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

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СКАЧАТЬ to MI5’s Director-General’s charter, an SLO’s job with a colonial government was to provide ‘liaison, supply of external intelligence, training [and] operational advice’. They reported directly to MI5’s headquarters in London, and from there their reports, if deemed sufficiently serious, could be passed by MI5 all the way up to the JIC. SLOs also reported to regional MI5 liaison outfits, such as Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME), headquartered in Cairo, and Security Intelligence Far East (SIFE), headquartered in Singapore, whose function was to pool regional intelligence reports from MI5 as well as GCHQ and SIS, and pass the most important information back to the JIC in London. As the Cold War set in, MI5’s SLOs were also responsible for reporting to and liaising with Local Intelligence Committees (LICs), which sprung up (largely at MI5’s instigation) in a number of colonial territories and Commonwealth countries. High-ranking local officials sat on the LICs, and their meetings were often chaired by the colonial Governor himself, which meant that MI5’s SLOs had a direct channel of communication to all of the most important officials in British colonies. Again, reports from LICs were passed on to the JIC in London if deemed sufficiently serious. The problem was that often reports were not deemed sufficiently serious, and were merely passed up the hierarchy of the colonial intelligence apparatus, rather than to London. This lay at the heart of many of the failures that British intelligence experienced in successive colonies after 1945. Finally, it should be noted that the actual groundwork of intelligence-gathering in the British empire in the Cold War was performed by special branches established within colonial police forces. MI5 overhauled colonial special branches as the Cold War escalated after 1945.

      This book is based on a wealth of previously classified intelligence records which have only recently been released to the public. The research for it, which took the best part of ten years to complete, is predominantly based on MI5 records, which makes sense considering that MI5 was Britain’s imperial intelligence service. This has involved reading literally hundreds of MI5 records and dossiers, many of them multi-volume, spanning thousands of pages. As well as MI5 records, JIC records have helped to provide an overview of what the British intelligence community considered as threats to Britain and its empire during the post-war years. These have proved particularly useful as, at present, SIS does not release records from its own archives, although Keith Jeffery’s recent official history of the first forty years of SIS, like Christopher Andrew’s official centenary history of MI5, does provide an insight into areas still hidden away from historians. In addition to drawing on intelligence records that until recently were still classified, kept under lock and key in secret Whitehall departments, I have consulted a range of private collections of papers from a number of archives. Together with interviews conducted with former intelligence officials, it has thus been possible to weave together a narrative of the history of British intelligence, the Cold War, and Britain’s twilight of empire.

      During my doctorate at Cambridge, and then as a post-doctorate research Fellow also at Cambridge, I was given the exciting opportunity to be a research assistant on Christopher Andrew’s unprecedented official history of MI5. This position gave me privileged access to MI5 records, before their release. It was during my doctorate, and also in the research for Andrew’s authorised history of MI5, that I realised that the role of British intelligence was missing from the overwhelming majority of books on Britain’s end of empire. All of the records that this book is based on are now declassified, and are available at the National Archives in London. There are overlaps between this book and Andrew’s official history of MI5, but this book is more than a history of a single intelligence service, whether MI5, SIS or GCHQ. It is the first history, based on intelligence records, of the involvement of British intelligence as a whole, meaning all three of those services, in Britain’s twilight of empire during the Cold War.

      This book also draws on a tranche of previously ‘lost’ Colonial Office records which were only made available to the public in April 2012, after a high-level court case forced the British government into admitting their existence. These supposedly ‘rediscovered’ records are said to contain some of the grimmest paperwork on the history of Britain’s end of empire, and the story of how they finally came to see the light of day is a shameful chapter in the history of British colonial rule, a cover-up of massive proportions.

      In 2009 a group of elderly Kenyans instigated legal proceedings at the High Court in London against the British government for gross abuses allegedly committed on them while they were detained as Mau Mau suspects fifty years previously, during the colonial ‘Emergency’ in Kenya. As part of the proceedings of the case, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (the successor to the Colonial Office) was forced to reveal the existence of 8,800 files that colonial officials had secretly spirited away from thirty-seven different British colonies across the world, including Kenya, Cyprus, Aden, Palestine, Nigeria and Malaya, as the sun set on the empire. The official explanation for why these records were deliberately removed was that they might ‘embarrass’ Her Majesty’s government. In reality, it was because they contained some of the darkest secrets of the last days of empire.

      The first cache of the previously ‘lost’ records, only made publicly available in April 2012, revealed that the British government deliberately set about destroying, culling and then removing incriminating records from colonies as they approached independence in order to prevent them falling into the hands of post-independence governments. By destroying and removing these records, Britain was then able to inculcate a fictional history of its colonial benevolence, in which occasional abuses and violence may have been inflicted on local populations, but these were the exception, not the rule. The ‘lost’ Colonial Office records revealed such a claim to be nonsense. Burying the British empire was a far more bloody affair than has previously been acknowledged or supposed.¹¹

      The records that were not deliberately destroyed by colonial officials in the last days of empire were transferred back to Britain, and were eventually housed at a top-secret Foreign Office facility at Hanslope Park, near Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, where they remained hidden for fifty years, until the High Court (assisted by a few Foreign Office officials determined that they should see the light of day) forced their release. Hanslope Park’s official title is curiously neutral-sounding: ‘Her Majesty’s Communications Centre’. To local inhabitants, however, it is known as ‘spook central’. The secret facility has a long history of involvement with Britain’s intelligence services: during the Second World War it was home to the Radio Security Service, a SIGINT outfit known as MI8 that was responsible for detecting German agents operating in Britain. The idea that the government could have ‘mislaid’ or ‘lost’ this archive is as shameful as it is preposterous. The records at Hanslope Park referring to Kenya alone were housed in three hundred boxes, occupying 110 feet of shelving. Thanks to the Kenyan case that went before the High Court, we can now see that Hanslope Park acted as a depository for records detailing the most shameful acts and crimes committed in the last days of the British empire.¹² In June 2013 the British government settled the Kenyan case out of court. Speaking on behalf of the government, the foreign secretary, William Hague, issued a public apology, for the first time admitting that ‘Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration.’ By settling the case before it went to full trial, the British government was probably attempting to avoid establishing what for it would be an unwanted legal precedent, which could be used by claimants in other former British colonies alleging torture and mistreatment at the hands of British forces. The result, however, may be precisely the opposite: the British government’s apology, and the £20 million compensation it gave to Kenyan victims, may open the flood gates to other claimants.

      This is the first book to draw on that secret archive. At the time of writing, only the first wave of records has been released to the public, but more are to follow. This book is therefore necessarily the first word, not the final word, on the secrets contained at Hanslope Park. Even though only the first tranche of these records, amounting to about 1,200 files, is available at the time of writing, they still reveal a number of previously unknown horrific stories. They show that the ‘elimination of ranking terrorists’ was a repeated theme in secret monthly reports circulated by the director of intelligence in British-controlled Malaya in the 1950s, suggesting that СКАЧАТЬ