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

embassy in Madrid noted, this did not explain why the women’s shoes and brassière he was wearing fitted him.²⁴

      For all of Clarke’s undoubted eccentricities, it was unfair for Robertson to suggest that he and A-Force were ‘amateur’. The root of the tension between MI5 and outfits such as A-Force was that MI5 was concerned with counter-espionage for its own sake – to prevent an enemy from gaining British secrets – and viewed strategic deception as an extreme form of counter-espionage, whereas agencies like A-Force tended to view strategic deception as the ultimate goal. A-Force’s disinclination to regard counter-espionage as an end in itself seems to be the reason Robertson played down its efforts.²⁵

      Robertson was one of MI5’s best agent handlers in the first half of the twentieth century. He was a professional intelligence officer who joined the service in the early 1930s, having served in the Seaforth Highlanders regiment of the British Army – his tendency to persist in wearing the regiment’s uniform of Scottish trews earned him the affectionate nickname ‘passion-pants’ within MI5. During the war he led Section B1a of MI5, which was responsible for running all double-cross agents – 120 in total. Robertson’s success had much to do with his affable manner, which could put even tough enemy agents at ease. Nevertheless, as a professional intelligence officer, he naturally regarded those who saw matters differently from himself and MI5, particularly over the use of strategic deception, as novice upstarts.²⁶

      In labelling A-Force ‘amateur’, Robertson overlooked a crucial point: MI5, like the rest of the British intelligence community, actually owed much of its wartime success to the influx of amateur outsiders into its ranks. A flood of outstanding, if eccentric, individuals equipped Britain’s wartime intelligence services with a degree of ingenuity and creativeness hitherto missing. They included a number of high-powered intellectuals from Britain’s leading universities, with Bletchley Park in particular becoming a bastion of such brainpower. Among its most notable recruits were the brilliant mathematicians Alan Turing, Alfred ‘Dilly’ Knox and Gordon Welchman, all from Cambridge University. Two-thirds of the Fellowship of King’s College, Cambridge, worked at Bletchley Park at some point during the war. Turing was essentially responsible for devising an entirely new system of mechanised ‘bombes’ to power decryption efforts against the Enigma code – for this reason he has justifiably been termed the father of modern computer science. Recruits into SIS included high-calibre Oxford academics such as the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper and the philosophers Stuart Hampshire and Gilbert Ryle. Some notable literary figures also entered SIS’s wartime ranks, sometimes with humorous results: when Malcolm Muggeridge and Graham Greene were given training by SIS on the use of secret inks, which included instructions on how to obtain raw material for an ink codenamed ‘BS’ (birdshit), their reactions were understandably bemused. Intellectual heavyweights who joined MI5 during the war included Victor Rothschild from Cambridge, who became MI5’s in-house expert on sabotage, and from Oxford the academic lawyer H.L.A. Hart and the historian John Masterman. Masterman, a brilliant academic, a bachelor and one of the best spin bowlers in English cricket at the time, became the chairman of MI5’s ‘Twenty Committee’, which oversaw all the double-cross agents that MI5 ran during the war. In a typical example of the wordplay used by its academically-minded members, the Twenty Committee was so called because a double cross, ‘XX’, is the Roman numeral for twenty.²⁷

      Alongside this kind of intellectual firepower, less academic professions also produced some outstanding wartime officers for British intelligence. One of MI5’s best agent handlers, Cyril Mills, came from an unlikely family background: he was the son of the famous circus-owner Bertram Mills. Probably the best working relationship that developed during the war between an agent and an intelligence case officer was that of the ‘amateur’ MI5 wartime recruit Tomás Harris and his double agent Garbo. Harris joined MI5 from the unlikely background of an antiquarian art dealership in London. His fluency in Spanish made him the obvious handler for Garbo, and the two worked brilliantly together, building up an extremely detailed but entirely fictional espionage network, consisting of twenty-eight sub-agents in various parts of Britain, who in reality were ‘nothing more than a figment of the imagination’. Garbo had to make use of a guidebook when describing the locations of these bogus agents to his German handlers, because he had not travelled widely in Britain. As Harris later commented, Garbo’s imagination was worthy of Milton.²⁸

      Another benefit of ‘amateur’ wartime recruits like Harris was that they were less concerned with careerism, and staying within the corridors of power of the secret state, than their professional colleagues, which meant they were more free to come up with creative ideas and less worried if those ideas did not work. That said, it should be noted that ingenuity and creativity only go so far in the mechanics of agent-running: there comes a point when it has to involve tiresome, but necessary, methodical research. One former SIS officer who worked closely with MI5’s Section B1a recalled that his day-to-day business involved such mind-numbing tasks as reading a Madrid telephone directory backwards in order to find an agent’s name from an intercepted telephone number.²⁹

      BRITAIN’S INTELLIGENCE EMPIRE

      During the Second World War Britain’s intelligence services essentially faced the same kind of threats as they had in the First World War. The intelligence services of the Axis Powers attempted to incite revolt and unrest across the British empire just as the Central Powers had done. To counter these threats, Britain’s secret state built up unprecedented imperial intelligence capabilities. The Second World War was when Britain’s imperial intelligence came of age, and MI5’s pre-war vision of being an imperial security service became a reality. It increased the number of officers (DSOs) posted to colonial and Commonwealth countries from six at the start of the war to twenty-seven by its end, supported by twenty-one secretarial staff, stationed across the globe, from Trinidad to Aden to Kuala Lumpur. DSOs communicated with the ‘Overseas Control’ section in MI5’s headquarters in London, run by an officer named Col. Bertram Ede, using secure cyphers and under the cover address ‘Subsided’. During the war several senior MI5 officers made trips to British territories overseas to oversee and help reform local security. Both Dick White and Tar Robertson visited the Middle East, and recommended ways in which MI5’s inter-service outfit there, known as Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME), could function more efficiently, particularly in running double agents. MI5 also maintained highly secret laboratories in two outposts of empire, Bermuda and Singapore, run by specially recruited scientists – real-life James Bond Q-types – whose responsibilities included testing intercepted letters for secret inks.³⁰

      Along with MI5’s expanded imperial role, the war also revolutionised SIGINT operations in British territories overseas, and led to GC&CS’s direct involvement in colonial and Commonwealth countries. GC&CS’s regional hub in India, the so-called ‘Wireless Experimental Centre’ in Delhi, dramatically increased the amount and quality of traffic it intercepted, obtaining volumes of enemy communications once the Enigma code had been cracked. GC&CS did the same in other parts of the empire, in Hong Kong, Cyprus, Malta and the British Army’s wireless station at Sarafand in Palestine, which acted as a local collection point for GC&CS in the Middle East. A similar surge in intercepted traffic occurred in the largely civilian outfit that GC&CS ran at Heliopolis, in Egypt, and in the SIGINT station that the RAF ran for GC&CS in Iraq, which was occupied by Britain and the Allies during the war. The massive expansion of GC&CS’s overseas wartime operations led to some ingenious developments. When a tall antenna was needed to intercept radio communications in Egypt, workers at the Radio Security Service (RSS), the outfit under MI5’s control responsible for intercepting illicit radio communications sent to and from agents, came up with the idea of sticking one on top of the Great Pyramid – effectively making this wonder of the ancient world the largest wireless receiver on the planet.³¹

      As in the First World War, during the Second World War it became a strategy of Britain’s enemies to forge alliances with anti-colonial groups campaigning for independence within the British empire. Once again, Ireland was an obvious target for Germany to incite anti-British revolt, and the Abwehr attempted unsuccessfully to forge links with the Irish Republican Army in a plan codenamed Operation Kathleen. The IRA took full advantage of Britain’s weakened