During my doctorate at Cambridge, and then as a post-doctorate research Fellow also at Cambridge, I was given the exciting opportunity to be a research assistant on Christopher Andrew’s unprecedented official history of MI5. This position gave me privileged access to MI5 records, before their release. It was during my doctorate, and also in the research for Andrew’s authorised history of MI5, that I realised that the role of British intelligence was missing from the overwhelming majority of books on Britain’s end of empire. All of the records that this book is based on are now declassified, and are available at the National Archives in London. There are overlaps between this book and Andrew’s official history of MI5, but this book is more than a history of a single intelligence service, whether MI5, SIS or GCHQ. It is the first history, based on intelligence records, of the involvement of British intelligence as a whole, meaning all three of those services, in Britain’s twilight of empire during the Cold War.
This book also draws on a tranche of previously ‘lost’ Colonial Office records which were only made available to the public in April 2012, after a high-level court case forced the British government into admitting their existence. These supposedly ‘rediscovered’ records are said to contain some of the grimmest paperwork on the history of Britain’s end of empire, and the story of how they finally came to see the light of day is a shameful chapter in the history of British colonial rule, a cover-up of massive proportions.
In 2009 a group of elderly Kenyans instigated legal proceedings at the High Court in London against the British government for gross abuses allegedly committed on them while they were detained as Mau Mau suspects fifty years previously, during the colonial ‘Emergency’ in Kenya. As part of the proceedings of the case, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (the successor to the Colonial Office) was forced to reveal the existence of 8,800 files that colonial officials had secretly spirited away from thirty-seven different British colonies across the world, including Kenya, Cyprus, Aden, Palestine, Nigeria and Malaya, as the sun set on the empire. The official explanation for why these records were deliberately removed was that they might ‘embarrass’ Her Majesty’s government. In reality, it was because they contained some of the darkest secrets of the last days of empire.
The first cache of the previously ‘lost’ records, only made publicly available in April 2012, revealed that the British government deliberately set about destroying, culling and then removing incriminating records from colonies as they approached independence in order to prevent them falling into the hands of post-independence governments. By destroying and removing these records, Britain was then able to inculcate a fictional history of its colonial benevolence, in which occasional abuses and violence may have been inflicted on local populations, but these were the exception, not the rule. The ‘lost’ Colonial Office records revealed such a claim to be nonsense. Burying the British empire was a far more bloody affair than has previously been acknowledged or supposed.11
The records that were not deliberately destroyed by colonial officials in the last days of empire were transferred back to Britain, and were eventually housed at a top-secret Foreign Office facility at Hanslope Park, near Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, where they remained hidden for fifty years, until the High Court (assisted by a few Foreign Office officials determined that they should see the light of day) forced their release. Hanslope Park’s official title is curiously neutral-sounding: ‘Her Majesty’s Communications Centre’. To local inhabitants, however, it is known as ‘spook central’. The secret facility has a long history of involvement with Britain’s intelligence services: during the Second World War it was home to the Radio Security Service, a SIGINT outfit known as MI8 that was responsible for detecting German agents operating in Britain. The idea that the government could have ‘mislaid’ or ‘lost’ this archive is as shameful as it is preposterous. The records at Hanslope Park referring to Kenya alone were housed in three hundred boxes, occupying 110 feet of shelving. Thanks to the Kenyan case that went before the High Court, we can now see that Hanslope Park acted as a depository for records detailing the most shameful acts and crimes committed in the last days of the British empire.12 In June 2013 the British government settled the Kenyan case out of court. Speaking on behalf of the government, the foreign secretary, William Hague, issued a public apology, for the first time admitting that ‘Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration.’ By settling the case before it went to full trial, the British government was probably attempting to avoid establishing what for it would be an unwanted legal precedent, which could be used by claimants in other former British colonies alleging torture and mistreatment at the hands of British forces. The result, however, may be precisely the opposite: the British government’s apology, and the £20 million compensation it gave to Kenyan victims, may open the flood gates to other claimants.
This is the first book to draw on that secret archive. At the time of writing, only the first wave of records has been released to the public, but more are to follow. This book is therefore necessarily the first word, not the final word, on the secrets contained at Hanslope Park. Even though only the first tranche of these records, amounting to about 1,200 files, is available at the time of writing, they still reveal a number of previously unknown horrific stories. They show that the ‘elimination of ranking terrorists’ was a repeated theme in secret monthly reports circulated by the director of intelligence in British-controlled Malaya in the 1950s, suggesting that Britain effectively operated a shoot-to-kill policy there. They also show that successive British governments hoodwinked Parliament and the public over the decision to give the US a military base on the small island in the Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia, and that in order to pave the way (literally) for this, Britain forcibly removed islanders from their homes. This sad story has a resonance closer to our own times: the same base on Diego Garcia has apparently been used as a transfer site by the US as part of its policy of ‘extraordinary rendition’ in the so-called ‘war on terror’.
As well as adding a new dimension to our understanding of both Britain’s last days of empire and the Cold War, this book reveals clear – and often alarming – parallels with the world today. Among other matters, it reveals how Western governments have both used and abused intelligence; it describes the practical limitations that were faced by under-resourced intelligence services, as well as the fine line that existed between safeguarding security and upholding civil liberties, a line that in some instances was crossed; it reveals a number of dramatic, unpublicised spy scandals; it shows that just over half a century ago the British government conspired with its allies to bring about ‘regime change’ in the Middle East, and ‘sexed up’ intelligence reports in order to do so; it demonstrates the difficulty of tracking down terrorist cells that are determined to cause death and destruction; and the central role that intelligence played in combating brutal guerrilla insurgencies. It also offers a new history of ‘rendition’, revealing that during the Second World War, German agents were captured in various parts of the British empire and then transported to top-secret interrogation facilities in Britain, despite MI5’s recognition of the dubious legality of doing so. It provides a haunting testimony to the fact that, in several post-war colonial ‘Emergencies’, British soldiers tortured detainees during interrogations – despite the belief of British intelligence that doing so was counter-productive and would not produce reliable intelligence. A central theme of this book is that a repetition of such catastrophic failures can only be avoided if we understand those that occurred previously; or as Winston Churchill put it, in order to understand the present, let alone the future, we must first look back at the past.
Victoria’s Secrets: British Intelligence and Empire Before the Second World War
One advantage of the secret service is that it has no worrying audit. The service is ludicrously starved, of course, but the funds are administered by a few men who do not call for vouchers or present itemised accounts …