The identity of the Fifth Man was eventually to be established, not through a belated VENONA breakthrough, but as a result of intelligence from Oleg Gordievsky, an SIS agent in the KGB recruited late in 1974. From September 1975 SIS passed all intelligence received from Gordievsky to K Branch (counter-espionage), where, in the Service’s view, K6 made ‘a fundamental contribution to the collation and assessment’ of his information.96 It was not, however, until after Gordievsky returned to Moscow at the end of the 1970s to work at the Centre that he discovered the identity of the Fifth Man.97 After his posting to the London residency in 1982, he revealed that the Fifth Man was John Cairncross, who had confessed his role as a Soviet agent to the Security Service eighteen years earlier. The Service then discovered that a major counter-espionage problem which had continued to preoccupy it for over twenty years had been resolved in 1964.
7
The End of Empire: Part 1
The post-war retreat from the greatest empire in world history without a single military defeat sets the British experience apart from the humiliations suffered by other European imperial powers. Britain’s decolonization, unlike that of its main imperial rival, France, began before it was too late for an orderly withdrawal. The transfer of power in India and Pakistan in 1947, despite the horrendous inter-communal carnage which accompanied it, happened in time to preserve a degree of official goodwill for postimperial Britain. The last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, was asked to stay on as governor general and the framework of the civil service of the British Raj was largely preserved in independent India. What was not made public, however, was that, during a visit to India in March 1947, the DDG, Guy Liddell, obtained the agreement of the government of Jawaharlal Nehru for an MI5 security liaison officer (SLO) to be stationed in New Delhi after the end of British rule.1 Though the first SLO, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Bourne, who had served in India with the Intelligence Corps during the war,2 stayed for only six months, he set an important precedent for the subsequent history of British decolonization. In all other newly independent Commonwealth countries, as in India, the continued presence of an SLO became a significant, though usually undisclosed, part of the transfer of power. For almost a quarter of a century, relations between the Security Service and its Indian counterpart, the Delhi Intelligence Branch (DIB or IB), were closer and more confident than those between any other departments of the British and Indian governments.
In 1948, shortly after Bourne had been succeeded as SLO by Bill U’ren, an old India hand with twenty-two years’ service in the Indian police,3 a dispute between the British high commissioner in India, General Sir Archibald Nye, and SIS led to the reaffirmation of the principle that the Empire and Commonwealth were the exclusive preserve of the Security Service. After Nye had complained in the autumn of 1948 that SIS activities in India risked prejudicing ‘delicate negotiations’ he was conducting in New Delhi, the Prime Minister issued what became known as the ‘Attlee Directive’ (an oral instruction which was never put in writing) formally precluding SIS from conducting clandestine operations in Commonwealth countries.4 An annexe to the 1952 Maxwell Fyfe Directive to the DG (this time in writing) allowed for a more flexible interpretation of the Attlee Directive:
Broadly speaking, the activities of the Security Service relate to British, Colonial and Commonwealth territory, and those of SIS to foreign territory but it is recognised that in certain circumstances it is expedient that each conducts operations on the other’s territory, on the understanding that both parties are kept informed.5
Not till the late 1960s, with decolonization almost complete, did the Security Service surrender the lead intelligence role in India and most of the Commonwealth to SIS.6
In June 1950 U’ren’s successor as SLO, Eric Kitchin, another old India hand, reported that the first head of the independent DIB, T. G. Sanjevi, lost ‘no opportunity of stressing the value which he places on maintaining our relationship on a professional and personal basis’.7 Liddell and Sanjevi were united in their deep distrust of the first Indian high commissioner in London, V. K. Krishna Menon, the Congress Party’s leading left-wing firebrand who had spent most of his previous political career in Britain, founding the India League in 1932 to campaign for Indian independence and serving as a Labour councillor in London.8 In 1933 the Security Service had obtained an HOW on Menon on the grounds that he was an ‘important worker in the Indian Revolutionary Movement’ with links to the CPGB.9 To outward appearance, Menon seemed an Anglicized figure. The only language he spoke by the time he became high commissioner in 1947 was English, he disliked curry and much preferred a tweed jacket and flannel trousers to Indian dress. But Menon also had a passionate loathing for the British Raj which independence did little to abate.
Though the JIC discussed the question of Communist influence at the Indian high commission, the discussion was considered so sensitive that no record was made of it. Liddell, however, noted in his diary that he told the JIC, ‘We were doing what we could to get rid of Krishna Menon.’10 The attempt failed. Though Menon was reported to be threatening to resign after press attacks in India, he was able to count on Nehru’s support and did not do so.11 Fears of Menon’s pro-Soviet sympathies were well founded. On at least one occasion during his later political career in India, the KGB paid his election expenses.12
Sanjevi’s successor as head of the DIB, B. N. Mullik, was also an enthusiastic supporter of close liaison with the Security Service.13 In 1951, despite South African opposition, India (represented by Mullik), Pakistan and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) were invited to the Second Commonwealth Security Conference in London along with the white dominions.14 Since the election victory in 1948 of Dr Daniel Malan’s white-supremacist Nationalist Party it had proved more difficult to maintain intelligence liaison with South Africa than with India. The Security Service had no SLO in Pretoria. Sir Percy Sillitoe, who had spent his early career in the British South African and Northern Rhodesian police forces, visited South Africa in 1949 and told Attlee afterwards that he was strongly opposed to the creation of a local security service:
The improper uses to which a Security Service might be put by the Nationalists might well include its employment against the Parliamentary Opposition and against those members of the British community out of sympathy with the Nationalist political programme. It would certainly be used to keep down the black races.15
Though in favour of intelligence co-operation with South Africa against Communism, the Security Service remained intermittently nervous about the political uses to which the Pretoria government might put its intelligence. The case of the campaigning anti-racist cleric the Reverend Michael Scott, who had contacts in the CPGB but was not at all the Communist stooge imagined by Pretoria, gave rise to particular anxiety. In December 1951 Sillitoe sent an unusually direct rebuke to the SLO in Salisbury (later Harare), B. M. ‘Bob’ de Quehen, for providing information on Scott to the South African authorities:
The Commonwealth Relations Office, the Foreign Office and our own High Commissioner at Pretoria have already said that they are opposed to allowing the South African Government the use of information about Scott received from British sources, because of political objections.
Would you please therefore refrain from giving further information about Scott to the South African High Commissioner without first referring to us. Scott’s case is one of exceptional political delicacy, which is a source of embarrassment to us no less than to the South Africans, and it is essential that our Service should not allow itself to become involved in its political aspects.16
Stung by the criticism, de Quehen replied plaintively to the DG: ‘Could not your letter have been expressed a little more graciously?’17
There were no such sensitivities in sharing Security Service intelligence on Communist ‘subversion’ with Mullik and the DIB. When Walter Bell became SLO in New Delhi in 1952, he was encouraged by Mullik to visit DIB outstations as well as its headquarters.18 Bell found Mullik ‘such an exceptional man, both pe
rsonally and in the position which he held, that he was the fount of all knowledge that I wanted’.19 When Mullik visited London for the Third Commonwealth Security Conference in 1953, he told Hollis (then DDG) ‘that he thought the Intelligence Bureau was reasonably well informed about subversive activities within India, but he was not so well satisfied about his position on the counter-espionage side’. Mullik asked for an experienced counter-espionage officer to visit DIB headquarters and for help in training transcribers.20 During 1955, probably to Mullik’s dismay, an exchange of state visits by Nehru and Nikita Khrushchev opened a new era in Indo-Soviet relations. American reliance on Pakistan as a strategic counterweight to Soviet influence in Asia encouraged India to turn to the USSR. The newly appointed SLO, John Allen, was understandably concerned about the possible impact on his relations with the DIB. He reported to Hollis in December:
As you know, Mullik has always been anxious not to draw the attention of the Ministry of External Affairs (excluding [N. R.] Pillai, the Secretary-General, who, I suppose, is more in our confidence than any other Indian civil servant) to the existence of an SLO here. Mullik’s opinion is that there are too many people in this Department who would be happy to break up the liaison. The fact that neither Mullik nor Pillai have sufficient confidence in the Prime Minister’s continuing approval of the liaison willingly to draw his attention to it is a fair indication of the delicate path we tread.21
In 1956 Nehru declared that he had never encountered a ‘grosser case of naked aggression’ than the Anglo-French invasion of Suez, but failed to condemn the brutal Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Uprising in the same year. The chill in Indo-British diplomatic relations, however, had little impact on collaboration between the DIB and MI5. A steady stream of DIB officers attended Security Service training courses in London.22 At Mullik’s request, a D Branch officer was sent to India in 1957 to undertake a detailed review of the DIB’s counter-espionage operations against the Soviet Union and propose improvements.23 Arrangements were also made for a Service expert on the CPGB to visit New Delhi to study DIB records on the finances of the Communist Party of India (CPI),24 which received regular secret subsidies from Moscow.25 After returning to London for the 1957 Commonwealth Security Conference, Mullik wrote to Hollis, who had succeeded White as DG: ‘In my talks and discussions, I never felt that I was dealing with any organisation which was not my own. Besides this, the hospitality and kindness which all of you showed me was also quite overwhelming.’26 Hollis visited the DIB in May 1958 and noted afterwards that Mullik’s views on Communist penetration were closer to his own than to those of the Indian government.27 But the SLO, John Allen, feared that, with ‘so many unfavourable political winds blowing’ between India and Britain, if Nehru realized how close collaboration between the DIB and MI5 was, he would probably forbid much of it.28 Nehru, however, either never discovered how close the relationship was or – less probably – did discover and took no action.
In the view of the Security Service, the DIB was increasingly unequal to coping with the growing Soviet intelligence presence in India, greater than in any other country in the developing world. In February 1964, three months before Nehru’s death, Director E (then responsible for overseas counter-subversion, intelligence organization and liaison), a veteran of the Indian police under the British Raj, visited New Delhi to discuss training and counter-espionage with the DIB:
Despite minor successes, the overall impression of the Bureau’s work against the huge Soviet Embassy staff is depressing indeed. Politicians and many officials do not even recognise that there is any threat, and there is no attempt to limit the movements of Russians. In effect they are having an almost free run for their money both in the espionage and subversive fields.29
KGB records reveal that his assessment was well founded. Its residency in New Delhi was rewarded for its operational successes by being upgraded to the status of ‘main residency’. Oleg Kalugin, who became head of counter-intelligence in KGB foreign intelligence (and its youngest general) in 1973, remembers India as ‘a model of KGB infiltration of a Third World government’. India under Nehru’s daughter and successor, Indira Gandhi, was probably also the arena for more KGB ‘active measures’ than anywhere else in the world.30 Successive SLOs’ close relations with the DIB made their inside information on Indian politics and government policy of increasing value to the British high commission at a time when the Soviet Union, through KGB as well as overt channels, was attempting to establish a special relationship with India. In 1965, a year after Nehru’s death, the high commissioner, John Freeman, wrote to Hollis to say how much he valued the SLO’s information: ‘his liaison is one which continues unaffected by changes in Indo-British relations.’31 Most of the SLOs appointed to New Delhi were gregarious people, fond of India and good at getting on with both the DIB and their high commission colleagues. In 1967 the SLO recruited as his clerical assistant the future DG, Stella Rimington, whose husband was a first secretary at the high commission. The SLO lived in some style. ‘He was’, Rimington recalls, ‘best known for his excellent Sunday curry lunches, which usually went on well into the evening, and for driving round Delhi in a snazzy old Jaguar.’32
By trying to maintain close links with the governments of its former empire, Britain sought (unsuccessfully in the case of India) to prevent them gravitating into the Cold War orbit of the Soviet Union.33 Though rarely mentioned in public, one of the most important of those links was in security and intelligence. During the early Cold War the wartime defence security officers (DSOs) were succeeded by a network of MI5 SLOs operating under civilian rather than military cover, who reported to the local colonial administration (usually the governor) and sometimes the British military commanders, as well as passing intelligence to and from London.34 After independence, as in India, they became part of the British high commission. Sillitoe frequently felt more at home in the Empire and Commonwealth, where he made a number of lengthy tours as DG, than he did in his office at Leconfield House.35 In January 1950, both to improve the co-ordination of the imperial security network and to bolster his own authority over it,36 Sillitoe brought in a leading colonial administrator, Sir John Shaw, to head a new division, the Overseas Service (OS). Over the next two years, Shaw went on lengthy tours of inspection of the Middle East, Far East, the Indian sub-continent and Anglophone Africa.37 Within the Security Service his beanpole appearance and time spent in the air earned him the nickname the ‘Flying Pencil’.38 Most of Sillitoe’s directors, however, resented the way that Shaw and OS interfered with direct communication between the SLOs and the intelligence departments. When Dick White succeeded Sillitoe as DG in August 1953, he lost no time in disbanding the Overseas Service.39
The imperial historian John Darwin rightly emphasizes ‘the wide variation in British attitudes and policy between one region and another, and the very different kinds of accommodation which they reached, or sought, with different nationalist movements’.40 The Security Service played a part in many of the ‘accommodations’. The first great challenge to an orderly post-war retreat from Empire was the guerrilla war begun by the Malayan Communist Party, composed mostly of ethnic Chinese, in 1948. The colonial administration was ill equipped to deal with it. One of the greatest successes of pre-war imperial intelligence had been the recruitment of the Vietnamese Communist Lai Teck, who became secretary general of the Malayan Communist Party in 1939. Chin Peng, who uncovered his treachery in March 1947 and succeeded him as secretary general, later described Lai Teck’s agent career as ‘surely one of Britain’s greatest spying triumphs’. Lai Teck was assassinated shortly after he was unmasked.41 The problems of Malayan intelligence were exacerbated by a power struggle between the interdepartmental Security Intelligence Far East (SIFE),42 based in Singapore, and the ambitious Colonel John Dalley, head of the Malayan Security Service (MSS) founded in 1946. In the view of the Security Service:
. . . Dalley was an empire builder, could not delegate responsibility and was convinced t
hat he was the sole expert on intelligence in the Far East . . . The shortcomings of MSS seriously hampered the work of SIFE and the personality of Dalley thwarted any attempt to remedy the situation.
Following complaints by Sillitoe to the Colonial Office in 1947, high-level negotiations ensued in both London and the Far East but failed to find a solution.43 Liddell’s distrust of Dalley was so acute that he believed there was a ‘strong indication that if, as we intend to do, we put in an informant [in the Malayan Communist Party], Dalley will sabotage him’.44
On 14 June 1948 Dalley reported, ‘At the time of writing there is no immediate threat to internal security in Malaya although the position is constantly changing and is potentially dangerous.’ Two days later Communist guerrillas killed two British managers and an assistant at two rubber plantations. At one of the plantations the guerrillas signalled their intentions by shouting to the Malay labourers who witnessed the killings, ‘We will shoot all Europeans!’ The Governor, Sir Edward Gent (soon to be replaced), responded by declaring a State of Emergency, and blamed a Communist ‘organised campaign of murder’.45 Intended as a purely temporary measure, the Emergency was to last twelve years. What was not known at the time was that, though the Communist leadership had issued a rather imprecise programme for guerrilla war, the killings on 14 June were the result of a decision by local Communists not authorized by the Party leadership.46
At the beginning of the Emergency, Sillitoe sent the flamboyant Alex Kellar47 to Malaya to advise on changes to the intelligence structure and spend almost a year as head of SIFE. Soon after his arrival he claimed from Head Office the cost of assembling a tropical kit which included ‘two Palm Beach and one Saigon linen suitings, white shirts, drill, sharkskin dinner jackets’.48 Kellar’s rather camp manner grated with some of the military. Sillitoe himself received an unusually frosty welcome during a visit to Malaya early in the Emergency. When he heard that Dalley had described him as a Glasgow street-corner boy (a slighting reference to Sillitoe’s gangbusting days as chief constable of Glasgow in the 1930s), he demanded and obtained an apology. The Governor’s secretary reported that he had ‘seldom witnessed so tense a scene’.49 As Sillitoe and Kellar had recommended, however, the Malayan Security Service was replaced by a new Special Branch within the Malayan Criminal Investigation Department, which liaised with SLOs in Kuala Lumpur and the neighbouring British colony of Singapore.50
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