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

it was developing a plan with the Malayan guerrilla fighters, codenamed Operation Zipper, for the Allied reinvasion and recapture of Malaya and Singapore. However, events were to overtake these plans: the war ended with the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, before Operation Zipper could become a reality.⁴⁷

      Over the years, much ink has been devoted to analysing the successes and failures of SOE, both in the Far East and in Europe. One way of measuring its effectiveness is by considering the goals it set itself. From 1943 onwards, Force 136’s aims were essentially to establish a submarine link between Ceylon and Malaya, to create an intelligence system within Malaya, contact and support guerrilla fighters, and find any survivors of left-behind forces. Given these aims, it seems fair to say that it was largely successful. In other ways, however, Force 136 was a failure. It never really adopted the sabotage role that it was intended to have in Malaya – which was, after all, the main purpose of SOE. Instead, it developed into much more of an intelligence agency than was originally planned, and thereby trod squarely on the toes of SIS. Unsurprisingly, the result was a fierce turf war, with SIS regarding SOE as a maverick organisation full of cowboys.⁴⁸

      The encroachment of SOE’s activities into SIS’s realm in the Far East raises an obvious question: would it have been better to combine intelligence collection and covert operations into a single organisation, as happened with the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and later with the CIA, which was in many ways its successor? The British tradition shunned this idea: a single agency, ran the argument, would be unable both to collect impartial intelligence and to carry out actions based on it. But, given the fierce resentment between some SOE and SIS officers, it is likely that Britain’s wartime intelligence activities in the Far East would have been more effective had they been formally combined into a single service.⁴⁹

      The confusion over what Force 136’s charter entailed in the Far East is part of a much broader picture relating to SOE’s failures during the war. Critics have pointed out that far from ‘setting Europe ablaze’, as it was tasked to do by Churchill, in fact its operations in Europe barely produced a smoulder. It certainly had some notable failures, the most notorious of which were its operations in the Netherlands, where from 1942 onwards the Abwehr totally compromised its operations, capturing its main agents and using their remarkably ineffective wireless codes to fool SOE into thinking they were still operational, and to continue to provide them with information and supplies – the Abwehr’s famous ‘England game’ (Englandspiel). However, it should be remembered that what the Abwehr did to SOE in the Netherlands for eighteen months – SOE finally realised in 1944 that its agents there had been blown – the British did to the Germans through the Double Cross System for six years.⁵⁰

      Furthermore, there were instances when SOE’s operations produced significant successes for the Allies. Its sabotage of heavy-water supplies at Vermork, in Norway, probably frustrated Nazi Germany’s attempt to build an atomic bomb. Its guerrilla operations at Montbéliard, in occupied France, showed how a small group of men could take out a machine-gun turret where successive bombing raids had failed. Finally, and probably more importantly than anything else it achieved, as M.R.D. Foot has noted, SOE gave a sense of self-respect back to countries, in Europe and the Far East, whose conventional armies had been totally overpowered by the Axis Powers. Many of the agents it dropped into occupied territories to assist local resistance groups displayed remarkable bravery. Wing Cmmdr. Forrest Frederick Edward Yeo-Thomas (codenamed ‘the White Rabbit’) forged valiant links with the French resistance and managed to escape Nazi captivity. Others, such as Violette Szabo, did not live to tell their tale, succumbing to Nazi interrogation, torture and execution. In total, SOE sent fifty-five female agents into occupied Europe, thirteen of whom were either killed in action or executed.⁵¹

      BRITISH INTELLIGENCE AND WARTIME ‘RENDITION’

      During the Second World War British intelligence developed imperial responsibilities in ways that it simply hitherto had not. MI5 posted more officers to British colonial and Commonwealth countries than it ever had previously, and GC&CS dramatically expanded its capabilities, hoovering up enemy traffic from its regional collection stations across the empire. Meanwhile, SOE armed guerrilla fighters against the Axis Powers. However, there is one chapter in the story of Britain’s wartime imperial intelligence responsibilities that is apparently so sensitive it has only recently been disclosed. It has some remarkable parallels with controversial intelligence and security practices in the present day.

      As part of its counter-espionage efforts, during the Second World War British intelligence ran a top-secret process of detaining, interrogating and transporting enemy agents between various parts of the British empire. At times this came close to being a form of state-sponsored kidnapping – closely resembling the process of ‘extraordinary rendition’ employed by the US government in the so-called ‘war on terror’ closer to our own time. After December 1940, Ultra decrypts revealed a number of German agents operating throughout the British empire and Commonwealth. In the first six months of 1942, six high-level agents were identified (but not arrested) in different British colonies, and in June 1942 one of them operating in Mombasa, in Kenya, was detained by local police. His detention sparked a debate within MI5 about what should be done with him and other such agents. MI5 wanted them, as well as any other agents who may have been working in different parts of the empire, to be interrogated, and if possible turned into double agents as part of its Double Cross System. However, MI5’s officers in Section B1a, responsible for counter-espionage, were reluctant to have them interrogated in the distant outposts of empire, where effective methods could not be guaranteed. Furthermore, MI5 feared that if the identified agents were interrogated locally, it would have to release the most closely guarded secret of the war, Ultra, to colonial authorities who could not necessarily be trusted – interrogators invariably used information derived from Ultra to trick enemy agents into thinking that British intelligence knew everything about their missions. Instead, MI5 wanted the agents to be brought to its own top-secret interrogation facility, Camp 020, located in a former lunatic asylum, Latchmere House, in Ham Common, a suburb of South London.

      Camp 020, which probably derives its name from the ‘Twenty Committee’ responsible for overseeing the Double Cross System, operated outside the control of any British government department except for MI5, and was without legal oversight. Its aim was to isolate and ‘break’ enemy agents, who were held without trial, in some cases for years, with the intention of turning them into double agents. Because its detainees were non-combatant enemy agents, international regulations concerning the treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to Camp 020. Nor was it inspected or listed by the Red Cross. In short, its detainees were placed in a legal void. The question that MI5 needed answering was whether it was legally justifiable to detain foreign nationals, and transport them from British territories overseas for interrogation in Britain. One of the leading figures in B-Division, Dick White, put it in the following terms to MI5’s legal adviser Toby Pilcher (a future High Court judge):

      … we shall find ourselves in a particularly serious position if it is ruled that the legal machinery for detaining an enemy agent in a Colony and subsequently bringing him to the U.K. is found to be faulty in law … I am afraid that this is a case in which we cannot leave the matter in doubt, for were the detention of an enemy agent brought here under this proposal to be tested by Habeas Corpus [the legal process by which a prisoner can demand to be brought before a court], in all probability it would be a moment when he was already installed in Camp 020. Subsequent publicity attendant upon a test of Habeas Corpus would be extremely detrimental to Camp 020 and might jeopardise our whole position with regard to it.⁵²

      Under the draconian Defence Regulations that had been enacted in Britain on the outbreak of war, it was impossible for the overwhelming majority of those detained to bring habeas corpus proceedings against the responsible authorities – which was invariably MI5, acting behind the cover of the ‘War Office’. That said, in at least one case a detainee did demand to be brought before a court, though unsurprisingly, given how expansive the British state’s powers of detention were under the Defence Regulations, his case was ultimately unsuccessful.⁵³

      There is also some evidence to suggest that there was more going