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

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, the Cold War was primarily an intelligence conflict, in which the intelligence services of Western governments and Eastern Bloc countries were pitted against each other, and fought at the front line. One veteran Whitehall intelligence official, Michael Herman, has rightly said that during the Cold War, Western and Eastern Bloc countries relied on intelligence assessments (of each other) to an extent that was unprecedented in peacetime. Given the connection that existed between Britain’s end of empire and the Cold War on the one hand, and the Cold War and intelligence on the other, it should come as little surprise to learn that Britain’s intelligence services played a significant role in British decolonisation. 10

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 departments, I have consulted a range of private collections of papers from a number of archives. Together with interviews conducted with former intelligence officials, it has thus been possible to weave together a narrative of the history of British intelligence, the Cold War, and Britain’s twilight of empire.

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.

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