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

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      Rather than following a planned programme, Britain’s exit from empire was actually a pragmatic response to events, in which the Colonial Office, assisted by MI5, attempted to negotiate the best possible outcome for the British government to events that were often beyond their control. Harold Macmillan, under whose Conservative premiership from 1957 to 1963 Britain rapidly withdrew from empire, famously quipped that political decisions were taken because of ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ As historians like to point out, there were two great periods during which events overtook Britain and accelerated its withdrawal from empire: from 1945 to 1948 and from 1959 to 1964. The main pressures on the British government in both periods were from the USA, the UN and the great anti-colonial empire in the East, the Soviet Union.⁹

      The pace of British decolonisation sped up when Macmillan appointed Iain Macleod as Colonial Secretary in October 1959, with a remit to ‘get on with it’. Within two years of taking his post, Macleod had effectively worked himself out of a job. Between 1960 and 1964 a total of seventeen British colonies gained independence, and as we shall see, MI5 was involved in many of these transfers of power. Macleod stated that he deliberately hastened the pace of withdrawal from colonies to avoid protracted violence and large-scale bloodshed of the kind seen in the Belgian Congo. The disintegration of Belgian rule in the Congo in 1960, with its ensuing chaos and carnage, was a visible warning for British policy-makers of how not to manage an exit from empire. One of Macleod’s successors as Colonial Secretary, Duncan Sandys, who between 1962 and 1964 became another great liquidator of empire, to borrow the phrase of the historian David Cannadine, stated in July 1964 that ‘we have no desire to prolong our colonial obligations for a day longer than is necessary’. This is the closest we can come to finding an official declaration by Macmillan’s government of the ‘end of empire’.

      In the opinion of one of the most eminent historians of Britain’s end of empire, Ronald Hyam, it was the external pressures imposed on the British government by the United States, the United Nations and the Soviet Union, more than any other reason, that explain how and why Britain relinquished its empire. As Hyam and several others have shown, the geopolitical concerns of the Cold War formed the context, and dictated the manner, in which Britain scrambled out of its empire. It was also the Cold War context that lies at the heart of the involvement of British intelligence in British decolonisation. As almost every history of the period has shown, the Cold War was primarily an intelligence conflict, in which the intelligence services of Western governments and Eastern Bloc countries were pitted against each other, and fought at the front line. One veteran Whitehall intelligence official, Michael Herman, has rightly said that during the Cold War, Western and Eastern Bloc countries relied on intelligence assessments (of each other) to an extent that was unprecedented in peacetime. Given the connection that existed between Britain’s end of empire and the Cold War on the one hand, and the Cold War and intelligence on the other, it should come as little surprise to learn that Britain’s intelligence services played a significant role in British decolonisation. ¹⁰

      This book offers a new chapter to the existing history of Britain’s last days of empire, as well as to our understanding of the Cold War and the history of international relations after 1945. Against the background of the Cold War, that is to say the rapid breakdown in relations between Western governments and the Soviet Union after 1945, and with the looming spectre of Soviet KGB-sponsored subversion in Britain’s dwindling colonial empire, British intelligence played a crucial role in the way that post-war British governments pulled out of the empire and passed power to independent national states across the globe. Britain’s clandestine services had to deal with a succession of insurgencies (or ‘Emergencies’) across the empire, but at the same time tried to maintain close links with the very groups that were often violently rejecting British rule. Given the geopolitical concerns of the Cold War, a main requirement for Britain and its allies was to prevent former British colonies being absorbed by the Soviet Union as satellite states. British colonial intelligence thus lay at the forefront of the Cold War, both for Britain and its main Western ally, the United States. The sequence of colonial insurgencies that Britain experienced in the death throes of its empire threatened at times to turn the Cold War into a hot war. In this context, the so-called ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States – much discussed, particularly on this side of the Atlantic, but also much misunderstood – was the linchpin and driving force for an enormous overhaul of colonial intelligence that Britain embarked on in the early Cold War. As successive spy scandals broke out in Britain, particularly the revelation of the ‘Cambridge spies’ in 1951, pressure from Washington forced London to enhance security standards not only at home, but across its colonial empire.

      Before proceeding any further, it would be useful to say a few words on terminology. One of the difficulties in studying intelligence history is that, like the study of government departments more generally, sometimes ideas can get lost in an alphabet soup of acronyms, so getting some of the basic terminology that will appear in this book sorted out at this stage will be helpful. There are three main services that comprise the British intelligence community: MI5, GCHQ and SIS. The Security Service, also known as MI5, plays a central role in this book. It was not simply a ‘domestic’ intelligence service, as is sometimes thought, but was Britain’s imperial intelligence service, responsible for security intelligence matters (counter-espionage, counter-subversion and counter-sabotage) in all territories across Britain’s global empire. Then there is Britain’s largest, best-funded, and most secretive intelligence service: the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), which after 1945 was renamed the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). GC&CS was, and GCHQ remains, responsible for intercepting and decoding communications, known as signals intelligence (or SIGINT). Thirdly there is Britain’s foreign intelligence service, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, which was, and remains, responsible for gathering human-based intelligence (known as ‘HUMINT’) from non-British territories all over the world. From the little information that can be discerned from publicly available sources, it appears that SIS’s espionage operations took place in a world less like that of James Bond, its most famous fictional officer, than like that from the pages of a John le Carré novel – less to do with licences to kill and high-tech gadgets, and more to do with grey-haired men in pipe-smoke-filled rooms, hunched over stacks of yellowing files, with matron-like women regularly bringing the tea trolley around.

      The most senior body within the British intelligence community, then as now, was the Joint Intelligence Committee (or JIC). It was responsible for collating intelligence from all the different intelligence services (MI5, SIS and GCHQ), as well as military intelligence (army, navy and air force), assessing it and distributing it to high levels of the British government. The JIC was not an intelligence collection body, but an intelligence assessment outfit. In the first years after its establishment before the Second World War, it came solely under the control of the military Chiefs of Staff. However, as the Cold War set in after 1945, and particularly after the Suez crisis in 1956, the JIC moved out of the control of the military and became directly responsible to civilian cabinet ministers. As well as sitting at the peak of the domestic British intelligence community, the JIC was also positioned at the centre of a complicated web of imperial intelligence agencies and assessment bodies stretching across the empire. Reading some reports on how British imperial intelligence operated in the Cold War, one gets the impression that it was a finely-turned, well-oiled machine. In reality, however, it evolved haphazardly, and looked better on paper than it performed in reality. This was revealed by the repeated intelligence failures in British colonies after 1945, as intelligence chiefs spectacularly failed to detect outbreaks of anti-colonial insurgencies in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Aden.

      In theory, at least, the British intelligence community formed a web across the empire through MI5. MI5’s representatives stationed in empire and Commonwealth countries were called Security Liason Officers (SLOs). Until recently their activities have been shrouded in secrecy, with their actions leaving hardly any traces in official British records. With the recent release of MI5 records, we can now see that SLOs operated from official British residencies in colonial and Commonwealth countries, sometimes openly and sometimes under cover, СКАЧАТЬ