By 1945, SOE and the OSS were parachuting rival paramilitary teams into Indochina to support opposite sides in a messy conflict. Both were under pressure from their governments to inch ahead in a secret race over restored empire in Asia. In this febrile atmosphere, accidents were bound to happen. Accordingly the British operated a ‘ban on informing the Americans’ about their secret flights, meaning there was a very real danger that they might be mistaken for Japanese aircraft. Just before midnight on 22 January 1945, two RAF Liberator aircraft from No. 358 Special Duties squadron set off to drop operatives into Indochina. They never returned, and soon questions were being asked. Air Vice Marshal Gilbert Harcourt Smith eventually reported: ‘It now seems certain that two of the Liberators missing from No. 358 Squadron on the night of 22/23 were destroyed by American fighters.’ He added, ‘I am convinced that it will be in the best interest of all concerned if we adopt sealed lips on these incidents and drop all idea of any investigation.’62
Churchill watched these imperial issues closely. He employed Gerald Wilkinson, an MI6 officer, as his secret contact with General Douglas MacArthur, the American commander in the South-West Pacific. MacArthur loathed Roosevelt, and was a potential Republican candidate for the next US election. When Wilkinson made return trips to England he reported first to Menzies in MI6 headquarters, and then went round to Downing Street to brief Churchill directly.63 One key issue was MacArthur’s prospects as a potential presidential candidate. Wilkinson described him as ‘ruthless, vain, unscrupulous and self-conscious’, but ‘a man of real calibre’.64 On his visits to London, Wilkinson was often summoned by telephone to brief Churchill in the middle of the night.65 His main theme during these midnight conversations was the ‘Wall Street imperialists’ and the danger they presented to British imperial interests in the Far East. Wilkinson visited Alan Brooke, who found him ‘very interesting’,66 and also briefed the editor of The Times, the secretary of Imperial Tobacco, the head of Imperial Chemical Industries and the senior staff from Anglo-Iranian Oil.67 Late in the war, at the suggestion of Ian Fleming, then a naval intelligence officer, he was posted to Washington, where he continued to monitor the American and Chinese threat to British commercial interests in the Far East. As William Stephenson noted, this work was ‘somewhat outside the charter of British Security Coordination’s activities’.68
British covert action in the service of empire was even more remarkable in the Middle East. Recent research in French archives has shown how the British tried to keep the Middle East quiet by means of a vast programme of bribery undertaken by both SOE and MI6.69 As the war drew to an end and the future of SOE came under scrutiny, Lord Killearn, the ambassador to Egypt, reflected that its main job in the Middle East had been the bribery of senior political figures, what he called ‘the payment of baksheesh’.70 At this point, Lord Selborne, the last head of SOE, wrote a veritable essay to Churchill on how SOE defended his beloved empire:
SOE can lend valuable aid to top-hatted administrators by unacknowledgeable methods. Lord Killearn in Egypt and Sir Reader Bullard in Persia have already employed SOE to important effect in nobbling personalities who can make themselves inconvenient to HMG. A ‘loan’ here, a directorship there, pay dividends out of all proportions, and may save battalions … this can be done in conformity with Foreign Office policy, but, it can only be done by those who understand the technique, potentialities, and limitations of subterranean work.71
It is only now becoming clear, with the recent discovery of documents which MI6 hoped had long been destroyed, that the wartime Middle East in particular served as a playground for the British secret service, perfecting their techniques of bribery and covert political influence. Many senior figures, including leaders in Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, were on the payroll. The British not only bribed an astonishing number of ministers, officials and newspaper editors across the region, they even forced them to sign receipts to underline that they were on the take.72
In 1941, Churchill had viewed William Donovan, the head of OSS, as an ally. But by the end of the war, because of these colonial issues, he saw him as a dangerous enemy trying to subvert the British Empire. In April 1945, when asked about the role of guerrillas and the liberation of Hong Kong, Churchill warned Eden, ‘I incline against another SOE–OSS duel, on ground too favourable for that dirty Donovan.’73 Donovan was in much the same mood. He visited London in July 1945 to hold discussions with the large OSS station there, but US intelligence and security officers reported that ‘he did not desire to see “any damn British”’.74 Donovan’s vexation in the summer of 1945 may have reflected a sense that he was losing the anti-colonial war against the British in Asia. Russia was on the rise, and Roosevelt, the great evangelist of anti-colonialism, died in April 1945. One of Donovan’s very last missives to the White House as America’s intelligence chief was to insist that the Viet Minh were fundamentally nice people but naïve, and were being ‘misled’ by ‘agents provocateurs and Communist elements’.75 Other OSS officers in Washington disagreed, and were already warning the new president, Harry S. Truman, that the US should be supporting the European colonial empires, not undermining them, as they would be needed to help contain the post-war Soviet Union. British and American intelligence agencies were increasingly talking the language of anti-communism and an emerging Cold War.
For Churchill, the Cold War had begun in earnest with the arguments over Poland in early 1944. Dismayed at Stalin’s brutal treatment of the Polish resistance, he told Eden: ‘I fear that very great evil may come upon the world … the Russians are drunk with victory and there is no length they may not go.’ He added that this time, at any rate, ‘we and the Americans will be heavily armed’. Clearly he was already thinking about a military confrontation with Stalin – and perhaps even about nascent nuclear weapons.76 Churchill mused that there would soon be nothing ‘between the white snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover’.77
A year later, within days of Germany’s defeat, the prime minister contemplated the ‘elimination of Russia’. He ordered plans for war with the Soviets to be drawn up, codenamed ‘Operation Unthinkable’. This called for hundreds of thousands of British and American troops, supported by 100,000 rearmed German soldiers, to unleash a surprise attack upon their war-weary eastern ally. Meanwhile the RAF would attack Soviet cities from bases in northern Europe.78 The military lacked enthusiasm, not least because Hitler had failed to achieve this objective even with more than a hundred divisions.79
Brooke and his fellow chiefs of staff were horrified by Churchill’s idea. The prime minister perhaps felt that nuclear weapons would provide the answer to the question of how to defeat Stalin. Such thoughts and discussions are not ordinarily recorded in formal minutes, but Brooke captured the reality of these intensely secret and private discussions in his diary. Churchill,