It is impossible to understand how and why British intelligence was involved in Britain’s often violent retreat from empire after 1945 without first understanding the root causes of why Britain relinquished that empire. Readers should be warned that this is an enormous subject, with as many different interpretations as there are historians. Pinpointing an exact moment for the beginning of the end of the British empire is an archetypal brain-teaser, which historians are unable to agree on – some have argued that it began in the early twentieth century with the Second Boer War in South Africa, between 1899 and 1902, when it took Britain much longer than predicted, and 45,000 troops, to defeat rebellious farmers in the colony. Others date it to the Second World War, particularly with the Atlantic Charter in August 1941 and then the Lend Lease programme, by which the United States provided Britain with urgently needed war supplies, both of which meant that Washington could largely dictate the future of Britain and its empire after the war. Others believe the decisive moment was the advent of the new Labour government in 1945, committed to the reform of local government in British colonies. Still others believe that it occurred much later, with the disastrous Suez crisis in 1956. The reality is that it is probably impossible to pin down a single event that conclusively represents the end of Britain’s imperial power, though if I were forced to choose one, it would perhaps be the Suez crisis, which, for reasons we shall see in this book, represented a humiliating failure for Britain and revealed that it was no longer a major world power.7
Nevertheless, out of all the ink devoted over the years to understanding why Britain ‘scuttled’ its empire in the post-war years, it is possible to divide the explanations given by historians into four distinct categories. One is that given by nationalist historians, who argue (unsurprisingly) that anti-colonial ‘freedom fighters’ were responsible for forcibly ejecting the British from their colonies. A second explanation is economic necessity: Britain emerged from the Second World War essentially as a bankrupt state, facing a credit crunch of epic proportions, and was forced to slash its defence budget in the two decades after 1945, at precisely the time that its military commitments in its colonies abroad increased. As the historian Paul Kennedy has put it, Britain was overstretched in its imperial commitments in 1945, and was forced to relinquish control of its colonies because it could not afford to keep them on. A third interpretation is a failure of will: Britain won the war in 1945, but then proceeded to lose the peace, no longer desiring to maintain a colonial empire. A fourth interpretation is that of external pressures: after 1945, the British government was attacked on the international stage for its colonial empire, a repugnant anachronism in the post-war world, which was widely criticised by the United States and the Soviet Union alike.8
It is tempting to suppose that there was a linear decline in Britain’s status in the post-war years, from a leading world power to a second-rate nation, but this was not the case. Even labelling British decolonisation a ‘process’ is misleading, because it implies that it was a planned programme. However, it only seems like a process when viewed in retrospect. The liquidation of the empire was never written down as a deliberate policy, by the Colonial Office or any other government department. It would be reading history backwards to suppose that Britain somehow marched triumphantly towards an enlightened, post-colonial future in the years after 1945. The fact is that few, if any, official British records dealing with anti-colonial movements in the late 1940s and early 1950s actually discuss ‘independence’. Instead, they refer to ‘self-government’, which meant that colonies would begin to take control of their own affairs, but with Britain usually retaining control over their security, defence and foreign affairs.
Self-government for colonies was not the same as full independence. When Clement Attlee’s Labour government came to power in 1945 it revised Britain’s former policies in the Middle East, largely to combat the encroachment of the Soviet Union in the region, away from military bases and autocracies to a commitment to more broadly-based popular regimes. As Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin memorably put it, Britain would throw its support behind peasants, not pashas. At first glance, this looks like a commitment to broadly-based democratic rule in the empire, which would inevitably mean eventual independence for colonies. However, Britain’s transfer of power in India in 1947 and its evacuation from Palestine in 1948 did not herald the empire falling apart under a tidal wave of democratic nationalism. Attlee’s government actually put the brakes on colonial emancipation whenever it could. Between 1948 and 1959 only three colonies gained independence from Britain – the Sudan (in 1956), the Gold Coast and Malaya (both in 1957) – and some British officials were dismissive of the idea of relinquishing greater control to colonies for much longer than we might imagine. The wartime Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, claimed that giving colonies self-government, let alone independence, would be like giving a ten-year-old child ‘a latch key, a bank account and a shot gun’, while others spoke, albeit rhetorically, of a revival and resurgence of empire, if only as a strategy for winning the Cold War. The great imperial historian Jack Gallagher pointed out that recruitment to the Colonial Office doubled in the decade after 1945. In this respect, in the post-war years the British empire was being reshaped and refurbished, not abandoned. MI5 approached its Cold War imperial responsibilities in a similar vein, vastly expanding them after 1945. It was only as events progressed that it became clear that its reforms to enhance imperial security were actually taking place as Britain was losing its empire.
Rather than following a planned programme, Britain’s exit from empire was actually a pragmatic response to events, in which the Colonial Office, assisted by MI5, attempted to negotiate the best possible outcome for the British government to events that were often beyond their control. Harold Macmillan, under whose Conservative premiership from 1957 to 1963 Britain rapidly withdrew from empire, famously quipped that political decisions were taken because of ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ As historians like to point out, there were two great periods during which events overtook Britain and accelerated its withdrawal from empire: from 1945 to 1948 and from 1959 to 1964. The main pressures on the British government in both periods were from the USA, the UN and the great anti-colonial empire in the East, the Soviet Union.9
The pace of British decolonisation sped up when Macmillan appointed Iain Macleod as Colonial Secretary in October 1959, with a remit to ‘get on with it’. Within two years of taking his post, Macleod had effectively worked himself out of a job. Between 1960 and 1964 a total of seventeen British colonies gained independence, and as we shall see, MI5 was involved in many of these transfers of power. Macleod stated that he deliberately hastened the pace of withdrawal from colonies to avoid protracted violence and large-scale bloodshed of the kind seen in the Belgian Congo. The disintegration of Belgian rule in the Congo in 1960, with its ensuing chaos and carnage, was a visible warning for British policy-makers of how not to manage an exit from empire. One of Macleod’s successors as Colonial Secretary, Duncan Sandys, who between 1962 and 1964 became another great liquidator of empire, to borrow the phrase of the historian David Cannadine, stated in July 1964 that ‘we have no desire to prolong our colonial obligations for a day longer than is necessary’. This is the closest we can come to finding an official declaration by Macmillan’s government of the ‘end of empire’.
In the opinion of one of the most eminent historians of Britain’s end of empire, Ronald Hyam, it was the external pressures imposed on the British government by the United States, the United Nations and the Soviet Union, more than any other reason, that explain how and why Britain relinquished its empire. As Hyam and several others have shown, the geopolitical concerns of the Cold War formed the context, and dictated the manner, in which Britain scrambled out of its empire. It was also the Cold War context that lies at the heart of the involvement of British intelligence in British decolonisation. As almost every history of the period has shown,