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

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СКАЧАТЬ Philby poisonously described him as tempestuous and incompetent: ‘His intellectual endowment was slender. As an intelligence officer, he was inhibited by a lack of imagination, inattention to detail and a sheer ignorance of the world we were fighting in,’ but even Philby conceded that Cowgill had ‘a fiendish capacity for work’, sometimes toiling through the night, knocking an array of pipes into wreckage on a stone ashtray on his desk. Whether this was the case or not, he was certainly spectacularly outmanoeuvred by Philby for wartime promotion within SIS – with disastrous consequences for British intelligence, as we shall see.⁴³

      There were similar colonial connections within GC&CS, the first Director of which, Alistair Denniston, began his career in India, where he successfully intercepted and decrypted Russian traffic. Likewise, the department in GC&CS that successfully broke Comintern radio traffic in the 1930s was led by a brilliant major from the Indian army, John Tiltman, who had been running a small but successful interception outfit in north-west India before being brought back to London in 1929. There were also colonial connections in Special Branch at Scotland Yard. Its pre-war head, Basil Thomson, had an eccentric colonial career: after being educated at Eton and dropping out of Oxford he joined the Colonial Office, and at the age of twenty-eight became the Prime Minister of Tonga, where – as he vividly noted in his memoirs – his first true friends were cannibals. He also went on to become private tutor to the Crown Prince of Siam and Governor of Dartmoor Prison.⁴⁴

      Officers in Britain’s intelligence services brought to their new roles many of the practices they had acquired in their colonial postings. In GC&CS, Tiltman wholeheartedly incorporated decryption techniques pioneered in India. The Special Branch adopted the technique of fingerprinting, which became the most basic form of police and security investigations in the modern world, from India, where it had been invented. MI5 also embraced techniques pioneered in the empire. When its Registry collapsed during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 – essentially giving up under the strain imposed on it during an apparently imminent Nazi invasion – Petrie advised reforming it on lines that he had devised for card-cataloguing ‘revolutionaries and terrorist suspects’ in India.⁴⁵

      The intelligence services of other major European powers had similar colonial hangovers, both in terms of staff and practices. Some influential French intelligence officers during the Second World War started their careers in the French colonial empire. More ominously, there were also colonial connections with the secret police and intelligence services of Europe’s murderous ‘totalitarian’ regimes before 1945. This was first identified by the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) argued that twentieth-century totalitarianism had its roots in European colonial rule in the late nineteenth century. Arendt believed that the type of savagery that European powers inflicted upon colonial populations, as graphically depicted in Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, modelled on Belgian rule in the Congo, was in the first half of the twentieth century brought back to its heartland: Europe. Although Arendt’s thesis was at first largely discounted by scholars, more recently it has been re-examined, and is now regarded by historians as having in many ways been proved correct.⁴⁶

      The Soviet secret police, the NKVD – subsequently renamed the KGB – imposed security practices such as mass detention which had been forged by the British in India, the French in Algeria, and by the Russians in their own empire. In Spain, Franco’s 1936 rebellion against the democratic government was waged predominantly by former Africanista generals, who, as one study has noted, were steeped in a ‘colonial mentality’ and embarked on a ‘colonial clearing-up’, namely institutionalised repression, of a working class deemed to be ‘hardly human’. These colonial connections with authoritarian regimes are hardly surprising when it is considered that the nature of European colonial rule allowed for the development of new forms of bureaucratic domination of ‘inferior’ races, which involved the registration of entire populations, mass deportation and the forced separation of races. These were all hallmarks of mass murder in Europe in the twentieth century: cataloguing, controlling and massacring. Colonies also provided a testing ground for new forms of warfare, which could be freely deployed against expendable, lesser, races. Europe’s colonial ‘small wars’ gave rise to, or allowed for the first testing of, concentration camps, barbed wire and machine guns – which were all then re-imported for use in Europe itself. The genocidal war that the Prusso-German army waged in the German colony of South-West Africa (present-day Namibia) foreshadowed the extermination policies conducted by the Nazis on the Eastern Front a generation later. It is no coincidence that it was in German South-West Africa that one of the founders of Nazi pseudo-scientific ideas of ‘racial hygiene’, Eugen Fischer, conducted his first research experiments supposedly proving the ‘inferiority’ of certain races. Later Fischer led forced sterilisation programmes against racial ‘degenerates’ in Nazi Germany, which paved the way for and legitimised mass-murder programmes – Fischer was a teacher of the so-called ‘Angel of Death’ at Auschwitz, Joseph Mengele.⁴⁷

      In the years before 1945, then, both in Britain and in a number of other European imperial powers, both democratic and non-democratic, there was a continuum between empire and ‘domestic’ intelligence services. However, as we shall see, in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century precisely the opposite occurred. In the two decades after 1945, Britain’s intelligence services posted a succession of intelligence officers out to the empire and Commonwealth. Recruits to MI5 at this time spent on average between a quarter and a half of their careers stationed in colonial or Commonwealth countries. It was the cataclysmic event of the Second World War that permanently transformed the imperial responsibilities of the British secret state. Ironically, the importance of MI5’s colonial responsibilities would increase after 1945, precisely when Britain’s imperial power began to decline.⁴⁸

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       Strategic Deception: British Intelligence, Special Operations and Empire in the Second World War

      ‘You were a spy then?’

      ‘Not quite … Really I was still a thief. No great patriot. No great hero. They just made my skills official.’

      MICHAEL ONDAATJE, The English Patient¹

      Towards the end of the Second World War, Sir David Petrie, the wartime Director-General of MI5, wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden, outlining some of the notable successes that MI5 and British intelligence more generally had gained during the war. As Petrie explained, the successes of Britain’s wartime intelligence services had necessarily not been disclosed to the public, and it was likely that they would have to remain under a veil of secrecy for the foreseeable future: ‘The full story can perhaps never be told but if it could be, it could perhaps claim acceptance as truth mainly on the grounds that it seems stranger than fiction.’ In many ways the story of Britain’s wartime intelligence successes still seems stranger than fiction, but luckily for us it can now be told. Put simply, the story is that during the war Britain’s intelligence services gained unprecedented successes: they learned more about their enemies than any power had ever learned about another in the history of warfare. At the end of the war, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, personally congratulated them for the role they had played, which in his opinion was ‘decisive’ in bringing the conflict to a successful conclusion for the Allies.²

      Britain’s intelligence services achieved their wartime successes both in Britain itself and across the empire and British-occupied territories – from the deserts of North Africa to the hilltops of India and the steamy jungles of Malaya. The Second World War was the event that revolutionised Britain’s imperial intelligence responsibilities, with MI5, SIS and GCHQ being directly involved in colonial affairs in earnest СКАЧАТЬ