, ‘not the usual ampoules of hydrocyanic acid, with which agents have been equipped in recent months to commit suicide after arrest’. Instead, they were planning to kill Allied officers with poisons infused in everyday commodities such as sausages, chocolate, Nescafé, schnapps, whisky and Bayer aspirin. They had also been instructed on how to leave arsenic and acids on books, desks and door handles.⁶

      Alarm was heightened when the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) discovered sabotage plots involving secret weapons such as poisonous cigarette lighters which would kill the smoker; a belt buckle with a silver swastika that concealed a double-barrelled .32 pistol; and germ warfare ‘microbes’ that were to be hidden in female agents’ compact mirrors. SHAEF also obtained some mysterious pellets and brown capsules that would emit fatal vapours when placed in an ashtray and heated by a cigarette. These were forwarded to MI5 in London, where they were tested by the service’s expert on counter-sabotage, Lord Rothschild, and its in-house scientist, Professor H.V.A. Briscoe of Imperial College London. Although SHAEF was sceptical about some of the supposed sabotage plots, the conclusion of one of its reports in March 1945, entitled ‘German terrorist methods’, was that Allied personnel should be forbidden from eating any German foods or smoking German cigarettes, ‘under pain of severe penalties’.⁷

      However, contrary to all of the warnings and intelligence assessments made in London and Washington, the Nazi threat – and that of imperial Japan – disintegrated far more quickly than predicted. As it turned out, neither Nazi Germany nor the Japanese secret police (the Kempeitai) organised any effective stay-behind networks after the Allied victory. British intelligence nevertheless devoted significant resources to hunting down and capturing Nazi war criminals on the run. The Oxford historian and wartime SIS officer Hugh Trevor-Roper was sent by SIS to Berlin to make a detailed report on the final days of Hitler and the attempted escapes of Nazi leaders. His report eventually became a best-selling book, The Last Days of Hitler. One of the leading figures in the ‘Final Solution’, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, for example, was captured in Austria disguised as a huntsman and was then secretly transported to Britain. Though it has not been acknowledged in historical accounts to date, Kaltenbrunner’s interrogation by MI5 at Camp 020 played a significant role in his successful prosecution and execution at Nuremberg. Likewise, the notorious leader of the SS and architect of Nazi mass murder in Europe, Heinrich Himmler, was captured by the Allies as he attempted to flee across the German border in disguise. However, Himmler committed suicide in British detention, by biting into a cyanide pellet hidden in one of his teeth, before he could be brought to trial.⁸

      The political situation in post-war Britain did not create an easy atmosphere for its secret services. The new Labour government of Clement Attlee, elected in July 1945, made an election promise СКАЧАТЬ