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

supposed to infiltrate two agents into British-occupied Egypt, who would report directly to Rommel’s headquarters in the Middle East by wireless. For this task he recruited an Egyptian, Mohsen Fadl, who was working for the Egyptian tourist board in Paris, and a former cotton trader named Hans Eppler, the illegitimate son of a German woman who had married an Egyptian judge. Both proved unqualified disasters.

      In May 1942 Almásy began Operation Condor, an epic but ultimately unsuccessful mission to smuggle his two agents into Egypt. It involved a hellish journey of about 3,000 miles, in two stolen US trucks and two Chevrolets, from Libya across the Egyptian desert. The first attempt was a failure, with the vehicles becoming stuck in quicksand and the drivers falling desperately ill. The second, however, was a success. After dropping his agents in the town of Asyut, Almásy made the return journey to Libya. His agents travelled on to Cairo, where they went underground in the city’s red-light district, and blew the £3,000 he had given them on cheap champagne, cabarets, prostitutes and nightclubs. Their mission produced no important intelligence, but they did manage to recruit one of the best belly-dancers in Egypt, described in MI5 records as ‘an exponent of the dance de ventre’, who installed them on a houseboat on the Nile, in the cocktail bar of which they hid their radio transmitters. Their attempts to make wireless communication with Rommel’s headquarters were unsuccessful: unknown to them, the Abwehr unit with which they were supposed to communicate had been captured by the Allies. In a desperate bid to get messages to the German forces they recruited a young signals officer in the Egyptian army named Anwar Sadat – the future President of Egypt. In fact, Almásy’s entire mission had been compromised from the outset: Bletchley Park and MI5’s inter-service agency, SIME, had been closely monitoring it as it took one inept turn after another. Almásy was identified in Ultra decrypts as operating under the codename ‘Salam’, an anagram of the first five letters of his surname. After three months watching its every move, SIME finally decided to put an end to the network, and in July 1942 Almásy and all of his agents, including the young Sadat, were arrested.³⁷

      One of the most complicated counter-espionage and deception agents run anywhere in the British empire in the Second World War was ‘Silver’, who was skilfully handled by British and Allied intelligence services in India. Silver is revealed by IPI records, now held at the British Library in London, to have been Bhagat Ram, an Afghani who was the right-hand man of the great Indian-Bengali nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose. In the course of the war Ram, who also went by the alias of ‘Ramat Khan’, actually became a triple agent, working at various times for Germany, the Soviet Union and Britain, and there is some evidence to suggest that he was also in communication with Chinese intelligence.³⁸

      Ram was a fiercely anti-British Indian nationalist, whose twin allegiances lay with India and the cause of communism. When war in Europe was declared in 1939, he and Bose threw in their lot with the Axis Powers – Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union started the war as allies through the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939. Bose, who regarded the war as India’s great opportunity, helped to lead the ‘Quit India Movement’, whose aim was to eject the British from India, and also assisted with the formation of the Indian National Army (INA), which collaborated with the Japanese and fought bloodily against the Allies. Indeed, some of the writings of the Burmese wartime nationalist leader Ba Maw, who also collaborated with the Japanese, show an affinity with many of the tenets of National Socialism. As a corollary to the wartime ‘Jewish Brigade’ of the British Army, during the war some 3,000 Indians joined a special division of the German army (the Wehrmacht), which was later absorbed into the notorious Waffen-SS. Facing a ‘fifth column’ threat, the British authorities in Delhi arrested and detained its supposed ringleaders. Bose was imprisoned in late 1940, as was his main rival in India’s Congress Party, Jawaharlal Nehru. However, in January 1941 Bose escaped incarceration in Calcutta and fled to Afghanistan, where he made contact with German forces, including the Abwehr.³⁹

      Bose and Ram’s fortunes were transformed by Nazi Germany’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, on 22 June 1941. Hitler’s disastrous decision was the result of his desire to establish a slave empire and ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) in the east for ‘pure’ Germanic races. One of its results was that previous diplomatic alliances were instantly overturned, with the Soviet Union and Britain becoming allies overnight. While Bose, India’s so-called ‘man of destiny’, remained a supporter of Nazi Germany, Ram held his allegiance to communism and the Soviet Union even higher, which led him to side with the Soviet Union’s new ally: his old foe, Britain. Ram started to work as an agent for British and Soviet intelligence – one of the few double agents shared by the two nations during the war. He presented himself to the Abwehr station in Kabul as a kind of modern-day Rudyard Kipling or Lawrence of Arabia figure, and started passing misinformation to them in October 1942.⁴⁰

      As in other parts of the British empire, local security agencies in India looked to Britain’s homeland intelligence services, particularly MI5, for guidance on how to run double-cross agents. Early in 1943 a senior MI5 officer, John Marriott, who was secretary to the ‘Twenty Committee’, travelled to India – with the honorary rank of Major, in order to afford him ‘better treatment’ than a civilian – to help coordinate the running of double agents, particularly Silver. Marriott was given a warm welcome by the IB in Delhi, but as his reports back to MI5 in London reveal, he was far from impressed with the IB. Between bouts of dysentery and suffering from the extreme heat in India – there are still apparently sweat marks on some of the pages of his reports – he noted that the IB had only fifty officers in total, stationed across the various provinces of India. With just twelve officers at its headquarters in Delhi, the IB was, according to Marriott, ‘understaffed and overworked’. Moreover, apart from Silver, it lacked any other meaningful double-cross agents. However, as Marriott conceded, part of the problem was that he often found it difficult to understand the details of cases in India – a former London solicitor, he undoubtedly had an English ‘home counties’ outlook. As he explained in one report to MI5 in March 1943:

      I quite honestly find myself unable to recall the name of the man whose file I am reading sometimes, and anything like association of ideas or even being able to recall a name which appears on the previous page is for the moment beyond me. Place names are even worse. I don’t pretend to be awfully good at the geography of western Europe so you can imagine the lack of response I feel when I read that a man has travelled from Monywa to Kalewa and thence has followed the Tamu Road.⁴¹

      Despite the meagre resources the IB in Delhi had at its disposal, together with MI5, it ran the Silver case – perhaps so named because one of the IPI officials working on it in London was a Mr Silver – remarkably successfully. Overall control came under the military intelligence unit led by Lt. Col. Peter Fleming, attached to the staff of the Commander in Chief in India, Wavell, who showed as much appreciation for intelligence there as he had in the Middle East. However, the day-to-day running of the case was carried out by William ‘Bill’ Magan, then a British Army officer attached to the IB, who would go on to play an important role in MI5’s involvement with anti-colonial movements, and broader issues of British decolonisation, in the post-war years. Magan had begun his career as an Indian cavalry officer, and was described to his wife before their marriage in New Delhi in 1940 as ‘a cavalry officer who has actually read a book’. With Magan’s assistance, Ram successfully portrayed himself to the Abwehr in Kabul as the head of a totally fictitious ‘All India Revolutionary Committee’, and depicted India as on the brink of disintegration due to Axis subversion and propaganda. In reality, the ‘All India Revolutionary Committee’ was nothing more than a figment of Ram and Magan’s imagination, and the wireless communications despatched to the Abwehr every night actually originated from Magan and Ram in the garden of the British High Commission in Delhi. As a subsequent MI5 report noted, through Ram British intelligence established a ‘direct line’ to Berlin. The disinformation provided by Ram, portraying India as on its last knees, helped to persuade the German High Command not to transfer more military divisions to India. Ram also made contact by wireless with Japanese intelligence in Burma. Documents captured after the war revealed that, thanks in part to the deception information he provided, the Japanese military judged that Allied troops in South-East Asia numbered fifty-two divisions, a staggering 72 per cent higher than reality. Subhas Chandra Bose died