This book offers a new chapter to the existing history of Britain’s last days of empire, as well as to our understanding of the Cold War and the history of international relations after 1945. Against the background of the Cold War, that is to say the rapid breakdown in relations between Western governments and the Soviet Union after 1945, and with the looming spectre of Soviet KGB-sponsored subversion in Britain’s dwindling colonial empire, British intelligence played a crucial role in the way that post-war British governments pulled out of the empire and passed power to independent national states across the globe. Britain’s clandestine services had to deal with a succession of insurgencies (or ‘Emergencies’) across the empire, but at the same time tried to maintain close links with the very groups that were often violently rejecting British rule. Given the geopolitical concerns of the Cold War, a main requirement for Britain and its allies was to prevent former British colonies being absorbed by the Soviet Union as satellite states. British colonial intelligence thus lay at the forefront of the Cold War, both for Britain and its main Western ally, the United States. The sequence of colonial insurgencies that Britain experienced in the death throes of its empire threatened at times to turn the Cold War into a hot war. In this context, the so-called ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States – much discussed, particularly on this side of the Atlantic, but also much misunderstood – was the linchpin and driving force for an enormous overhaul of colonial intelligence that Britain embarked on in the early Cold War. As successive spy scandals broke out in Britain, particularly the revelation of the ‘Cambridge spies’ in 1951, pressure from Washington forced London to enhance security standards not only at home, but across its colonial empire.
Before proceeding any further, it would be useful to say a few words on terminology. One of the difficulties in studying intelligence history is that, like the study of government departments more generally, sometimes ideas can get lost in an alphabet soup of acronyms, so getting some of the basic terminology that will appear in this book sorted out at this stage will be helpful. There are three main services that comprise the British intelligence community: MI5, GCHQ and SIS. The Security Service, also known as MI5, plays a central role in this book. It was not simply a ‘domestic’ intelligence service, as is sometimes thought, but was Britain’s imperial intelligence service, responsible for security intelligence matters (counter-espionage, counter-subversion and counter-sabotage) in all territories across Britain’s global empire. Then there is Britain’s largest, best-funded, and most secretive intelligence service: the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), which after 1945 was renamed the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). GC&CS was, and GCHQ remains, responsible for intercepting and decoding communications, known as signals intelligence (or SIGINT). Thirdly there is Britain’s foreign intelligence service, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, which was, and remains, responsible for gathering human-based intelligence (known as ‘HUMINT’) from non-British territories all over the world. From the little information that can be discerned from publicly available sources, it appears that SIS’s espionage operations took place in a world less like that of James Bond, its most famous fictional officer, than like that from the pages of a John le Carré novel – less to do with licences to kill and high-tech gadgets, and more to do with grey-haired men in pipe-smoke-filled rooms, hunched over stacks of yellowing files, with matron-like women regularly bringing the tea trolley around.
The most senior body within the British intelligence community, then as now, was the Joint Intelligence Committee (or JIC). It was responsible for collating intelligence from all the different intelligence services (MI5, SIS and GCHQ), as well as military intelligence (army, navy and air force), assessing it and distributing it to high levels of the British government. The JIC was not an intelligence collection body, but an intelligence assessment outfit. In the first years after its establishment before the Second World War, it came solely under the control of the military Chiefs of Staff. However, as the Cold War set in after 1945, and particularly after the Suez crisis in 1956, the JIC moved out of the control of the military and became directly responsible to civilian cabinet ministers. As well as sitting at the peak of the domestic British intelligence community, the JIC was also positioned at the centre of a complicated web of imperial intelligence agencies and assessment bodies stretching across the empire. Reading some reports on how British imperial intelligence operated in the Cold War, one gets the impression that it was a finely-turned, well-oiled machine. In reality, however, it evolved haphazardly, and looked better on paper than it performed in reality. This was revealed by the repeated intelligence failures in British colonies after 1945, as intelligence chiefs spectacularly failed to detect outbreaks of anti-colonial insurgencies in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Aden.
In theory, at least, the British intelligence community formed a web across the empire through MI5. MI5’s representatives stationed in empire and Commonwealth countries were called Security Liason Officers (SLOs). Until recently their activities have been shrouded in secrecy, with their actions leaving hardly any traces in official British records. With the recent release of MI5 records, we can now see that SLOs operated from official British residencies in colonial and Commonwealth countries, sometimes openly and sometimes under cover, disguising their MI5 postings under titles such as ‘Second Secretary’ or ‘Cultural Attaché’. According to MI5’s Director-General’s charter, an SLO’s job with a colonial government was to provide ‘liaison, supply of external intelligence, training [and] operational advice’. They reported directly to MI5’s headquarters in London, and from there their reports, if deemed sufficiently serious, could be passed by MI5 all the way up to the JIC. SLOs also reported to regional MI5 liaison outfits, such as Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME), headquartered in Cairo, and Security Intelligence Far East (SIFE), headquartered in Singapore, whose function was to pool regional intelligence reports from MI5 as well as GCHQ and SIS, and pass the most important information back to the JIC in London. As the Cold War set in, MI5’s SLOs were also responsible for reporting to and liaising with Local Intelligence Committees (LICs), which sprung up (largely at MI5’s instigation) in a number of colonial territories and Commonwealth countries. High-ranking local officials sat on the LICs, and their meetings were often chaired by the colonial Governor himself, which meant that MI5’s SLOs had a direct channel of communication to all of the most important officials in British colonies. Again, reports from LICs were passed on to the JIC in London if deemed sufficiently serious. The problem was that often reports were not deemed sufficiently serious, and were merely passed up the hierarchy of the colonial intelligence apparatus, rather than to London. This lay at the heart of many of the failures that British intelligence experienced in successive colonies after 1945. Finally, it should be noted that the actual groundwork of intelligence-gathering in the British empire in the Cold War was performed by special branches established within colonial police forces. MI5 overhauled colonial special branches as the Cold War escalated after 1945.
This book is based on a wealth of previously classified intelligence records which have only recently been released to the public. The research for it, which took the best part of ten years to complete, is predominantly based on MI5 records, which makes sense considering that MI5 was Britain’s imperial intelligence service. This has involved reading literally hundreds of MI5 records and dossiers, many of them multi-volume, spanning thousands of pages. As well as MI5 records, JIC records have helped to provide an overview of what the British intelligence community considered as threats to Britain and its empire during the post-war years. These have proved particularly useful as, at present, SIS does not release records from its own archives, although Keith Jeffery’s recent official history of the first forty years of SIS, like Christopher Andrew’s official centenary history of MI5, does provide an insight into areas still hidden away from historians. In addition to drawing on intelligence records that until recently were still classified, kept under lock and key in secret Whitehall