Britain's Cloak-and-Dagger Industry
ALAN, RAY
Euro vista BY RAY ALAN Britain's Cloak-and-Dagger Industry Asked why spy-fiction is so popular in England, a best-selling English novelist said recently: "Deviousness is one of our national...
...Books, articles and films may still be banned at the request of a secret agency...
...The reputation of the intelligence community was, however, assured by the intellectuals' success (building on earlier Polish and French achievements) in breaking Enigma and other German cyphers...
...he went to Brussels and hunted around bookstores for German military publications...
...Official stinginess allotted him only one assistant, a clerk, to begin with...
...The Duke of Wellington complained in the 1840s that, although commander-in-chief, he had to rely on newspapers for information on the progress of colonial conflicts...
...they spoke of them only when it was unavoidable, and as distastefully as if referring to drains and latrines...
...with the secrecy of intelligence operations...
...Recently, in a syndicated column by the Italian writer Indro Montanelli, I read: "In the days when England was great, its rulers and officials knew that the security of the empire depended largely on its famous espionage and security services, but they abhorred direct contact with secret agents and police...
...His subject was relations between the White House and the CIA...
...and, as the arak flowed, they extended their encomium to cover all English Mideast specialists and diplomats...
...by the "Double-cross Committee," presided over by an Oxford history don, which employed captured German spies to feed the Nazis with misleading information...
...Its first chief, Mansfield Cumming, spoke French and some German, traveled intelligently, and was a friend of the Jewish educator Kurt Hahn who may have ad vised SIS...
...and they were better briefed than members of Parliament on security problems at the British government's secret communications HQ...
...Bevin was persuaded to lie to Parliament to cover an SIS unit that was pursuing aims opposed to those of the Labor government...
...When Labor won the 1945 election the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, put MI5, which many of his supporters distrusted, under the command of an outstanding police officer...
...As Shakespeare made Artemidorus say, "Security gives way to conspiracy...
...Anyway, the greatest Englishman, Shakespeare, hated spies ("Some carry-tale, some please-man, some slight zany, some trencher-knight, some Dick...
...All too often, as Andrew says, secrecy and nonaccountability have encouraged governmental neglect and maladministration...
...he is more interested in historical and administrative aspects of the subject than in operations or scandals...
...have been evaded by every government since the foundation of the Secret Service Bureau in 1909...
...the same name was given the bribes Lawrence and other UK officials paid Arab leaders during and between the two World Wars...
...Information was badly assessed and distributed...
...Even at a higher level of sophistication, one meets references to a supposed British talent for intrigue which assume that policymakers in London have traditionally relied on ubiquitous, lavishly-financed secret services to make up for the relative weakness and unprepar-edness of their military forces...
...The problems of reconciling parliamentary accountability...
...But their reputation was soon to be tarnished by postwar blunders in the Near East and Balkans—due variously to inadequate political control, incompetence and treachery—and by evidence of Soviet infiltration of the headquarters of both MI5 and SIS...
...Forty years after the end of World War II, British government policy on intelligence matters is riddled with internal contradictions...
...Peripatetic Brits who are tired of being complimented on their perfidy, and historians who need to know how much influence secret services exerted over, say, Neville Chamberlain's appeasement ofHitlerin 1938-39, will therefore welcome a new book by Christopher Andrew, Her Majesty's Secret Service, just published in New York (Elisabeth Sif-ton/Viking, 620 pp., $25.00...
...SIS reacted to the Labor government more artfully, flattering the poorly informed Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, via its extensive media outlets, and exerting on "his" Near Eastern policy what has been described as a "Philbyite" orientation...
...as the 1914 War approached, he was allowed to employ four officers and seven clerks...
...Not being a KGB officer, Andrew, a Cambridge don, didn't have access to British intelligence files...
...Philby needs no introduction...
...One of the guests was an old tribesman with a twisted neck who, our host said, had been hanged by the Turks and rescued just in time...
...When the Nazis took over in Germany, Cumming's wife and son helped Hahn escape to Britain where he founded the famous Gordon-stoun school, two of whose alumni are Prince Philip, the Queen's husband, and Prince Charles...
...Other SIS employees sabotaged operations in the Balkans, organized the murder of King Abdullah of Jordan, the only Arab ruler Whitehall could rely on, and betrayed the 1956 Suez operation, endangering British and French troops and intelligence men...
...and by personal initiatives such as that of the newly-recruited intelligence man who was ordered to teach fellow recruits about the German Army: Discovering that the War Office had no up-to-date material on the Wehrmacht (in 1940...
...After the disasters of the Crimean campaign, the War Office set up a small topographical and statistical department, renamed in 1873 (on April Fools Day) the Intelligence Branch...
...Britain's rulers took another 25 years to realize that the Armed Forces were unpromising seedbeds of intelligence...
...Damage was also done at times by feuding between Army and Navy codebreakers, by struggles for the control of new techniques and departments, and by the conservatism of some SIS and MI5 bureaucrats who considered the War against Nazism an unseemly interruption of their sloppy routines...
...Andrews recalls that the absence of a parliamentary committee on intelligence has produced weird anomalies in Anglo-American relations...
...Most of us were aware that while supposedly championing the Arabs, Lawrence considered them "a manufactured people" and preached imperialism back in London...
...Congressional committees were told about treason charges against Sir Roger Hollis, a former MI5 director, long before the House of Commons was informed...
...In 1909, prompted by the spy-phobia and anxiety over German naval expansion being stimulated by the popular Anglo-French novelist William Le Queux, the government created the mainly civilian Secret Service Bureau...
...By 1945 half a dozen sectors of SIS, SOE and MI5 had achieved something like the distinction hitherto conferred on the British secret services only in myth...
...Until then "intelligence" officers had been ignorant of geography and barely spoke schoolboy French...
...Britain's intelligence show was at last on the road, but it was often weakened by that old British handicap incompetent management...
...On the eve of Hitler's War, Andrew says, "the system was so defective that Whitehall was frequently incapable of distinguishing good intelligence from bogus plants...
...The following year this was divided into security and intelligence sections (later to become MI5 and SIS...
...A secret service fund was instituted in the 17 th century but used at first mainly for political bribery inside Britain and the upkeep of Royal mistresses...
...He has dug diligently, though, in private memoirs and the archives of the Foreign Office and other government departments whose records are usually made available to researchers after 30years...
...As late as the mid-19th century British governments launched military campaigns in little-known territories for which they had no reliable maps...
...The SIS began from scratch and was initially unable to afford full-time agents...
...He was, however, praised by several of those present, precisely for his cunning...
...When, a decade later, the British Navy was persuaded to form its first intelligence section— staffed by two officers and two clerks— there, too, braided numbskulls tried to sabotage it...
...George" (payments in gold sovereigns that bore an effigy of the saint...
...In a short war the intelligence renaissance would have come too late...
...Coming from men of the Levant, an intercontinental crossroads where many ethnic and religious communities owe their survival to mastery of the arts of duplicity—from crude political chameleonism to subtle taqiya ("expedient deception" in religious matters)—this was mind-spinning praise...
...The novelist's reply reminded me, though, of an afternoon I spent at a feast given by a Bedouin sheikh who had known T.E...
...But the experience of Congressional intelligence committees in the United States has demonstrated that these problems are not insoluble...
...The Official Secrets Acts are in voked in order to hide facts, including security scandals, not from the Russians but from the British media and Parliament...
...There was, they asserted, no one to equal the English for trickery...
...every case-officer will recognize the categories) and would have snubbed MI5 ("Security is mortals' chiefest enemy...
...They particularly resented the 1940-43 influx of writers, professors and other unawed intellectuals...
...Well, I know family, social and cultural characteristics exist, but I find "national characteristics" as dubious a concept as vegetarian hamburgers...
...Senior MI5 men, "Oxbridge types" who despised the low-caste, ill-educated police, were infuriated by this "insult" and spared no effort to humiliate their new director, even quoting to him Latin epigrams he could not understand...
...Readers will find many useful facts and comments in Andrew's pages, and clues to help them dig out more...
...The innovation was mocked and sniped at for years by senior officers, including the next commander-in-chief, a dimwitted cousin of Queen Victoria's...
...by the boost SOE (a new covert action service) gave the morale of resistance workers in occupied Europe...
...It required remarkable improvisation and a major new recruitment to fit the intelligence community for war...
...But MI5 could call on the services of the police Special Branch formed in 1883 to combat Irish nationalism and Left-wing agitation (working-class reform movements had been spied on since the early 1800s in a patchy, ill-coordinated way...
...How important does he consider Whitehall's secret services to have been " in the days when England was great...
...In the last quarter of the 18th century, British efforts to obtain inside information about the American and French revolutions were largely unsuccessful, even though backed by "the cavalry of St...
...His approach is scholarly...
...Euro vista BY RAY ALAN Britain's Cloak-and-Dagger Industry Asked why spy-fiction is so popular in England, a best-selling English novelist said recently: "Deviousness is one of our national characteristics...
...MI5's first boss, the product of a cosmopolitan upbringing, spoke five languages...
...the others, younger, were Syrian landowners and politicians...
...Lawrence...
Vol. 68 • December 1985 • No. 16
