In March 1938 Holt-Wilson arrived in India, where he met the new head of the IB in Delhi, Sir John Ewart, whom he referred to as the ‘K [‘Kell’] of India’. He next travelled to Singapore and Hong Kong, where as he reported to his wife, he was spotted by local press reporters as being involved with ‘hush-hush’ work. In Singapore he liaised with a local MI5 officer stationed there, Col. F. Hayley Bell, in Holt-Wilson’s unflattering opinion a ‘deaf madman’, whose deafness made hushed conversations difficult. He also met Hayley Bell’s daughter, Mary Hayley Bell (later Lady Mills), who in 1942 would write a popular wartime play, Men in Shadow, about resistance groups in France, which would attract the attention of MI5 for revealing sensitive details of escape routes from occupied France. MI5 only allowed the play to be performed after the passages in question were removed. At a dinner held in his honour during Holt-Wilson’s visit to Hong Kong in April 1938, which was officially described as an ‘inspection of the colony’s defences’ so as not to attract too much press attention, the Governor proposed a toast to ‘good old Thames House’ (MI5’s headquarters), which was lost on all the guests except for himself and Holt-Wilson.35
Ireland was a particularly important recruiting ground for colonial police officers, many of whom would deal with intelligence matters across the empire. After the Irish Free State was granted a form of Dominion status in 1921, a stream of former officers of the disbanded Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) moved into the Indian and other colonial police forces, particularly in Palestine, where they gained a reputation for stern discipline and ‘backbone’. Ireland was also the theatre that provided a model for policing and counter-insurgency operations that persisted in British military thinking for several decades. In 1934 Major General Sir Charles Gwynn published an influential book, Imperial Policing, on low-intensity conflicts or ‘small wars’. Drawing on lessons from Ireland, and the tactics the British used to crush the Indian Mutiny in the 1850s and other Indian revolts at Dinshawai (1906) and Amritsar (1919), Gwynn recommended that to be effective, colonial policing required the use of minimum necessary force, with the aim of restoring civilian government as soon as possible, and tactics such as troops moving in sweeping column formations against enemies. While Gwynn’s recommendations were undoubtedly applicable to Palestine in the 1930s, they left their mark for much longer than they should have on British military authorities, who continued to apply these tactics to anti-colonial insurgencies in the post-war years, when they were largely irrelevant because Britain’s enemies in those conflicts did not fight in open, regular and identifiable formations. Thanks in large part to Gwynn, there was a direct continuum between the way the British military crushed colonial revolts in India in the 1860s, and how it tackled post-war insurgencies in places like Palestine, Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus.36
THE THREE-MILE RULE
In 1931 the British government finally drew an official distinction between MI5 and SIS’s responsibilities. Ever since the establishment of the two services in 1909, when MI5 was made responsible for ‘domestic’ security intelligence and SIS for ‘foreign’ intelligence-gathering, there had been confusion over whether the empire and the Commonwealth counted as domestic or foreign territory. The issue was finally resolved following a fierce turf war within Whitehall over intelligence matters. In 1931 the London Special Branch, led by its eccentric head Sir Basil Thomson, essentially attempted to take over MI5. Although the bid was unsuccessful, it led to a major review of intelligence matters within Whitehall, led by the top-secret committee responsible for them, the Secret Service Committee, chaired by Sir John Anderson, the Permanent Undersecretary at the Home Office. One of the recommendations of the Committee in June 1931 was that MI5 should have increased responsibilities. From that point on MI5 was given responsibility for all forms of counter-espionage, military and civilian – previously it had been limited to detecting espionage in the British armed forces – and a number of skilled officers were transferred from the London Special Branch to MI5, including Guy Liddell (a future Deputy Director-General of MI5) and Milicent Bagot (who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Comintern activities, and is thought to have been the inspiration for John le Carré’s character, the eccentric Sovietologist Connie Sachs). One of the other major decisions taken by the Secret Service Committee was that MI5 would assume responsibility for security intelligence in all British territories, including the empire and Commonwealth, while SIS would confine itself to operating at least three miles outside British territories. In other words, from 1931 onwards a three-mile demarcation line was drawn around all British territories worldwide, at the time covering roughly one-quarter of the globe, which acted as the official boundary between MI5 and SIS.37
With this operational border established, MI5 was given more of a free rein to concentrate on imperial security matters – hence Holt-Wilson’s numerous trips overseas and his attempts to promote the view that MI5 was an imperial service. Throughout the 1930s MI5 collaborated with IPI and the Delhi IB to keep a close watch on the main anti-colonial political leaders in India, such as Nehru, whom IPI considered – accurately – to be, next to Gandhi, the ‘second most powerful man in India’. Whenever Nehru travelled to Britain in the 1930s, which he did on several occasions, MI5 monitored his activities, often imposing HOWs to intercept his post and telephone conversations, and instructed Scotland Yard to send undercover officers to his speaking engagements. Judging from IPI records, it also seems that IPI acquired a source close to Nehru himself: it obtained sensitive information relating to the death of his wife from tuberculosis in 1936 at a hospital in Switzerland following a trip Nehru made to Britain. The information reaching IPI included private arrangements that Nehru’s family was considering for the funeral, which most likely came from an informant within Nehru’s close entourage. MI5 and IPI also attempted to track the activities of the Comintern agent Narendra Nath Bhattacharya, also known as M.N. Roy – but were not always successful: on at least one occasion Roy was able to travel to Britain without being discovered. At the same time, MI5 and IPI also scrutinised the activities of the British Communist Party’s leading theoretician and anti-colonial Indian campaigner, Rajani Palme Dutt, who acted as a Comintern agent on at least one trip to India. They likewise kept a close eye on Dutt’s younger brother Clemens, who led the ‘Indian section’ of the British Communist Party, and even discovered the cover address that Clemens used to communicate secretly with underground communist sympathisers. Furthermore, although no specific file has yet been declassified, it is likely that MI5 also worked in conjunction with SIS to track the movements of the notorious German Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, who moved widely around Europe and even further afield, and in 1927 organised a conference in Brussels against imperialism.38
However, MI5’s claim in the 1930s that it was an imperial service was more aspiration than reality, more chest-puffing than fact. Throughout the decade it had such limited resources at its disposal that there was no way it could have a meaningful supervisory role over imperial security intelligence as a whole. As late as 1938 it had a total staff of just thirty officers, only two of whom worked in its counter-espionage section, B-Division, in London – that is, a grand total of two officers formed the front line of detecting Axis espionage in Britain, to say nothing of the empire. However, a turning point for the involvement of British intelligence in the empire occurred in the late 1930s, when MI5 broke with its past practices and, instead of merely receiving intelligence from colonies abroad, began to post officers to British territories overseas for the first time. These officers were known as Defence Security Officers (DSOs) and were attached to British military general headquarters (GHQs) in British colonies and other dependencies. Their responsibilities were focused on coordinating security intelligence on Comintern activities, and as the Second World War approached, increasingly on the threat posed by the Axis Powers.39
The first DSO stationed abroad was posted to Egypt. Egypt had gained independence from Britain in 1935, but in a manner that would be replicated over subsequent decades in other British territories – as we shall see – the British government had negotiated a series of favourable treaties for itself, which allowed for a continued British presence in Egypt. From 1935 onwards British military headquarters for the Middle East was based in Cairo, and London continued to have control over the Suez Canal, the strategic gateway to India – which