Although the establishment of MI5’s DSOs was a watershed in the history of British intelligence, with just six officers stationed overseas, MI5 was still clearly not the imperial service that it claimed to be. As the official history of British intelligence in the Second World War noted, in 1939 MI5 was just a ‘skeleton’ of an imperial security service. It took the war for it to become truly the imperial service that it claimed to be. It was also the war that transformed the involvement of Britain’s largest and most secret intelligence services, GC&CS, in the British empire.41
In the pre-war years, MI5 claimed to be – but had not yet actually become – a service for the empire. Even at this stage, however, it was a service of the empire. This was most clearly shown by the high proportion of senior MI5 officers in the pre-war years who began their careers in the empire. Its first head, Sir Vernon Kell, and his deputy who served him for twenty-eight years, Sir Eric Holt-Wilson, had both previously served in British colonial campaigns. Its Director-General during the Second World War, Sir David Petrie, was similarly an old colonial sweat, having served as the head of IB in Delhi from 1924 to 1931, and carried scars of his service (literally) on his legs with wounds from a bomb attack inflicted by an Indian revolutionary in 1914. The sources that Petrie used for his classified official history, Communism in India, included intercepted correspondence of both Indian communists and the Comintern. The post-Second World War head of MI5, Sir Percy Sillitoe, likewise had a former colonial police career, having served in the British South Africa Police. One of the few pre-war British counter-espionage desk officers, John Curry, had served with the Indian police for a quarter of a century before joining MI5 in 1933. Curry was among the limited number of people in British intelligence, and in Whitehall generally, who recognised and warned about the threat posed by Nazi Germany after 1933. He had previously written a history of the Indian police, which attracted the attention of Sir David Petrie, and in 1945 was the author of MI5’s in-house history, which has now been declassified. MI5’s most successful wartime interrogator, Robin ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens (discussed in the next chapter), was also a former Indian policeman, as was MI5’s semi-senile septuagenarian wartime Deputy Director-General, Brigadier O.A. ‘Jasper’ Harker, later described by the notorious KGB spy Kim Philby as filling his position in MI5 with handsome grace, but little else. With such strong colonial connections in the pre-war years, MI5’s working culture and outlook undoubtedly also had a colonial feel. An examination of the CVs of MI5 officers before the Second World War reveals that several of them included ‘pig sticking’ among their hobbies, a hangover from colonial service in India of the pink-gin-and-polo type. Moreover, because pay in MI5 at the time was so poor, many of its senior staff, doubtless burnt out from too much sun, came from independently wealthy backgrounds.42
These connections with the British empire did not only exist in MI5: they were also prominent in the rest of the pre-war British intelligence community. In fact, a remarkable number of Britain’s leading spooks in those years had previously served in the empire. In SIS, for example, the two most important counter-espionage desk officers st the time were both former Indian policemen. The first was Valentine Vivian, known to his friends as ‘Vee Vee’, the son of a Victorian portrait painter, who entered SIS in 1925 after serving in the Indian police and in an IPI station in Constantinople. Vivian had a glass eye, which he tried to shield by awkwardly standing at right angles to those he met. Philby – who had a vested interest in making his former SIS colleagues look as incompetent as possible – depicted him in his KGB-sponsored memoirs as being afraid of his subordinates in SIS, and acidly described him as ‘long past his best – if, indeed, he ever had one’. Vivian’s subordinate in SIS’s pre-war section dealing with counter-espionage, Section V, was Felix Cowgill, the son of a missionary, who had served as a personal assistant to Petrie in the Delhi IB. Cowgill’s colonial past gave him, as one of his wartime colleagues described, a ‘sallow face and withdrawn tired air that came of long years of service in India’. Philby poisonously described him as tempestuous and incompetent: ‘His intellectual endowment was slender. As an intelligence officer, he was inhibited by a lack of imagination, inattention to detail and a sheer ignorance of the world we were fighting in,’ but even Philby conceded that Cowgill had ‘a fiendish capacity for work’, sometimes toiling through the night, knocking an array of pipes into wreckage on a stone ashtray on his desk. Whether this was the case or not, he was certainly spectacularly outmanoeuvred by Philby for wartime promotion within SIS – with disastrous consequences for British intelligence, as we shall see.43
There were similar colonial connections within GC&CS, the first Director of which, Alistair Denniston, began his career in India, where he successfully intercepted and decrypted Russian traffic. Likewise, the department in GC&CS that successfully broke Comintern radio traffic in the 1930s was led by a brilliant major from the Indian army, John Tiltman, who had been running a small but successful interception outfit in north-west India before being brought back to London in 1929. There were also colonial connections in Special Branch at Scotland Yard. Its pre-war head, Basil Thomson, had an eccentric colonial career: after being educated at Eton and dropping out of Oxford he joined the Colonial Office, and at the age of twenty-eight became the Prime Minister of Tonga, where – as he vividly noted in his memoirs – his first true friends were cannibals. He also went on to become private tutor to the Crown Prince of Siam and Governor of Dartmoor Prison.44
Officers in Britain’s intelligence services brought to their new roles many of the practices they had acquired in their colonial postings. In GC&CS, Tiltman wholeheartedly incorporated decryption techniques pioneered in India. The Special Branch adopted the technique of fingerprinting, which became the most basic form of police and security investigations in the modern world, from India, where it had been invented. MI5 also embraced techniques pioneered in the empire. When its Registry collapsed during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 – essentially giving up under the strain imposed on it during an apparently imminent Nazi invasion – Petrie advised reforming it on lines that he had devised for card-cataloguing ‘revolutionaries and terrorist suspects’ in India.45
The intelligence services of other major European powers had similar colonial hangovers, both in terms of staff and practices. Some influential French intelligence officers during the Second World War started their careers in the French colonial empire. More ominously, there were also colonial connections with the secret police and intelligence services of Europe’s murderous ‘totalitarian’ regimes before 1945. This was first identified by the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) argued that twentieth-century totalitarianism had its roots in European colonial rule in the late nineteenth century. Arendt believed that the type of savagery that European powers inflicted upon colonial populations, as graphically depicted in Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, modelled on Belgian rule in the Congo, was in the first half of the twentieth century brought back to its heartland: Europe. Although Arendt’s thesis was at first largely discounted by scholars, more recently it has been re-examined, and is now regarded by historians as having in many ways been proved correct.46
The Soviet secret police, the NKVD – subsequently renamed the KGB – imposed security practices such as mass detention which had been forged by the British in India, the French in Algeria, and by the Russians in their own empire. In Spain, Franco’s 1936 rebellion against the democratic government was waged predominantly by former Africanista generals, who, as one study has noted, were steeped in a ‘colonial mentality’ and embarked on a ‘colonial clearing-up’, namely institutionalised repression, of a working class deemed to be ‘hardly human’. These colonial connections with authoritarian regimes are hardly surprising when it is considered that the nature of European colonial rule