In the years before 1945, then, both in Britain and in a number of other European imperial powers, both democratic and non-democratic, there was a continuum between empire and ‘domestic’ intelligence services. However, as we shall see, in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century precisely the opposite occurred. In the two decades after 1945, Britain’s intelligence services posted a succession of intelligence officers out to the empire and Commonwealth. Recruits to MI5 at this time spent on average between a quarter and a half of their careers stationed in colonial or Commonwealth countries. It was the cataclysmic event of the Second World War that permanently transformed the imperial responsibilities of the British secret state. Ironically, the importance of MI5’s colonial responsibilities would increase after 1945, precisely when Britain’s imperial power began to decline.48
Strategic Deception: British Intelligence, Special Operations and Empire in the Second World War
‘You were a spy then?’
‘Not quite … Really I was still a thief. No great patriot. No great hero. They just made my skills official.’
MICHAEL ONDAATJE, The English Patient1
Towards the end of the Second World War, Sir David Petrie, the wartime Director-General of MI5, wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden, outlining some of the notable successes that MI5 and British intelligence more generally had gained during the war. As Petrie explained, the successes of Britain’s wartime intelligence services had necessarily not been disclosed to the public, and it was likely that they would have to remain under a veil of secrecy for the foreseeable future: ‘The full story can perhaps never be told but if it could be, it could perhaps claim acceptance as truth mainly on the grounds that it seems stranger than fiction.’ In many ways the story of Britain’s wartime intelligence successes still seems stranger than fiction, but luckily for us it can now be told. Put simply, the story is that during the war Britain’s intelligence services gained unprecedented successes: they learned more about their enemies than any power had ever learned about another in the history of warfare. At the end of the war, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, personally congratulated them for the role they had played, which in his opinion was ‘decisive’ in bringing the conflict to a successful conclusion for the Allies.2
Britain’s intelligence services achieved their wartime successes both in Britain itself and across the empire and British-occupied territories – from the deserts of North Africa to the hilltops of India and the steamy jungles of Malaya. The Second World War was the event that revolutionised Britain’s imperial intelligence responsibilities, with MI5, SIS and GCHQ being directly involved in colonial affairs in earnest for the first time. However, before we can turn in detail to the wartime operations of British intelligence, it is necessary to understand their context. It is only by appreciating how the intelligence services operated domestically, from their headquarters in London, that their activities in distant outposts of the empire can be understood.
NAZI NEMESIS: INTELLIGENCE FAILURE – INTELLIGENCE SUCCESS
The unprecedented successes of British intelligence during the Second World War are all the more remarkable when it is considered how weak the collective position of MI5, SIS and GC&CS was in 1939. The British secret state began the war with pitiful intelligence on its enemies, the Axis Powers. GC&CS had failed to make any significant headway in reading German communications, which relied on the famous Enigma code. The situation was similarly bleak for MI5 and SIS: they had such a dearth of intelligence that in 1939 they barely knew the name of the German military intelligence service (the Abwehr) or of its head (Admiral Wilhelm Canaris). MI5’s official in-house wartime historian, John ‘Jack’ Curry, who had worked as a counter-espionage officer before the war, and was therefore well placed to comment on what Britain knew at the time about Nazi intelligence, described MI5 as entering the war in a state of ‘confusion’ that often amounted to ‘chaos’:
In 1939 we had no adequate knowledge of the German organisations which it was the function of the Security Service [MI5] to guard against either in this wider field of the ‘Fifth Column’ or in the narrower one of military espionage and purely material sabotage. We had in fact no definite knowledge whether there was any organised connection between the German Secret Service and Nazi sympathisers in this country, whether of British or alien nationality.3
A similarly bleak picture was given by one of MI5’s principal wartime counter-espionage desk officers, Dick White, who went on to become the only ever head of both MI5 and SIS. He later recalled that MI5 started the war ‘without any real documentation on the subject we were supposed to tackle. We had a very vague idea of how the German system worked, and what its objectives were in time of war.’4
Much of the reason why the British secret state had so little information on Nazi Germany at the beginning of the war was that, for most of the 1930s, its intelligence services had been starved of resources. In 1934 Whitehall’s Defence Requirements Committee had predicted that Nazi Germany would be the ‘ultimate enemy’ for Britain and its empire, but in the years that followed, MI5 and SIS failed to obtain any significant increase in funding or staff. Some minority voices, such as John Curry in MI5, warned from an early stage that Britain’s intelligence machinery needed to gear up to face the threat of Nazi Germany. From 1934 onwards Curry was advising that it would be dangerous simply to dismiss Mein Kampf, in which Hitler essentially outlined his vision for world domination, as the writings of a crazed lunatic – which of course it was, but it was also much more. As Curry argued, the problem for Britain (and the rest of the world) was that this crazed lunatic was now in power, so his diatribe in Mein Kampf had to be taken seriously. However, Curry was a voice in the wilderness within Whitehall, and neither MI5 nor SIS managed to secure any major expansion of resources in the pre-war years. While both agencies failed to make their warnings about Hitler sufficiently loud to be heard, Whitehall bureaucrats and bean-counters were only too willing to disregard the warnings they did hear as merely the perennial cry for more resources from intelligence services – after all, armies always ask for more tanks. As late as 1939, SIS was so underfunded that it could not even afford wireless sets for its agents.5
MI5’s lack of reliable intelligence on Nazi German intelligence was made worse by the frenzied ‘spy scares’ that broke out in Britain in the early stages of the war, just as they had in 1914. During the so-called ‘phoney war’, the period after September 1939 when war had been declared but proper fighting had not yet commenced, hysterical reports from the British public bombarded MI5’s London headquarters about German ‘agents’ – and even ‘suspicious’-looking pigeons, which led MI5 to establish a falconry unit, appropriately led by a retired RAF wing-commander, to track down and ‘neutralise’ enemy pigeons. Its efforts were