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

surveillance systems, and the strains of ‘total war’, in which all of a country’s resources were mobilised towards the war effort, necessitated an enormous increase in security and surveillance, both in Britain and across its empire. Total war required total surveillance. All of the warring governments were equipped with vastly increased new powers of detention and investigation, particularly through mail interception. MI5’s staff expanded dramatically after 1914, growing from a handful on the outbreak of war to reach 844 in 1918, of whom 133 were officers, as opposed to other ranks, while its central registry of people and organisations grew from 17,500 card indexes in 1914 to over 250,000 cards and 27,000 personal files in 1918. The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), passed soon after the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, provided MI5 and other departments of the British secret state with enormously increased powers of surveillance. This is illustrated by the fact that at the start of the war the Post Office employed a single censor to intercept, open and analyse mail, but by its end the Censor’s Office had grown to employ over 2,000 officials, each of whom opened on average over 150 letters per day. It was also during the First World War that MI5 became more than just a ‘domestic’ intelligence service, as it is sometimes still mistakenly understood to be, and made a claim to be an imperial service, responsible for security intelligence in all British territories across the globe.¹²

      The First World War is often regarded as a European war, a view that is reinforced by the famous war poetry of the Western Front, which vividly captures the horrific realities of trench warfare, with thousands of men being sent to their deaths in conditions akin to hell on earth. In reality, however, from the outset it was a worldwide war. Contrary to what we might expect, the first shots fired by British forces on land in the war did not take place in Europe, but were fired on 12 August 1914 at a German wireless station in Togoland, and soon after the outbreak of hostilities it became a deliberate policy of the Prusso-German General Staff to incite revolution and subversion (termed Revolutionspolitik) in the colonial empires and ‘weak points’ of its enemies. In September 1914 the German Chancellor, Theobold von Bethmann Hollweg, told his Foreign Ministry: ‘England appears determined to wage war until the bitter end … Thus one of our main tasks is gradually to wear England down through unrest in India and Egypt.’ It is revealing that while the British used the term ‘Great War’, from the start the German military spoke of a ‘World War’ (Weltkrieg).¹³

      In 1914 the German General Staff established a new department, the Intelligence Bureau for the East (Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient), attached to the Foreign Ministry, which was led by an aristocratic Prussian archaeologist and explorer, Max von Oppenheim. The exploits of Oppenheim’s Bureau read much like the fantastic accounts of dastardly German plots to stir up unrest in India found in John Buchan’s classic wartime espionage novel Greenmantle (1916). Buchan describes a fiendish plan by the Central Powers to incite revolt in the Middle East and India, which it falls to his heroes, Major Richard Hannay and his friend Sandy Arbuthnot, a master of foreign tongues and exotic disguises, to thwart. In fact, Buchan’s story was not as absurd as the author purposefully made it appear. Buchan served as a war correspondent and briefly as a military intelligence officer at British headquarters in France, where he would have had access to intelligence records. His novel was fictional in degree, but not in essence.¹⁴

      The reality was that before the war, Germany had been carefully cultivating links with Turkey and other Middle Eastern countries, which acted as the gateway to British India. Beginning in the 1890s, the German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, had sponsored the construction of the Berlin–Baghdad railway, and during a trip to Damascus in 1898 he went so far as to declare himself the ‘protector’ of all Muslims – though it is unclear what reaction this received. Oppenheim’s new intelligence Bureau was responsible for inciting revolt among Germany’s enemies, and at various times during the war it sponsored French pacifists and Mexican nationalists, and most famously – or infamously, depending on one’s perspective – it helped a Russian émigré called Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, more popularly known by his pseudonym, Lenin, to return to Russia in April 1917 in a sealed bomb-proof train, with ample funds, shortly after which he successfully instigated a revolution against the temporary Russian government. There is no evidence that Lenin was a German agent per se, but he was certainly sponsored by Oppenheim’s Bureau – though presumably Lenin himself would have argued that it was he who was playing the German intelligence services, not the other way around. Nevertheless, in many ways the Bolshevik revolution was the greatest success of the wartime German intelligence services. Meanwhile, the main targets of Oppenheim’s Bureau in the British empire were Indian and Bengali nationals, Irish republicans and Arab jihadists.¹⁵

      On 5 November 1914, soon after the outbreak of hostilities, the Ottoman empire entered the war on Germany’s side, and largely as a result of pressure from the German government, the Turkish Caliphate issued fatwas ordering all Muslims to wage a holy war (jihad) against Britain and its allies. British War Office records reveal the extent to which the Chiefs of Staff in London were concerned about subversion in the Indian army, one-third of whose soldiers were Muslims. It was also not lost on the Chiefs of Staff, nor on MI5, that approximately half of the world’s then 270 million Muslims lived under either British, Russian or French rule.¹⁶

      At the beginning of the war, India was the only part of the British empire that MI5 was in direct contact with, communicating with the Director of Criminal Intelligence (DCI) in Delhi, Maj. John Wallinger. Previously, the main responsibility for dealing with Indian ‘seditionists’ or ‘revolutionaries’ (members of the Ghadr ‘revolt’ party) had fallen to the London Special Branch, but in the course of the war MI5 increasingly took a lead in dealing with Indian revolutionaries in Britain. After 1914 the German Foreign Ministry established an ‘Indian Committee’ in Berlin, which revolved around the exiled Indian academic and lawyer Virendaranath Chattopadhyaya, who had become a revolutionary while studying law at Middle Temple in London, and was a close confidant of the man who would later become the first leader of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru. One of the agents being run by Chattopadhyaya in wartime Britain, Harish Chandra, was identified by MI5 through intercepted communications and interrogated by MI5 officers in October 1915. They persuaded him to act as a double agent, and he duly passed over considerable amounts of information on German plots in India. Reassuringly for MI5 and the Chiefs of Staff, the intelligence produced by Chandra revealed that the German Foreign Ministry was making increasingly unrealistic and far-fetched plans for subversion in India. The intensive interception of the mail of 138,000 Indian troops serving on the Western Front likewise convinced MI5 and the War Office that there was no widespread support for revolutionaries or for pan-Islamism among those soldiers – though one censor did report a worrying trend among them to write poetry, which he considered ‘an ominous sign of mental disquietude’. It was judged that the best strategy was to let the German Foreign Ministry continue wasting time, money and energy on fruitless plans for subversion in India.¹⁷

      MI5’s main wartime expert on Indian affairs was Robert Nathan, who joined the organisation in November 1914, having spent twenty-six years in the Indian Civil Service and also serving as Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University before he was forced to resign due to ill-health. Within MI5, Nathan surrounded himself with a number of veterans of the Indian army, police and civil service. By 1917, MI5’s G-Branch, which was responsible for investigations, had a total of twenty-eight officers, eight of whom had previously served in India. This was an unusually large collection of Indian veterans for any British government department outside India itself. One of Nathan’s continual wartime concerns was possible political assassinations on British soil. In July 1909 an Indian Ghadr revolutionary had assassinated Sir William Curzon Wyllie, a former Indian Army officer and aide to the Secretary of State for India, on the steps of the India Office in London. Based in part on information provided by its double agent Chandra, MI5 feared that similar attempts might be made during the war. No such plot ever materialised, but MI5 continued to intercept and scrutinise the correspondence of known revolutionaries in London. In the spring of 1916 Nathan travelled to the USA, where his intelligence provided the US authorities with much of the evidence used at two major trials of the Ghadr movement, the first of which was held in Chicago in October 1916 and ended with the conviction of three militants. The second trial, held in San Francisco, came to a dramatic