Keith Jeffery, at the initiative of the British government, has used unlimited access to the archives of the British Secret Intelligence Service, which deals with foreign intelligence-gathering and counter-espionage, to write a book which will be of value to politicians, public servants — including the military and security services — academics, and others.
The service was started in 1909 to obtain information on ‘any movement' indicating an attack on Great Britain. It was — and remains — within the Foreign, now the Foreign and Commonwealth, Office, but for a long time it was a bureaucratic football. The military often tried to annex it. Tensions, both external and internal, persisted into and through World War II, during which other problems arose because the activities of a sister body, the Special Operations Executive, led to the destruction, through reprisals, of MI6 networks for long-term espionage. In any case, wartime spying was extremely dangerous; British agents in occupied France survived three weeks on average.
If World War II made for far greater professionalism, the Bolshevik Revolution raised other issues. Third-country agents were safer; locals were often — and may still be — double agents. Secondly, foreign espionage and internal surveillance are not always separable, though domestic bodies, including the police, spied on the British Labour movement and trade unions. As for agents' predilections, the leftish novelist Arthur Ransome sent better material from the USSR than the rabidly anti-communist Sidney Reilly. That has recent echoes; the Bush administration swallowed everything Ahmed Chalabi said about Saddam's Iraq.
There were failures. The service never recognised the German intentions that led to World War I; in the 1930s, it saw ‘far too late' the importance of Nazism and German rearmament. Other disasters included the November 1939 contact with Nazi officers in Venlo, which turned out to be a lethal ambush.
The author details internal political paranoia. Agents were told to cover ‘socialist and labour troubles' in France of the 1920s, but Churchill ‘sensibly' overrode service attitudes which threatened the British government's strenuous attempts to normalise relations with the Soviet Union. The service was slow to see that Atatürk was no Soviet pawn, and it also insisted against all evidence that the notorious Zinoviev letter was genuine. Even senior staff, who were open about their legitimate socialist leanings, were suspect, but the Soviet agent Kim Philby went undetected throughout his successful MI6 career. Private businesses, however, seem not to come under suspicion, and are sometimes co-opted for espionage; their everyday work gives good cover.
Entertaining
Although questions remain about governmental restrictions on certain material, some episodes are entertaining. An agent in Canada seduced a Vichy French official and got more information than her office could handle. Secondly, the Keystone Kops nature of some of the early work is explained in part by the recruitment process, which until 1945 was through an old-boy network; the book contains some very fruity double-barrelled names. Another source of entertainment is that all states spy on one another; even early on, MI6 cracked 52 countries' diplomatic codes, including those of the United States and France.
Jeffery identifies many serious issues. After 1945, MI6 recruited unregenerate Nazis for information on continental European communists. British intelligence cooperation with the U.S. is extremely close, despite reservations on both sides. Economic intelligence and signals interception have become very important. Zionist terrorism against Britain was more extensive and deadlier than many realise. The responses were equally vicious; in Italian harbours, the service limpet-mined ships which were intended to carry Jews illegally to mandated Palestine. It created a fake Arab organisation to take the blame, and tried to implicate the Soviet Union with forged documents; but it gave the Zionists a huge propaganda coup by killing three people in an attack on a refugee ship off Palestine.
India does not figure much. Washington disliked MI6's spying on Indian freedom fighters in the U.S., but the spying continued. Espionage in India, which included using Indian informers at the highest levels of all Independence movements, was not MI6's province, and it is documented elsewhere. Those interested in the organisation of espionage will find this book very informative; others might wonder if the Westphalian state can ever escape its founding inheritance of war, fear, and hate.
