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

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      But while historians in the past were crippled by a lack of official records relating to British intelligence and the end of empire, the same is not true today. Britain’s intelligence services have at last come in from the cold. In the late 1980s, the British government finally gave up its practice of denying the existence of its intelligence services, and placed them, for the first time, on a statutory basis – MI5 in 1989, and SIS and GCHQ in 1994. One of the consequences of this was that the intelligence services have, in recent years, at last removed themselves from the historical never-never land they previously occupied, and begun to acknowledge that they do actually have a past. In 1992 Whitehall departments began the so-called Waldegrave Initiative on Open Government, which for the first time brought independent historians into the review and declassification process of government records, including intelligence records. Since then, Britain’s intelligence services have begun to declassify records in earnest. This has meant that this book, and others like it, can finally place Britain’s secret departments in the historical position they deserve. In fact, the result of the government’s declassification process is that there are now almost too many intelligence records relating to the British empire to study.⁵

      Despite the unprecedented volume of records that have been crashing into archives in recent years, the overwhelming majority of historians of Britain’s end of empire have continued to ignore the role of Britain’s intelligence services. Even the best, and most recently published, histories of the period have a yawning gap when it comes to the role of the intelligence services. In the few books that do mention them, they usually appear as little more than an afterthought, in the footnotes of history. This omission is even more bizarre considering that almost every history of the Second World War now mentions the successes of Allied code-breakers at Bletchley Park in cracking the German Enigma code, known to the British as the ‘Ultra’ secret. However, hardly any currently available history of Britain’s end of empire (or for that matter of British activities in the Cold War) mentions Bletchley Park’s post-war successor, GCHQ. Judging from these books, we are supposed to believe that British code-breakers abruptly stopped operating in 1945. Unsurprisingly, this was not the case. Far from being a mere footnote to post-war history, in reality Britain’s intelligence services were as active in the years after 1945 as they were during wartime. In fact, since the early twentieth century they had been actively working behind the scenes, removed from public gaze, just as they continue to be today in many of the countries that formerly comprised the British empire. With this in mind, the basic proposition of this book can be summarised concisely: it argues that the current state of the history of Britain’s end of empire is in the same position that the history of the Second World War was in before the disclosure of the Ultra secret. By ignoring the role of intelligence, our understanding of the demise of the British empire is at best incomplete, and at worst fundamentally flawed.⁶

      It is impossible to understand how and why British intelligence was involved in Britain’s often violent retreat from empire after 1945 without first understanding the root causes of why Britain relinquished that empire. Readers should be warned that this is an enormous subject, with as many different interpretations as there are historians. Pinpointing an exact moment for the beginning of the end of the British empire is an archetypal brain-teaser, which historians are unable to agree on – some have argued that it began in the early twentieth century with the Second Boer War in South Africa, between 1899 and 1902, when it took Britain much longer than predicted, and 45,000 troops, to defeat rebellious farmers in the colony. Others date it to the Second World War, particularly with the Atlantic Charter in August 1941 and then the Lend Lease programme, by which the United States provided Britain with urgently needed war supplies, both of which meant that Washington could largely dictate the future of Britain and its empire after the war. Others believe the decisive moment was the advent of the new Labour government in 1945, committed to the reform of local government in British colonies. Still others believe that it occurred much later, with the disastrous Suez crisis in 1956. The reality is that it is probably impossible to pin down a single event that conclusively represents the end of Britain’s imperial power, though if I were forced to choose one, it would perhaps be the Suez crisis, which, for reasons we shall see in this book, represented a humiliating failure for Britain and revealed that it was no longer a major world power.⁷

      Nevertheless, out of all the ink devoted over the years to understanding why Britain ‘scuttled’ its empire in the post-war years, it is possible to divide the explanations given by historians into four distinct categories. One is that given by nationalist historians, who argue (unsurprisingly) that anti-colonial ‘freedom fighters’ were responsible for forcibly ejecting the British from their colonies. A second explanation is economic necessity: Britain emerged from the Second World War essentially as a bankrupt state, facing a credit crunch of epic proportions, and was forced to slash its defence budget in the two decades after 1945, at precisely the time that its military commitments in its colonies abroad increased. As the historian Paul Kennedy has put it, Britain was overstretched in its imperial commitments in 1945, and was forced to relinquish control of its colonies because it could not afford to keep them on. A third interpretation is a failure of will: Britain won the war in 1945, but then proceeded to lose the peace, no longer desiring to maintain a colonial empire. A fourth interpretation is that of external pressures: after 1945, the British government was attacked on the international stage for its colonial empire, a repugnant anachronism in the post-war world, which was widely criticised by the United States and the Soviet Union alike.⁸

      It is tempting to suppose that there was a linear decline in Britain’s status in the post-war years, from a leading world power to a second-rate nation, but this was not the case. Even labelling British decolonisation a ‘process’ is misleading, because it implies that it was a planned programme. However, it only seems like a process when viewed in retrospect. The liquidation of the empire was never written down as a deliberate policy, by the Colonial Office or any other government department. It would be reading history backwards to suppose that Britain somehow marched triumphantly towards an enlightened, post-colonial future in the years after 1945. The fact is that few, if any, official British records dealing with anti-colonial movements in the late 1940s and early 1950s actually discuss ‘independence’. Instead, they refer to ‘self-government’, which meant that colonies would begin to take control of their own affairs, but with Britain usually retaining control over their security, defence and foreign affairs.

      Self-government for colonies was not the same as full independence. When Clement Attlee’s Labour government came to power in 1945 it revised Britain’s former policies in the Middle East, largely to combat the encroachment of the Soviet Union in the region, away from military bases and autocracies to a commitment to more broadly-based popular regimes. As Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin memorably put it, Britain would throw its support behind peasants, not pashas. At first glance, this looks like a commitment to broadly-based democratic rule in the empire, which would inevitably mean eventual independence for colonies. However, Britain’s transfer of power in India in 1947 and its evacuation from Palestine in 1948 did not herald the empire falling apart under a tidal wave of democratic nationalism. Attlee’s government actually put the brakes on colonial emancipation whenever it could. Between 1948 and 1959 only three colonies gained independence from Britain – the Sudan (in 1956), the Gold Coast and Malaya (both in 1957) – and some British officials were dismissive of the idea of relinquishing greater control to colonies for much longer than we might imagine. The wartime Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, claimed that giving colonies self-government, let alone independence, would be like giving a ten-year-old child ‘a latch key, a bank account and a shot gun’, while others spoke, albeit rhetorically, of a revival and resurgence of empire, if only as a strategy for winning the Cold War. The great imperial historian Jack Gallagher pointed out that recruitment to the Colonial Office doubled in the decade after 1945. In this respect, in the post-war years the British empire was being reshaped and refurbished, not abandoned. MI5 approached its Cold War imperial responsibilities in a similar vein, vastly expanding them after 1945. It was only as events progressed that it became clear СКАЧАТЬ