The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  In November 1963 Thomson reported that the head of the Special Branch, J. W. K. Harlley, and his deputy, A. K. Deku, had told him they were convinced that Nkrumah was turning Ghana into a Soviet satellite. In January 1964 a Ghanaian policeman fired at Nkrumah, causing him only minor injury but killing a security guard. A bogus letter from a supposedly disillusioned US military intelligence officer, rapidly fabricated by the KGB, persuaded Nkrumah that the CIA was, once again, plotting his overthrow. He wrote an angry personal letter of protest to President Lyndon Johnson, accusing the CIA of devoting all its energies to ‘clandestine and subversive activities among our people’.48 The high commissioner in Accra, Hugh Smedley, tried unsuccessfully to persuade Hollis to extend Thomson’s tour of duty beyond the planned departure date of May 1964. The Commonwealth Relations Office wrote to Hollis:

  Our High Commission in Accra view Thomson’s departure with some dismay because they regard him as a key man in the Mission, with excellent knowledge and judgment of Ghanaian affairs and having contacts, especially with Special Branch, which are of crucial importance . . . It looks as if we may be entering one of those phases in our relations with Ghana when Thomson’s advice would be particularly helpful.49

  In 1965, a year after Thomson’s departure, the post of SLO in Accra was abolished on the grounds that, because of the worsening of relations with the Nkrumah regime, it no longer served any significant purpose.50 Over farewell drinks in the house of a Ghanaian general, Harlley invited Thomson’s successor as SLO to ask London to send him telephone interception and eavesdropping equipment. London did not respond.51

  On 24 February 1966 Harlley succeeded in organizing a combined military and police coup which overthrew the Nkrumah regime. Next day Sir Arthur Snelling of the Commonwealth Relations Office rang the DG, Furnival Jones, to ask him to despatch Thomson urgently to Ghana. Snelling believed that ‘through his knowledge of personalities in Ghana [Thomson] would be able to find out what was going on and in particular what the prospects were for a resumption of diplomatic relations’.52 Arriving in Accra on the 28th, Thomson was welcomed with open arms by Harlley, who was now deputy chairman of the National Liberation Council (NLC). After a brief tirade from Harlley upbraiding Her Majesty’s Government for having abandoned him in 1963 and put his life in danger, as well as failing to supply the equipment he had asked for in 1965, the two men settled their differences and renewed their friendship over a bottle of brandy. Thomson went on to be welcomed by, and deliver unofficial congratulations to, the NLC chairman, General Ankrah, and the other NLC members. On 2 March, following a favourable report from Thomson, Britain formally recognized the new Ghanaian regime, establishing full diplomatic relations three days later. This was the only occasion on which a Security Service officer was charged by HMG with making the first contact with a new government which had seized power in a coup d’état.53

  In some other African Commonwealth countries, the SLO remained an influential figure throughout the 1960s. By 1966 the SLO in Lagos had been given one of the twenty secret government telephones allocated to senior Nigerian figures. After the coup which brought General Gowon to power in July 1966, he was asked, with the approval of the new regime, to arrange the escape of the number two in the previous government, which he successfully effected during ‘an amusing few hours reminiscent of wartime . . . with launch trips after dark and ladders over the seaward side of the mailboat’.54 The SLO also reported that his small office, ‘through our liaison contacts, were virtually the only source of real intelligence throughout the coup and that [the] huge official edifice, with its forty-four British diplomats and over one hundred non-diplomats, relied on us for almost all of their factual information’.55 The high commissioner, Sir Francis Cumming-Bruce, told the DG in November that the SLO was ‘the High Commission’s lifeline for information on day-to-day developments in the internal security situation, through his contacts with the Nigerian police’.56 A new SLO, who was appointed in 1967 at the beginning of the Nigerian Civil War which followed the attempted secession of Biafra, was taken aback by the amount of inside information on the Gowon regime which he acquired from his contacts in the Nigerian Special Branch,57 including its head whom he had first met on a colonial administrator’s course in Oxford in the 1950s. When he accompanied the high commissioner to see the President, General Gowon made a point of asking the SLO to stay behind so that he could thank him for his help.58

  The former African colony in which the Security Service’s role remained of greatest significance was Kenya. The intelligence in which Kenyatta took most interest concerned the activities of the pro-Communist deputy president of his ruling KANU party, Oginga Odinga. With assistance from former senior members of the colonial Special Branch, whom Kenyatta had asked to stay on after the end of British rule, at least one of Odinga’s houses was bugged.59 On the first anniversary of Kenyan independence in 1964, Kenyatta asked the former Commonwealth Secretary, Duncan Sandys, ‘if we, the British, could produce any documentary proof of Odinga receiving money from the Chinese. Kenyatta said that he was perfectly well aware of these subventions but he could not effectively deal with Odinga unless he could confront him with specific evidence.’60 Though no usable evidence seems to have been forthcoming, the Special Branch successfully identified the main conduit by which Odinga received funds from China.61 In April 1965 the Kenyan Attorney General, Charles Njonjo, informed the British high commissioner, Malcolm MacDonald, of reports that Odinga and his associates were planning a coup, and requested the intervention, if necessary, of British troops. The coup, however, never materialized. Odinga’s offices were searched, and several crates of machine guns, grenades and other arms were seized. Soon afterwards Kenyatta gave the Soviet ambassador a furious dressing down after the arrival of a Soviet arms shipment apparently arranged by Odinga. The arms were sent back to Russia. Odinga was replaced as deputy president in 1966 and lost a trial of strength with Kenyatta over the following year.62

  Soon after Odinga’s sacking, the Head of Training in the Security Service63 was asked to carry out a review of Kenyan intelligence. He recommended the secondment of a British intelligence officer to head a ‘research’ desk which would co-ordinate intelligence assessment and produce reports for Kenyatta and other members of his administration, and the creation of a National Security Executive to oversee the intelligence community. His report was accepted in its entirety and an MI5 officer was appointed in January 1967 as both head of the research desk and secretary of the new National Security Executive. The Ministry of Overseas Development paid the officer’s salary on the possibly dubious grounds that he was providing ‘technical assistance’.64 He later recalled that Kenyatta had asked him ‘to keep an eye on Oginga Odinga’.65 The Nairobi SLO reported in July 1968 that the MI5 officer had acquired an access to the Kenyan Special Branch and its files ‘which is almost unique in Africa in this day and age’.66

  The two most fraught transfers of British imperial power in the 1960s were in Aden and British Guiana. In both areas the Security Service had only a limited influence. The aim of the Macmillan government in the late 1950s and early 1960s was to consolidate British influence in the Arab world by maintaining the British base in its Aden colony and setting up a federation of British protectorates in South Arabia ruled by traditional tribal chiefs. Though Macmillan sensed what he called ‘the wind of change’ leading Africa to independence, he greatly underestimated the force of Arab nationalism in the Middle East, inspired by the charismatic Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was widely believed to have humiliated both British and French imperialists during the Suez crisis of 1956. So far as South Arabia was concerned, Macmillan believed: ‘We must get rid of this horrible word “independence”. What we want is a word like “home rule”. The thing to do is to think of the Arabic for “home rule” and then work backwards from it.’67

  In 1959 six states in the Western Arab Protectorate were persuaded to form a Federation of Arab Emirates of the South and sign a treaty
of friendship and mutual co-operation with Britain accepting the continuation of the British military base in Aden. By the end of 1962 the total number of states in the Federation had grown to eleven. Aden Colony joined as the State of Aden in January 1963 and the Federation was renamed Federation of South Arabia.68 There was never any realistic chance, however, of stemming the rising tide of Arab nationalism. In June 1962 Nasser sponsored the foundation in Aden of the People’s Socialist Party (PSP), an offshoot of the Aden Trade Unions Congress, led by Abdullah al-Asnag, whose aim was to cause labour unrest, provoke a government crackdown and radicalize Adeni opinion. A year later Nasser provided support for the newly founded and more radical National Liberation Front (NLF), which from its base in Yemen began to plan a nationalist rebellion in Aden through a network of secret operational cells. By late 1963 Nasser was beginning to tire of al-Asnag and the PSP, whom he condemned as ‘too moderate’, and to place greater confidence in the NLF. On 10 December, however, al-Asnag sought to demonstrate his revolutionary credentials by leading an assassination attempt at Aden Airport against Sir Kennedy Trevaskis, the high commissioner. Trevaskis survived but his aide, George Henderson, was killed, attempting to shield him from the attack.69

  As the PSP and NLF had doubtless hoped, the Federation Government declared a State of Emergency and arrested over fifty PSP members, prompting protests at the United Nations, from the Soviet Bloc and from a wide range of anti-imperialist groups. During a visit to neighbouring Yemen in April 1964, Nasser declared: ‘We swear by Allah to expel the British from all parts of the Arabian Peninsula.’70 The British authorities in Aden failed to learn the lessons of the Malayan insurgency more than a decade earlier. Intelligence organization was confused and no overall director of intelligence was appointed until 1965. The Security Service was not asked to play a role which approached the significance of its participation in previous counter-insurgencies in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus. Trevaskis favoured extensive use of Special Political Action (SPA) against Arab nationalists. The Aden high commission, he claimed, ‘would be able to bring about a clash between the PSP and SAL [the rival South Arabian League] which will encourage them to slit each other’s throats’. Trevaskis was authorized by the Secretary of State, Duncan Sandys, to spend £15,000 ‘penetrating their organizations, suborning their key figures, stimulating rivalries and jealousies between them, encouraging dissension and the emergence of splinter groups and harassing them generally, for example by breaking up public meetings’.71

  In July 1965 the high commission reported to the Colonial Office that ‘the casually aimed grenade and the incompetently assembled explosive device are giving place to planned and selective assassination. Presumption is that new cadre of skilled and carefully trained operatives are now on the job.’72 Trevaskis was thought to be in favour of retaliating against the NLF murder campaign by a covert assassination campaign against known terrorists. At a meeting at the Colonial Office, Director E, Bill Magan, argued that, as ‘in the Malayan jungle’ and against ‘Mau Mau in the Kenyan forests’, the correct strategy in Aden was not to kill terrorists but to capture and interrogate them.73 When asked by the Colonial Office to clarify his proposals for targeting terrorists, Trevaskis dropped the subject. Magan believed that the original proposal had come from the armed services and MoD, which had pressed it on the high commission.74 The SLO in Aden reported that he too was inclined to favour the selective targeting of known terrorists.75 Magan did not. ‘For myself,’ he replied, ‘I think that experience shows that to counter terrorism with terrorism is for the authority administering the law a two-edged and dangerous weapon, and the temptation to use it is best avoided.’76 The SLO continued to argue his case: ‘I am not advising anything drastic: all I would suggest at present is that [Trevaskis] be advised to inform Head of Special Branch that if a very few NLF suspects were shot whilst resisting arrest there would be nothing more than a formal inquest.’ Magan noted his (probably exasperated) dissent on the SLO’s letter.77

  A JIC Working Party on Intelligence Organization in Aden concluded that, despite some improvements, the intelligence organization ‘still does not work smoothly’.78 Among the reports which led it to this conclusion was one from the Political Adviser Middle East Command in December 1965:

  There is no Intelligence Service, properly speaking, covering and targeting the Protectorate. The nearest thing to an Intelligence Service is the Special Branch, which is confined to Aden State, which has been gravely weakened by assassinations and which, because of these assassinations and through intimidation of the population, is receiving far less than the normal flow of information.

  . . . Security Service material is available as necessary, but Security Service coverage outside Aden is very small indeed. The Security Service does not of course run its own intelligence network.79

  In February 1966 Harold Wilson’s Labour government announced that South Arabia was to be fully independent by 1968 at the latest, that Britain would withdraw from its Aden military base and end its defence commitment to the Federation. Sandy Stuart, who had become SLO four months earlier, wrote to Head Office: ‘The political side is thoroughly confused both locally and amongst the exiles abroad; and the decisions concerning the base here and the absence of a defence treaty after independence have added to the confusion. My impression is that everyone is at present rather rudderless . . .’80 Stuart was also concerned by the brutality of some of the interrogations conducted by the Federal Ministry of Internal Security, and believed it necessary to:

  emphasise that it is both morally wrong as well as being unproductive to torture or subject to third degree treatment the subjects of interrogation but, in so doing, also seek to have it clearly understood by the Federal Government that such procedures are not practised by ourselves in the Aden Interrogation Centre at Fort Morbut.81

  The announcement of British withdrawal from South Arabia, which the Labour government had expected to diminish the insurgency, served only to intensify it. NLF spokesmen declared, ‘Some may ask, “Why fight for independence when the British will grant it freely?” Comrades, true independence is not given away, but taken.’82 On 28 February 1967 the Security Service suffered the only fatality of a member of staff or of staff family in the entire retreat from Empire (though some locally engaged staff had been killed in Palestine) during an Aden drinks party in the fourth-floor apartment of a British diplomatic couple. Sandy Stuart had reassured his wife Judi that the apartment was too high up for gun or grenade attacks. A Czech-manufactured anti-personnel mine, however, had been concealed in a bookcase and exploded during the party. Two of the guests, one of them Judi Stuart, were fatally wounded. As Sandy Stuart waited at the hospital, where his wife died on the operating table, John Prendergast, the Director of Intelligence, brought him a change of clothing (‘a Christian act’, Stuart said later, because his own clothes were saturated with his wife’s blood).83 ‘Swallowing all emotion’, he bravely sent back to Head Office the forensic report on Judi’s death. Stuart accompanied his wife’s body back to the UK for the funeral but then insisted on returning to his post. An investigation concluded that the bomb had been planted by a servant with ‘a grudge against the British’, probably related to his treatment by a previous employer. A diagram of what was believed to be the electric circuit used for the bomb detonator was found in an exercise book in his room.84

  Judi Stuart’s death was part of an escalating pattern of violence during the final year of British rule. By September 1967 the Foreign Secretary, George Brown, had washed his hands of South Arabia. ‘It can’t be helped,’ he said privately. ‘Anyway, we want to be out of the whole of the Middle East as far and as fast as we possibly can.’ Richard Crossman, Leader of the House of Commons, noted cynically in his diary that the fact that ‘the regime . . . should have been overthrown by terrorists and has forced our speedy withdrawal, is nothing but good fortune’.85 On 30 November South Arabia became independent as the People’s Republic of South Yemen.

  In Br
itish Guiana, unlike South Arabia, Special Political Action had a major influence on the transition to independence in 1966. But for SPA, the first prime minister of independent British Guiana would almost certainly have been Cheddi Jagan, the Marxist leader of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), rather than the supposedly moderate, pro-Western Forbes Burnham. After being dismissed as chief minister a few months after the 1953 PPP election victory,86 Jagan returned to office when the PPP won the 1957 elections under a new colonial constitution. As elsewhere in the Empire and Commonwealth, the Security Service’s role in SPA in British Guiana was peripheral. Unlike most other imperial troublespots, British Guiana lacked a resident SLO. The SLO in Trinidad from 1960 to 1963 visited British Guiana about once a month but regarded it as ‘the bane of my life – a ghastly place’.87 He reported in February 1961 that Jagan and his wife Janet were in effective control of the PPP. While some PPP office-holders had been committed members of the CPGB during their time in Britain, there was no evidence that the Jagans themselves, though undoubtedly Marxists, were members of any Communist organization. After independence, however, they could be expected to seek close relations with Castro’s Cuba, to whom Cheddi Jagan paid an official visit in 1960, as well as with the Soviet Union and China. The SLO believed the PPP were likely to win the October 1961 elections, though by too small a majority to form a stable government. He was strongly opposed to the use of SPA to try to ensure Jagan’s defeat; it would be unlikely, he warned in April, to influence the outcome of the elections and ‘the results of failure would probably be disastrous.’88

  Contrary to the SLO’s expectation, the PPP won a clear majority in the elections and Jagan became prime minister. Eavesdropping at the CPGB’s London headquarters revealed that Jagan had approached it for help in recruiting financial, taxation and social security staff to work in British Guiana.89 Soon after his election victory, he went to visit President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office to seek US support for British Guianan independence. Cheddi Jagan might be a Marxist, Kennedy said afterwards, ‘but the United States doesn’t object, because that choice was made by an honest election, which he won.’ In private, JFK said the opposite. Following the humiliating failure to overthrow Fidel Castro by the CIA-backed landing of an anti-Castro brigade at the Bay of Pigs six months earlier, the President was determined not to allow the emergence of another potential Castro in the Caribbean.90 The US Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, wrote to Lord Home, the British Foreign Secretary, on 19 February 1962, ‘I must tell you now that I have reached the conclusion that it is not possible for us to put up with an independent British Guiana under Jagan.’91 Macmillan told Home that Rusk’s letter was ‘pure Machiavellianism’, exposing a ‘degree of cynicism’ which he found surprising in view of the fact the Secretary of State was ‘not an Irishman, nor a politician, nor a millionaire’. Home replied sharply to Rusk: