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

Introduction

      In times of travail, Britain’s tendency was to rely more, not less, on spies. Her entire empire history urged her to do so. The thinner her trade routes, the more elaborate her clandestine efforts to protect them. The more feeble her colonial grip, the more desperate her subversion of those who sought to loosen it.

      JOHN LE CARRÉ, The Honourable Schoolboy¹

       On a cold morning in April 1947, a female terrorist slipped into the main headquarters of the Colonial Office in London. After politely asking a security guard if she could shelter from the chill indoors, she placed an enormous bomb, consisting of twenty-four sticks of dynamite, wrapped in newspaper, in the downstairs toilet, then calmly walked back out into the busy street and disappeared into the crowd. Her identity was not known at the time to either the police or MI5, but she worked for a terrorist ‘cell’ in Britain belonging to the Stern Gang, one of the two main paramilitary organisations fighting the British in Palestine. The explosives used for the bomb had been given to her by another Stern Gang agent, a wounded Franco-Jewish war veteran, known as the ‘dynamite man’, who had avoided detection by smuggling the dynamite into Britain in his artificial leg. The aim of these agents, and of other Stern Gang cells operating in Britain, was to use violence to force the British government into establishing an independent Jewish state in Palestine.

       Even before this incident, MI5 had already been placed on high alert for possible terrorist outrages to be conducted in Britain. In the light of increasingly alarming reports from its sources in the Middle East, warning that Jewish paramilitaries planned to extend their ‘war’ against the British from Palestine to Britain itself, MI5 mounted intensive surveillance operations on known radical Jewish and Zionist groups in Britain. MI5’s investigations revealed a number of terrorist cells operating in London, whose members were planning bombing campaigns and assassinations of leading British politicians. In 1946 the head of MI5 briefed the Prime Minister that he and cabinet ministers were targets. That same year, another terrorist cell launched a letter-bomb campaign directed at every member of the British cabinet. All of the bombs, found to be potentially lethal, were successfully intercepted.

       The bomb left in the Colonial Office was only detected after, by sheer luck, it had failed to go off because its timer broke. If it had successfully detonated, it would have caused carnage and chaos at the centre of Whitehall, probably on a similar scale to an attack that the other main militant group fighting the British in Palestine, the Irgun, had carried out in Jerusalem in July 1946, blowing up the King David Hotel and killing ninety-one people.

       When the bomb at the Colonial Office was discovered, it led to an immediate Europe-wide search for the female Stern Gang agent, headed by MI5, SIS (MI6) and the London Special Branch. She was eventually apprehended in Belgium. MI5 also identified Irgun members operating in Britain, who were kept under surveillance or arrested. The head of the Irgun, however, remained at large, and continued to plan attacks against the British, in both Palestine and Europe. His name was Menachem Begin. He went on to become the sixth Prime Minister of the state of Israel, and the joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. ²

      This episode is just one among a vast number of remarkable, and mostly undisclosed, security operations that Britain’s intelligence services were involved in during the period immediately after the Second World War, when Britain began to lose its empire. It has only recently been revealed through declassified intelligence records, and it not only adds a new chapter to the history of the early Cold War, but also has a chilling contemporary resonance. In a striking parallel with the world today, it reveals that the infiltration and radicalisation of a terrorist minority from the Middle East was experienced in Britain more than half a century ago. In fact, as this book reveals, in the aftermath of the Second World War the main threat to British national security did not come from the Soviet Union, as we might expect, but from Middle Eastern terrorism. However, the terrorists then did not come from Palestinian and Islamist groups, as they would do in the late twentieth century, and do today, but from Jewish (or ‘Zionist’) extremists. As Niall Ferguson has argued, terrorism is the original sin of the Middle East.³

      This book tells the secret, largely untold, history of Britain’s end of empire – the largest empire in world history – and is the first study devoted to examining the involvement of British intelligence in that story. Like Britain’s secret services themselves, it offers a global perspective: the agency responsible for imperial security intelligence, MI5, was involved everywhere in the empire where British national security was threatened – which in the early Cold War included almost all of Britain’s territorial holdings. It provides a panoramic tour of Britain’s declining empire after 1945, and the clandestine activities of the British government as this occurred. Its subject matter ranges from wartime espionage campaigns waged in the deserts of North Africa to shady back-channel communications with African dictators; from violent counter-insurgencies (or ‘Emergencies’) in the jungles of Malaya and Kenya, and the hills of Cyprus, to urban warfare campaigns in Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula. It reveals CIA plots and covert activities in British colonies, KGB assassinations, and failed coups sponsored by the British and US governments in the Middle East, primarily intended to secure oil and other natural resources.

      Intelligence is the ‘missing dimension’ of the history of Britain’s end of empire (or ‘decolonisation’, as it is known to historians), which took place largely in the two decades after 1945. The activities of Britain’s intelligence services are conspicuously missing from almost all histories of that period. Part of the reason for this is perfectly understandable. During Britain’s rapid retreat from empire, the British government unofficially acknowledged the existence of MI5, but did not officially recognise that of SIS or GCHQ. This meant that there were no officially-released intelligence records for historians to study – it was obviously impossible for government departments to release records if the departments themselves did not officially exist. Intelligence was, therefore, quietly and subtly airbrushed out of the history books.⁴

      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