se
bare
Side xi - xv har en nyttig liste over forkortelser. Der er et godt indeks med bl.a. følgende personer: Acheson, Dean, Adams, Alec, Ashraf, Princess, Attlee, Clement, Bandera, Stephan, Barbie, Klaus, Begin, Menachem, Ben-Gurion, David, Beria, Lavrenti, Beuve-Mery, Bevin, Ernest, Blake, George, Braden, Thomas W., Bradley, General Omar, Briggs, General Sir Harold, Brown, Irving, Brundrett, Frederick, Burgess, Guy, Cabell, General Charles, Caccia, Harold, Cadogan, Sir Alexander, Castle, Barbara, Cavendish-Bentinck, Victor, Chiang Kai-shek, Churchiil, Sir Winston, Clark-Kerr, Sir Archibald, Clay, General Lucius, Colby, William, Crabb, Commander Lionel 'Buster', Cripps, Sir Stafford, Dixon, Pierson, Donovan,William J., Dulles, Allen, Dulles, John Foster, Eden, Sir Anthony, Eisenhower, Dwight, Evang, Wilhelm, Foot, Sir Hugh, Fuchs, Klaus, Fulbright, Senator J. W., Gavin, General, Greene, Graham, Greene, Hugh Carlton, Grivas, Colonel George, Gubbins, Major-General Colin, Harriman, Averell, Hart, Liddell, Healey, Denis, Herter, Christian, Hillenkoetter, Admiral, Hitler, Adolf, Ho Chi Minh, Hollis, General Leslie, Hollis, Roger, Hoover, Herbert Jnr., Hoover, J. Edgar, Hoxha, Enver, Ignatief, Nicholas, Inglis, Admiral John, Inglis, Admiral Tom, Isaacs, George, Ismay, General 'Pug', Ivanov, Captain Yevgeny, Jackson, C. D., Jansen, Helen (nee Rado) John, Otto, Jones, Professor R.V., Joyce, Robert, Khalil, Squadron leader, Kapitza, Professor Peter, Keeler, Christine, Kennan, George, Kennedy John F., Kennedy, Robert, Kenney, General George C, Khokhlov, Nikolai, Khrushchev, Nikita, (Hrustjov), Killearn, Lord, Killian, Dr James, King, Mackenzie, Kirkpatrick, Ivone, Klemme Generalmajor, Koestler, Arthur, Kyprianous, Spyros, Lai Tek, Lang-Brown, Alan, Lansdale, General Edward, Lashmar, Paul, Laski, Harold, Layton, Lord (Walter), LeMav, General Curtis, 207, Lemnitzer, General, Lennox-Boyd, Alan, Lie, Trygve, Lindsay, Franklin, Lindsay, Michael, Lloyd, Selwvn, Loehnis, Sir Clive, Longley-Cook, Vice Admiral, Lovestone, Jay, Lumumba, Patrice, Lundhal, Arthur, Lydford, Air Vice Marshal H. T., Lyttelton, Oliver, MacArthur, General Douglas, McCloy, John, MacDonald, Alex, McDonald, A.N., McDonald, General George, McDonald, Malcolm, McDonald, Air Vice Marshal William, Mackav, Richard, MP, Mclachlan, Donald, Maclean, Donald, McLean, Fitzroy, MacMichael, Sir Ronald, McNeil, Hector, Macmillan, Harold, Maisky, Ivan, Makarios III, Archbishop, Martel, General Sir Gifford, Masterman, J.C., May, Allan Nunn, Menon, Krishna, Menzies, Robert, Menzies. Sir Stewart, Meyer, Cord. Mindszenty, Cardinal, Moir, Guthrie, Monnet, Jean, Montagu-Pollock, William, Montgomery, Field Marshal Bernard, Morrison, Herbert, Morton, Jack, Mossadegh, Dr .Mohamed, Mountbatten, Admiral Lord Louis, Moyne, Lord, Muggeridge, Malcolm, Münsenburg, Willi, Nasser, Colonel Gamal Abdel, Neguib, General .Mohammed, Nehru, Pandit, Nehru, Vijaylakshmi, Ngo Dinh Diem, Ngo Dinh Nhu, Nicholls, John, Nitze, Paul, O'Malley,Sir Owen, Pahlavi, Mohammed Reza, Shah of Iran, Penkovsky, Colonel Oleg, Petrie, Sir David, Petrov, Vladimir, Philbv, Kim, Pope, Allen, Poston, Ralph, Prendergast, John, Profumo, Quesada, Major General, Quinn, General, Rajk, Laszlo, Rebattet, F. X., Rebattet, George, Rennie, Sir John, Retinger. Joseph H., Reynaud, Paul, Ribbentrop, Joachim von, Richardson, John, Roosevelt, Archie, Roosevelt, Eleanor, Roosevelt, Franklin D., Roosevelt. Kermit, Rosenberg, Dr Werner, Rostow, Professor Walt, Rubowitz,.Alexander, Rusk, Dean, Sandys, Duncan, Sargent, Orme, Sarit, General, Schlesinger, Professor Arthur, Schow, Colonel Robert, Sibert General Edwin, Sillitoe, Percy, Sinclair, Major-General, John, Slessor, Air Marshal Sir John, Slim, General Bill, Smith, Joseph Buckholder, Smith, Walter Bedell, Spaak, Paul-Henri, Sporborg, Harry, Strong, General, George, Strong, General Kenneth, Sukharno, President, Svab, Karel, Taylor. A. J. P., Tedder, Air Chief Marshal Arthur, Templer, Major-General Gerald, Tewson, Sir Vincent, Thompson, Colonel Robert, Thornycroft, Peter, Tito, Marshal Josip, Tizard, Sir Henry, Tofte, Hans, Tokaev, Dr, Tomlinson, Sir Stanley, Travis Commander Edward, Trend, Sir Burke, Trepper, Leopold, Trevor-Roper, Hugh, Trevor-Wilson, Arthur, Truman, President Harrv S., Tsarev, Oleg, Tunku Abdul Rahman, Twigge. Stephen, van Zeeland, Paul, Vandenburg, General Hoyt, Ward, Barbara, Ward, Stephen, Warner, Christopher, Watson, Adam, Weisband, William, Welsh, Commander Eric, Welton, Elizabeth (Violet), White, Sir Dick, Wigg, Ceorge, Willoughby, General Charles, Winnifrith, A. J. D., Wisner, Frank, Yeaton, Colonel, Ivan, Young George C., Zahedi, General Fazlollah, Zander, Randolf, Ziegler, Philip, Zuckerman, Sir Solly.
En grundig bog.
Der optræder i den nogen mærkelige oplysninger, som jeg ikke rigtig kan tro på. Kontroller derfor hans oplysninger. Specielt, hvor der, som her sker en sammenblanding af primære og sekundære kilder. Det kan være bevidst propaganda. Han har mærkelige udtryk som "Allied neutrals", hvor man må undre sig over, hvad han egentlig mener, selvom betegnelsen er rigtig dækkende for Sverige ! Hos Peter Wrigth hedder det samme "nominally neutral". Der også besynderlige antydninger.
Sverige leverer optagelser af russisk radiotrafik fra krigens tid, rekognoseringsflyvninger og formentlig meget andet og modtager til gengæld materiale fra Venona.
Det er bemærkelsesværdigt, at bogen, selvfølgelig indirekte, bekræfter, at Sovjetunionen endnu i 1946 opretholdt et loyalt, åbent samarbejde med vestmagterne med en militærattache på en af de store flådebaser ! Dette selvom der netop i Ukraina var aktive guerillaer med rod i SS Galicia Division. Og briterne er også tilfredse med Jalta-aftalen. Amerikanerne interesserer sig for baser i England i 1946 og USUK samler tyske planer for bombning af Sovjet i 1945. Jeg kan ikke undre mig over, at Stalin blev paranoid. Slet ikke når Vesten støttede en modstandsbevægelse fra krigens slutning til ind i 1950erne. Hitler, Allen Dulles og George Kennan arbejdede mere eller mindre systematisk med at styrke Stalins mistænksomhed. Aldrich mener, at der var Werwolf-enheder i Schlesien og Sudeterlandet enkelte endda helt til 1947.
Bogen citerer William F. Clarke for et godt råd til FN, forbyd al kodet meddelelse. Det vil være det største bidrag til en varig fred ! Briternes fremgange på området beskrives på siderne 238-39.
Friedland lejren var et engelsk forhørscenter for Grenzdurchgänger.
Ved krigens slutning var 1/8 af Hitlers soldater sovjetborgere !
Bogen belyser udmærket de hemmelige tjenesters samarbejde, deres arbejde udenfor parlamentarisk, demokratisk, folkelig kontrol - ofte endda uden for, i i hvert fald i et tilfælde direkte imod, den politiske ledelses kontrol/ordre. De samarbejder også (måske endda især) om kontrol med besværlige borgere. Den væsentligste informationsudveksling angår netop egne borgere. I de fleste tilfælde er der tale om ulovlig aktivitet, stridende mod de involverede landes forfatning og/eller love. Sammenholder man bogens beskrivelse af de hemmelige tjenesters indsats på hjemmeplan med dagens terroristlovgivning, er det svært at undgå den opfattelse, at de vestlige ULIGHEDSstater med deres meget overfladiske parlamentariske demokrati, kun kan klare sig, hvis de har en tilsyneladende stærk fjende, som undskyldning for at opretholde undertrykkende hemmelige tjenester.
Under Koreakrigen anvendte England sin tjeneste for psykologisk krigsførelse, IRD, til at skærme Sydkorea mod presseomtale af massehenrettelserne !
De hemmelige tjenester er gode til at omgå beslutninger om at nedlægge dem. Første gang er i 1945 under Truman.
Merkantile amerikanske interessers indflydelse på de hemmelige tjenesters arbejde får nogen behandling - inkl. USAs interesse i at overtage det britiske imperium. Det får lejlighedsvis positive udtryk, som under Suez-krisen og når USA støtter bevægelser mod kolonimagten. Det er mærkeligt - når man tænker på det merkantile element i USAs hemmelige tjenesters arbejde i almindelighed, de mange personer med forretningsbaggrund, og tager i betragtning betydningen af venskaber/bekendtskaber i forretningslivet - hvis det skulle være sandt, at det skulle være svært for CIA m.fl. at indse betydningen af de samme relationer på efterretningsområdet. Når man tillige inddrager ambassadør Eugenie M. Andersons forhold til Hedtoft er det nærmest utænkeligt og virker nærmest som om Aldrich vil kamuflere det forhold.
Beskrivelsen af efterkrigs-Iran ligner dagens problemer omkring Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran og nok et par steder til. Både m.h.t. penge og olie, alle 3 lande er allerede med i sigtekornet i 1948.
Udover de samarbejdsproblemer mellem amerikanerne og englænderne, der skyldes USAs bestræbelser på at overtage imperiet, vanskeliggøres samarbejdet af englændernes forsøg på at dæmpe for vilde amerikanske aktioner. På grund af den russiske atombombe var englænderne, som rimeligt er, på vagt overfor aggressive tendenser i egne eller amerikanske tjenester. Faktisk var USA altså allerede i 1951 parat til en forebyggende (preemptive) krig - det er det pæne ord for aggression. En tilsvarende modvægt mod overivrige tendenser savnes idag, som det ses tydeligst ved drabene på 7 uskyldige syrere, der delte hus (i Syrien) med en person, som en af de stridende amerikanske tjenester mistænkte, men også ved de mange bombede bryllupsfester i Afghanistan og angrebene med ubemandede fly i Pakistans stammeområder.
Et andet interessant element, af dem man ikke tænker over, når man er udenfor det system, er stridighederne mellem (og indenfor) de forskellige amerikanske tjenester (både de hemmelige og de åbne, bl.a. General MacArthur, Supreme Commander Allied Powers (SCAP)). De er mange og heftige - og belyses godt i bogen, bl.a.i forbindelse med Koreakrigen, p. 272-81, her yderligere kompliceret af flere deltagende lande.
Et fælles problem for UKs og USAs tjenester er racisme/xenophobi og deraf følgende undervurdering af modstanderen. Enden herpå begynder sommeren 1949.
Antikommunismen startede allerede i 1920erne, hvor Vesten hjalp de Hvide. England var meget nær ved at komme i krig med Sovjetunionen. Englænderne var ikke parate til at tro deres egne efterretninger om et forstående tysk angreb på Sovjet. (Det var Stalin heller ikke). Først efter Hitlers angreb på Sovjet (220641) kom der en samarbejdsaftale. For det var jo helt ok, at Sovjetunionen tog hovedparten af slæbet med at bekæmpe nazisterne. Nogen kunne dog knapt vente til krigen mod dem var slut, med at genoptage den gamle kamp (der er dog også eksempler på loyalt samarbejde). Der var et almindeligt billede af de primitive russere. Et billede, der bl.a. byggede på forskellig hygiejneopfattelse og omgangstone. Det kunne på mange punkter være svært ikke at få en sådan opfattelse på jorden - helt op i 1968 - oplevede jeg selv. Aldrich's skildring af de engelske tjenesters holdning til Sovjet er tæt på det selvmodsigende - men det kan jo meget vel alligevel være korrekt. Stalin havde sandelig god grund til at være mistroisk - desværre. xx Alligevel overholdt han sine aftaler med Churchill, bl.a. ved ikke at støtte den græske folkerepublik, som modstandsbevægelsen havde fået op at stå. Der er noget meget umenneskeligt amerikansk i, at man sendefolk ud i en befrielseskrig, som de ikke har nogen chancer i, bare for at opretholde et pres mod Sovjet. [Aldrich ser slet ikke det, som hos Chomsky hedder noget i retning af betydningen af at undgå et godt eksempel - på en mere menneskelig samfundsform.]
Nazismens raceteorier havde mange tilhængere også blandt Tysklands fjender.
Churchill er allerede i juni 1945 bange for at de hemmelige tjenester skal udvikle sig til et Gestapo [det har vi jo nu !, bare stærkere, bedre udrustet. OJ]. Churchill er besynderligt naiv, ved kun at se denne fare under Labour.
Udrensningerne i de østeuropæiske kommunistpartier gjorde stor skade, i hvert fald i de vestlige kommunistpartier jeg kender til, men åbenbart ikke i Østeuropa. Men man ser hos Aldrich, at de ikke var tilfældige, ubegrundede, måske var de ligefrem provokerede. Jeg opfatter Aldrich derhen, at egentlige vestlige undergrundsaktiviteter begyndte straks efter Tysklands kapitulation - i overensstemmelse med Trumans udtalelser inden han blev præsident.
Og i hvert fald begynder man straks med at hyre "nyttige" tyskere - herunder ganske tvivlsomme figurer - og forsøger at forhindre, at tekniske nyheder når frem til Sovjet.
Som i dag glemte man, at man - i teorien - går ind for demokrati, ytringsfrihed og lignende radikale samfundsforhold.
Da Sovjet sprænger sin første atombombe bliver briterne mere sårbare, mens USA føler, at de har et lille vindue at reagere i.
Aldrich omtaler, at man bevidst holdt signalefterretningsarbejdet ude fra offentlig omtale. Spionhistorier var derimod gode som salgbar vare og som afledning. Det gælder vel stadig. Hvad afleder de nu opmærksomheden fra ? Stadig signalefterretningsarbejdet, men nu rettet mod egne borgere, altså aflytning ? Det foregår i hvert fald i et meget stort omfang. Andet ?
Det er ikke bare i Tyskland, Centraleuropa, Sovjetunionen, men også i USA, at jøderne til tider lægges for had.
This was misleading since some of the most important aspects of the conflict with Germany remained hidden. Only in the early 1970s, three decades after the end of the war, did the story of Ultra and Bletchley Park - the effort which defeated the German Enigma cipher machine - burst upon a surprised world. 1
Sir David Petrie, the head of MIS, kept various Allied neutrals who knew too much, including Spaniards and Swedes, in detention and incommunicado from their embassies beyond the end of the war in Rurope. 2 - 3
The spell was not broken until 1972 when J. C. Masterman published his memoir The Doublecross System. Masterman was an Oxford don who had run the committee which controlled wartime deception operations. 4
Cold War fighting, and a growing conviction that the Cold War could be won through special operations or covert action, was critical in determining the character of this struggle. 5
In London, for example, the authorities select about 2 per cent of Whitehall's records for permanent preservation and the rest are destroyed. 6
Contemporary historians who explore the State are quite unique. Nowhere else is the researcher confronted with evidence precisely managed by their subject. From astronomy to agriculture, from botany to the built environment, no investigator confronts information so deliberately preselected. 6
. It seems more questionable when the hidden band is directed towards Third World states, neutrals, allies or the Citizens of one's own country. 8
The Western intelligence Community - a network of co-operation between the secret Services of developed states - began in the first decades of the twentieth century to trade surveillance material on agitators, subversives, labour activists, pacifists and anti-colonial nationalists. In many cases these were the troublesome elements among their own citizenry. 8-9
... was gathered by a process of exchange with allied Services, something of which even their political masters were not always aware. 9
The second facet offers a picture of American intelligence as assisting a corporate foreign policy in the displacement of Britain in the wider world. These transatlantic tensions over business and empire were present throughout the twentieth century. 9
In December 1950 Sir Bill Slim, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, returned from a visit to Washington and warned his fellow Service chiefs that: The United States were convinced that war was inevitable, and that it was almost certain to take place within the next eighteen months. 10
The United States had poured billions into reconstruction and the encouragement of a strong and unified Western Europe through the Marshall Plan. 12
The CIA rescued the European Movement from bankruptcy, encouraged replacements for the anti-federalist British leadership and then financed a massive popular campaign to encourage support for unity among European youth. 12
Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian leader during the Suez Crisis, was a CIA protege of the early 1950s. 12
After June 1948, however, the National Security Council decreed that such activities were superintended by Frank Wisner's Office of Policy Co-ordination (OPC) which was to carry out covert Operations of the sort that 'if uncovered the United States Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for'. 13
Stupefied British officials in Vietnam remarked that there were more than a dozen American intelligence Services camped out around the outskirts of Saigon and their competition was hard fought and bitter. 13
We can trace the central architecture of the current British foreign policy-making machine to a struggle by the diplomats to prevent 'wild' military elements from taking over the direction of Britain's secret Cold War and to stop the creation of independent agencies capable of launching covert Operations. For this reason all aspects of the British Secret Intelligence Service stayed very firmly under the control of the Foreign Office. 14
The central purpose of this study, which arises out of more than ten years in the archives, is to 'say it with documents'. 15
The idea of Containment arose naturally in response to the image of dangerous barbarians at the gates of a civilised Europe. But it also reflected a sense that it was a realistic objective. The Soviet forces were immense, but in 1945 they were in an 'extreme State of military exhaustion' and were also perceived as technologically inferior. These groundlevel views percolated upwards and eventually distilled themselves as controversial intelligence reports circulating at Cabinet level in London and Washington. Among the military they reinforced hostile attitudes that had been established as early as 1918, when the West had supported the Whites against the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war. Indeed, not a few of those compiling the reports were British and American veterans of the White Campaign. 21
... maverick individuals in the remnants of wartime secret Services had already begun the first unauthorised steps in this enterprise by 1946. 22
Indeed, both London and Washington were slow to recognise the rise of the Axis powers during the 1930s in part because their intelligence services were obsessed with the Bolshevik threat. 22
More important was the highly effective campaign run by Willi Münzenberg to mobilise Western intellectuals and leading cultural figures in favour of Soviet objectives. 22
The Soviet Union was effectively contained from the outset by a curtain of British colonies, or by states under strong British influence. From the Baltic states to the Balkans, from Turkey to India. 23
In the early 1930s figures such as Leo Steveni, the British Military Attache at Meshed, ran agents into Central Asian territories and interrogated refugees escaping from Stalin's southern rimlands. These efforts to monitor activities inside the Soviet Union were remarkably similar to those conducted from the British and American embassies in Teheran after 1945, Leo Steveni, who finished his career as regional head of the Secret Intelligence Service in Asia, was well equipped for these duties, for he had served with the Whites and acted as a liaison with Admiral Kolchak during the Russian civil war. 23
Meticulous letter interception of coded communist Communications in the Far East eventually led to the collapse of the Comintern in the Far East. In 1931 its entire archive was seized in the international settlement of Shanghai and key figures were arrested. Even Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Indochinese Communist Party, found himself imprisoned by the British in Hong Kong and only narrowly escaped extradition to the French, who wished to execute him. When the Comintern attempted the gradual revival of its networks within the colonies of Asia, the agent it chose for this work was himself in the employ of the British Special Branch. By the 1930s, even the Secretary General of the Malayan Communist Party, Lai Tek, was working for the British. 23
As in Britain, Army and Navy Intelligence adopted a leading role in the inter-war surveillance of communists, collecting a vast amount of what they called 'negative intelligence', a euphemism for domestic political surveillance. 23
This material [USA arkivmateriale] underlines the origins of the Western intelligence Community which lie, not so much in the exchange of intelligence on enemy states, as in swapping security information on their own Citizens. 24
Indeed, between 1939 and 1941 London and Washington considered the Soviet Union to be effectively an ally of Germany. In Berlin, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's Foreign Minister, ardentiy pursued the idea of a four-power bloc, consisting of Germany, Italy, Japan and the Soviet Union, which would carve up the World between them. Ribbentrop, although not overly bright, was a practical man and believed in the idea of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, a common-sense network of military and economic agreements that also gave Stalin Eastern Poland and the Baltic states. However, Stalin did not share Ribbentrop's geo-strategic vision, any more than Hitler did. 24
By 1940 London was planning covert intervention against Moscow. Forerunners of the sabotage organisation in London, the Special Operations Executive or SOE, prepared for the sabotage of Soviet oil production. 25
British Military Intelligence looked at fomenting uprisings in Transcaucasia. 25
Britain came far closer to war with the Soviet Union than is commonlv realised and it is the Anglo-Soviet alliance of 1942 that represents the aberration, not the onset of post-war anti-Soviet hostility. 25
April 1941 ... Bletchley Park - known as Ultra - began to show something quite unexpected. German troops had begun to move away from the West to the borders of the Soviet Union. SIS had been receiving agent reports as early as April the previous year indicating that Germany was preparing to attack the Soviet Union but it was not believed in London. 25
It was not until May 1941 that London fully accepted that Hitler intended an all out attack on Stalin, rather than merely presenting him with an ultimatum demanding more territory in Central Europe. 25
On 18 June, four days before Hitler's Operation Barbarossa crashed down on the Soviet frontier, Sir Stafford Cripps, the British Ambassador, who had returned to Britain on a brief visit, and Ivan Maisky the Soviet Ambassador to London, had a very frank and private talk about the future over lunch. Both of them knew what was coming, Cripps told Eden. 25
Churchill's decision to pass Ultra-derived information about Hitler's plans to the Soviets required him to disguise its source. 26.
Stalin was equally stubborn in refusing to believe strident warnings about the impending attack from neutral and communist sources. More than eighty separate warnings were rejected. 26
So rigid was bis thinking that, when Soviet border troops relayed the news of the German invasion on 22 June 1941, he ordered them not to open fire. 26
Nevertheless, it was decided to send a unit called 30 Military Mission to offer the Soviets every assistance, even if this contribution could serve only to make the presumed German victory in the East a little more costly. 27
The British Military Attache in Moscow was instructed to begin handing over intelligence on the order of battle of the German forces. But its source - Ultra decrypts of German Communications from Bletchley Park - continued to remain hidden, as it would do throughout the war. 27
Wartime Axis Communications were never completely penetrated by the West. But by 1941 the successful American attack upon Japanese diplomatic Communications - known as Magic - and the British penetration by Ultra into growing amounts of German Enigma traffic transformed the nature of the war. In the West, the clearest window into the thinking of Adolf Hitier was provided not by Ultra but by the messages that 'Hitler's Japanese Confidant', the Japanese Ambassador in Berlin, sent back to Tokyo. The speed of this process was remarkable. At times these Axis telegrams could arrive on Churchill's or Roosevelt's desks before they reached their intended recipient. 27
In 1942 the British and the Americans signed the Holden Agreement, the first milestone in signals intelligence co-operation. 27
Britain continued to intercept and break a certain amount of Soviet and American traffic during th the war. In July 1941, sigint personnel in India were still working on Soviet material and showed no signs of winding down their activities. In London, the Soviet material under attack consisted mostly of Comintern traffic between agents in Eastern and Central Europe and their controllers in Moscow. This work was based not at Bletchley Park but in a secret central London location on the top floors of Berkeley Street. This was GC&CS's London diplomatic communications annexe, of which we still know remarkably little. Here, for the duration of the war, those on the top floors rubbed shoulders only with a select band of personnel working on the traffic of neutrals and Allies, including the American, Spanish and Free French. 28
Accordingly, on the very day that the Germans attacked, Britain sent a stark warning to Moscow about the insecurity of its military communications. 28
Improbably, each individual item of Ultra given to the Soviets was to be personally approved by Churchill. 29
In all but name, 30 Mission was a large intelligence station. The staff had been chosen for their deep knowledge of the Soviet Union and language skills which, perversely, meant many had served with the Whites during the civil war, or as attaches during the prickly 1920s. Some were from White emigre families, guaranteeing their impeccably anti-communist credentials. The Mission's chief, General Noel Mason-MacFarlane, had been head of intelligence for the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1939-40. 'Mason-Mac', as he was known, wondered what the perennially suspicious NKVD would make of such an improbable team. 29
Mason-Mac need not have worried about cutting an improbable figure in Moscow. Instead this role fell to the head of a parallel British SOE mission, intended to liaise with the NKVD on resistance and sabotage. The rotund and boisterous Brigadier George Hill was an extraordinary choice as leader. Not only had Hill been an active practitioner of clandestine activities against the Bolsheviks in the inter-war period, he had chosen to publicise his role in a well-known memoir. His deputy, Major Turkouski, was a Pole who hated Russians with a passion and loathed communism. Hill's twin saving graces were his ability to speak fluent Russian and his tremendous capacity to absorb alcohol. 29
In November 1941, London showed its band and frankly told Moscow of its fears that the Soviet oilfields at Baku were about to fall into German hands. 30
London ordered the SIS and SOE Mission at Singapore too develop closer relations with the NKVD, which had been supplying London with valuable intelligence on Axis schemes in Central Asia since the summer of 1941. 30
In 1944 SOE and thhe NKVD found themselves in a further dispute over London's plans to subvert Soviet Citizens serving the Wehrmacht. This seemed a good idea on the face of it since by now one in eight soldiers fighting for Hitler was a former Soviet citizen. 32
The only exception was the Royal Navy, which commanded the respect of its Soviet equivalent and developed successful channels for exchanging detailed Information on northern waters. Captain Alafuzov, a liaison officer to Britain's Admiral Miles in Moscow, regularly handed over intelligence on the Japanese and tried to help in battles with Soviet diplomats for visas for more British staff to be sent to Moscow. 33
American relations with the Soviets developed more slowly. Despite the best intentions of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his special representative, the frail but animated Harry Hopkins, a familiar pattern could be detected. Colonel Ivan Yeaton, the American Military Attache in Moscow, shared the anti-Bolshevik mentality of his British counterparts. He sent a continual stream of doom-laden messages, and evaded Orders from American Military Intelligence in Washington (G-2), to exchange real information with the Soviets. 34
... eventually William J. Donovan, the head of OSS, would insist on sending his own mission to Moscow. 34
Cripps, the British Ambassador, had tired of Martel's complaints and asked London to send veterans of the current war with combat experience. But experienced officers were not to be had and instead he was sent staff officers with inflated egos. Unfortunately 30 Mission remained consistently hostile to its hosts and Giffard Martel led the way. Like his predecessors, he viewed the Soviets as incomprehensible 'Asiatics'. 35
Some historians have suggested that Churchill decided not to pass full information to Moscow due to growing hostility. But this is not the case. Instead the failure of the Germans to keep to their own schedule drove British intelligence predictions off course and prompted the Soviets to complain about being given bad Information. 35
General Hoyt Vandenberg, the post-war Commander of Central Intelligence Group, an Organisation that preceded the CIA in 1946-7. 35
All these figures, together with General Edwin Sibert, the US Army intelligence Chief in Europe, embodied an atritude that was years ahead of other departments in Washington in identifying the Soviet Union as a future opponent. This attitude connected comfortably with military thinking in London.
All these streams now began to merge. Hitherto Britain and the United States had had separate patterns of intelligence-gathering in Moscow. In early February 1944, long-term Soviet experts in British and American Military Intelligence met in London for a remarkable two-week conference to compare their pictures of the Soviet Air Force and Soviet Army. These two groups even prepared a Joint Anglo-American Version of the Soviet order of battle. They also concluded a formal agreement to continue exchanging intelligence gathered on the Soviet armed forces and their progress on the eastern front. This agreement was drafted by the leading American and British exponents on the Soviet order of battle, Randolph Zander and Nicholas Ignatieff respectively. The principal source of information underpinning this agreement was material from Ultra decrypts of German radio traffic on the eastern front. This agreement of February 1944 was nothing short of a landmark treaty. It was not only the first Anglo-American 'Cold War' intelligence treaty, it also underlined the critical importance of Military Intelligence officers in marking the Soviets as the next enemy, to the dismay of the diplomats. 36
A struggle for control of the JIC view of the Soviets had already commenced. 37
This is one of the few cases where I feel sympathy with the Russian attitude. If I had had to deal with most of the Service representatives we have sent to Russia I should have difficulty in resisting an inclination to be obstructive and tiresome. 37
Stalin and his Foreign Minister Molotov both politely requested that Burrows, the new head of 30 Mission, be removed on the ground that he looked upon Soviet officers 'as savages and this hurt them'. 37
Cultural and racial stereotypes served to distort Western intelligence on Soviet capabilities and intentions throughout the war and for many years thereafter. This idea of Russians as semi-oriental barbarian hordes reached its height during the last stages of the war, especially in Germany and Poland. 37
Sir Alexander Cadogan, the senior official at the Foreign Office, described the Japanese in his diary as 'little yellow dwarf slaves'. During the war Roosevelt ordered a programme of research at the Smithsonian Institute which encouraged his own belief that the characteristics of races, such as intelligence or aggression, were determined by physiological featurcs, especially skull shapes. 37
But in April 1944 it [London] suddenly decided not to tell the Soviets about the rood results that the German Luftwaffe sigint Organisation was achieving against the Soviet Air Force. 38
By early 1945, vast quantities of intelligence were available to the West on the Soviet armed forces. Sigint intercepts were now augmented by German prisoners who had previously fought on the eastern front. The British depended more heavily than ever upon their enemies for intelligence about their allies. 39
The American OSS Organisation, the remnants of which would become the CIA in 1947. 40
[B]y the autumn of 1944 OSS launched a wave of operations into Central and South-eastern Europe just as the Soviet Army moved into these areas. These Operations, authorised by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, were designed not only to gather intelligence, but also to carry out political operations against the fading Nazi regimes in countries from Rumania to Hungary. Rounded up quickly by NKVD teams advancing with Soviet forces, they did nothing to reduce Soviet suspicions about OSS. 40
John Herbert King had been suborned by NKVD agents of Dutch nationality and had handed over large quantities of telegraphic traffic and ciphers to the Soviets for money. This included conversations between Hitler and Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador in Berlin. 41
Caught in 1939, King eventually received ten years' imprisonment. 41
Welcome confirmation of this classic pattern was received by MI5 in 1943 in the form of the Douglas Frank Springhall case. Springhall was National Organiser of the Communist Party and used this position to recruit communist clerical staff, and even an Army officer, Captain Ormond Uren, to spy for the Soviets. 41
MI 5 took a trenchantly anti-Soviet line throughout the war. 41
Extended contact with the Soviets on the ground shaped the impressions of intelligence. This nurtured a pre-existing stereotype of Russian barbarians whose boorish behaviour was intolerable and with whom it was impossible to conduct sensible bargaining. 43
But, once it appeared that the Soviet Union would survive, British diplomats moved with surprising speed to embrace the idea that the Soviets would be important, benign and co-operative after the war. 45
Meanwhile Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed on a Mediterranean sideshow a decision that Stalin greeted with open disgust. Warner recognised the depth of distrust generated in Moscow by this Second Front issue. 46
When Germany had first invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the United States was still not at war. At this moment an enterprising journalist had stopped an obscure Senator from Independence, Missouri called Harry S. Truman on the steps of Capitol Hill and asked him how the United States should react to this new development in world politics. Truman responded with customary Mid-Western directness. Both regimes were nasty, he said, and so this new development represented an opportunity. 46
Anything other than open-handed co-operation was likely to result in disaster. Anti-Soviet intelligence estimates were bound to leak and aggravate the very problem they predicted. Optimism and efforts to broaden the dialogue on practical matters at least offered some hope of escape from the trap of perpetual confrontation. 48
The trigger came as early as 1942 when an offer of post-war bases from the Norwegian government in exile prompted the creation of a small future planning body. 50
O'Malley saw this partly as a moral question, and he did not mince his words. At what cost in human values would not the sovietization of central and south-eastern Europe be achieved? How could London contemplate 'the surrender to the cruel and heathenish tyranny of the Soviets of a large part of the heritage of Roman and Byzantine civilisation'? 51
This reflected the fact that the 'main enemy' for the military was not the Germans nor even the Soviets but the British Treasury, bent on post-war retrenchment. 53
At the end of September 1944 PHP [Post Hostilities Planning Committee] produced plans for a West European bloc which was 'even more hostile to Russia' than before. 56
British diplomats were anxious to prevent the leakage of anti-Soviet planning, fearing that Roosevelt would be infuriated by such talk. But at the military level at least there was a growing private Anglo-American consensus on the 'Russia problem'. In June 1944, Major-General Colin Gubbins, the head of SOE, visited General MacArthur at his South West Pacific Area headquarters. MacArthur launched into a tirade lasting one and a half hours against Russia. Not much later another senior British inteliigence officer visited the Americans and accidentally came across 'super-secret' appreciations of the Soviet Union as the next enemy that were circulating in Washington. 57
In May 1945, within days of Germany's defeat, Churchill ordered plans for war with the Soviets to be drawn up. 57-8
All this only hints at what was really at the back of Churchill's mind. Why did he think that the West might be able to take on the Soviets in the Summer of 1945? The answer was clearly the advent of nuclear weapons. The impending test of the atomic bomb - carried out on 16 July 1945 might shift the balance of power between East and West. The possibility of chemical and biological warfare might also have been in Churchill's mind. These sorts of thoughts and discussions are not ordinarily recorded in formal minutes. But Brooke captured the reality of these intensely secret and private conversations in his diary. Churchill, he wrote, now saw 'himself as the sole possessor of the bombs and capable of dumping them where he wished, thus all-powerful and capable of dictating to Stalin'. 59
The Warsaw Rising of August 1944, when the Soviets deliberately left the Polish resistance to be crushed at the hands of the Germans before moving forward, was not, as some have suggested, the turning point for British perceptions. Cavendish-Bentinck of the JIC insisted that in fact tough German defences had 'annihilated a Russian armoured force which was advancing' on Warsaw. The Lord Privy Seal and prominent Labour MP Arthur Greenwood went further, asserting that the Soviets were quite justified in holding back. He told Eden that 'the present controversy would be paralleled if the Germans had occupied Dublin and an uprising by the I.R.A. interfering with our plans for recapturing the city became the subject for similar controversy with Moscow'. He went on to complain about the Poles as a running sore in Anglo-Soviet relations, partly because they expressed 'anti-Semitism in a virulent form'. 60
Even as Unthinkable was being drafted, the JIC explicitly cautioned that the Germans would exploit their value in the East-West struggle to the maximum as a way of 'fooling the Allies' into reconstructing Germany as a major power. (Churchill's Operation Unthinkable [had the] stated objective .... the 'elimination of Russia'.) 61
Although Stalin did not travel outside territories under Soviet control, he relished contact with foreign leaders. He often charmed them and surprised them with his warmth, intelligence and rationality, albeit underpinned by a firm realism and a clear sense of his own demands. Eden explained the puzzling business of dealing with the urbane Stalin when he recounted to Hugh Dalton, the Minister of economic Warfare, his prolonged meeting with the Soviet leader in early 1942. Stalin had struck him as surprisingly small, with physical movements 'rather like those of a cat'. Eden confessed that he knew full well what horrors Stalin was guilty of and so 'tried hard to think of him as dripping with the blood of his opponents and rivals, but somehow the picture wouldn't fit'. 63
It was commercial rivalry that prompted America abruptly to end Lend-Lease support in August 1945, plunging Britain into economic crisis. 65
Although numbers would fall gradually with the "^ end of wartime tasks, the secret Services suffered less under post-war austerity than any other aspect of defence. 67
... the Middle East - a curious part of the world where Britain appeared still to predominate - yet only owned Cyprus and Kenya by 1948. Secret Service was especially colonial in the Persian Gulf, a region which had been superintended from India. Each British outpost enjoyed a 'secret service grant' to subsidise local clandestine activity. 72
Early in the war, senior RAF staff officers told SOE they did not wish to associate their Service with the dishonourable business of parachuting agents in civilian clothes for the purpose of attempting to kill members of the opposing forces. 73
The post-war pattern of British special Operations and propaganda was tied directly into the core of British foreign policy-making. In Washington, as we shall see, these activities escaped diplomatic control and the CIA became a rival centre of American foreign policy which even its own officers feared had become a State within a State. 74
Eden immediately wrote to Churchill asking that SOE be placed under him as a tidy short-term measure. But it was clear that the Foreign Secretary was already looking ahead. He argued that, in the future, 'in liberated territories and in neutral countries there may from time to time be useful scope for a covert organisation to further [British] policy ... and I should therefore be sorry to see the abandonment of all the machinery for "special operations" even when the war is over' 74
In January 1945, Colin Gubbins, the head of SOE, wrote to Cadogan explaining that he wanted to drop one of his officers, Captain John Coates, into Budapest. The diplomats gave Gubbins a firm no, citing the 'unfortunate experiences' with the Soviets that had resulted from recent SOE missions in Rumania and Bulgaria. SOE dropped a few agents into Prague in May 1945, but these were NKVD agents inserted on Moscow's behalf, the last remnants of the fairly solid co-operative relationship developed by George Hill, the SOE man in Moscow. 75
Arab nationalism was growing fast among intellectuals and middle-ranking Army officers, inclining them to side with anyone who would rid the Middle East of the remains of the European colonial presence. This was the tendency that needed to be countered with extensive bribery. 76
SOE in Germany was employed in an Operation to acquire some files from the East which were considered 'most valuable' by the Director of Military Intelligence in London. This was an Operation that involved the covert removal of an entire archive, and the limited surviving record of this episode speaks unambiguously of 'the "lifting" of the material from the Russian Zone' of Germany. This Operation was successful and remained covert, but a no less successful American Operation a few months later was blown and became embarrassingly public. This involved a similar 'intelligence foray into Czechoslovakia' and was selfonfessedly a 'raid' to secure intelligence materials, archives and other gems. 77
The State Department had no choice but to admit involvement and sent a message to the American Embassy in Prague authorising the Ambassador to apologise for the affair. This sort of event made diplomats in London and Washington nervous.
Elsewhere in Germany, the main SOE unit called ME 42 still had thirty-four staff in Operation on 15 January 1946, who were gradually being merged with SIS stations. Their role was not only to retain agents as intelligence contacts but also to establish stay-behind parties for resistance work. 77
The Commanders in the Middle East were keen to point out that a lot of SOE equipment delivered to th the guerrillas in Greece had subsequently been used against the British. 78
Note 55, p. 653. In the autumn of 1947, Vilhelm Evang, the young Chief of the fledgling Norwegian service, travelled to Germany and Britain to conclude agreements with the British JIB and also SIS. Then in Nov. 1947 he travelled to Washington for agreements, with the newly established CIA.
Eden himself remained a lifelong adherent of tight political control of secret service, and would reaffirm this when he returned as Prime Minister in the 1950s. 80
Graham Greene served under Kim Philby in the SIS counter-intelligence wing, Section V. 81
This [bevarelsen af et samlet system af tjenester] was made difficult by Harry Truman's decision to abolish OSS. On 20 September 1945 the President had passed Executive Order 9621 ensuring that OSS was disbanded with almost immediate effect, from 1 October. He was influenced by the Park Report, a collected survey of OSS misdemeanours during the war. 81
The wait was longer than many had expected. Harry S. Truman did not create the Central Intelligence Agency until July 1947, and a semidetached unit for covert action only came along a year later in 1948. 82
On 29 August 1945, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI - no friend of William Donovan or the OSS - nevertheless wrote to the US Attorney General declaring that 'the future welfare of the United States necessitates and demands the operation of an efficient, world-wide intelligence service'. 82
The new CIA handled only intelligence; meanwhile Washington developed a different organisation for 'covert action'. This was the Office of Policy Co-ordination (OPC) under Frank Wisner, a seasoned former OSS oflflcer who had waited out the Interregnum in Germany. OPC took its Orders from George Kennan at the State Department and from the National Security Council, which was created in 1947 to co-ordinate high-level military and diplomatic policy, and it was connected to the CIA only for purposes of administrative support and 'rations'. Designed for 'stirring up trouble' in Eastern Europe, it was intensely disliked by those in the new CIA responsible for quietly collecting intelligence. 86
Many key figures in the post-war Washington elite, including Allen Welsh Dulles, George Kennan, Paul Hoffman, John McCloy and Paul Nitze, were adherents and urged Wisner on to yet grander schemes. 86
But George Kennan resisted the Integration of OPC into the CIA. 87
By the time OPC was finally merged with CIA in 1950, Wisner presided over a staff of close to 2,000 personnel with forty-seven stations around the world and a budget approaching $200 million. 87
Thereafter, the culture of covert action developed a firm grip on the American system and continued to dominate the CIA into the 1960s. 87
MI5 was associated with the temporary surrender of civil liberties and with claustrophobic security measures such as mail censorship, things that all now wanted swept away. 91
Cadogan, Menzies, Montgomery and others were aware of the penetration of Whitehall by Soviet agents and remarked on it during the war and soon after. As early as 1943, Menzies warned Cadogan about the penetration of SIS, telling him frankly that he had 'communists in his organization'. What action they took, if any, remains unknown. 91
The story of work against Soviet espionage in the West is now dominated by something called Venona, Western efforts to break into the enciphered wireless traffic of Soviet intelligence, which began to produce dividends in early 1948. But, as we shall see, this effort to read Soviet communications has tended to distract from an intriguing story that precedes it.92
MI5 and the Special Brauch were also keeping a close eye on the Trotskyist movement in Britain led by James Heston. 92
Attlee resisted pressure, from those more conscious of Soviet activities, to introduce active security investigations into the background of those with access to government secrets, known as positive vetting. 92
There were several incidents in which MPs in Westminster appear to have been kept under surveillance with microphones or phone taps in pursuit of possible security leaks about operational plans. Information gained from postal censorship had been used for overt political purposes. All were thoroughly conscious of the potential abuses to which surveillance could be put. 93
In the Summer of 1944, the MP Tom Driberg was pursuing the issue of the mistreatment of Jewish soldiers within the Polish Home Army. He complained to Eden that he had learned 'from an extremely reliable source 'that the Polish secret service' have my phone tapped'. 93
The Free French secret service in London, to name but one, had behaved in a vicious and arbitrary way. French nationals in London were often picked up and taken to its Duke Street HQ for interrogation. 93
During the general election campaign of June 1945 these private concerns erupted into remarkable public controversy. Churchill chose a major election broadcast on the BBC to warn the public of what a future Labour government might have in store in the field of public security. In a wild moment, he claimed that in order to enforce its will Labour would:
have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely administered in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders ... and where would the ordinary simple folk - the common people as they like to call them in America - where would they be once this mighty organism had got them in their grip? 94
By contrast MI5's responsibilities in 1945 were uniquely vast. Although it was responsible for security and counter-intelligence only in British territory, British territory had expanded remarkably in the last days of the war. British occupation troops were spread all over Europe and Asia. 95
Some elements, typically in SIS or in US Army Intelligence in Europe, had begun to refocus on the Soviets in 1944. But diplomats in London and Washington regarded defectors as an unwelcome embarrassment and wished to return them to their home country, regardless of their fate. 96
In Istanbul in 1944, the US Military Attache was approached by Major Akhmed, the Assistant Military Attache in the Soviet Embassy Akhmed faced a dilemma. He had been recalled to Moscow and did not know the reason. 97
Alexander Rado, the famous chief of the Soviet GRU military intelligence network in wartime Switzerland - the linchpin of the so-called Red Orchestra, the large GRU spy network in Nazi-occupied Europe - presents an especially fascinating case. Rado had run a large and successful intelligence network operating into Switzerland which had been broken up by the Swiss police in 1943. At this point Rado had asked Moscow about the possibility of taking refuge at the British Embassy by approaching the British intelligence service, SIS, but permission was denied. Instead Rado made his way to Paris. There he linked up with his radio Operator, a British communist called Alexander Foote. While in liberated Paris, Rado, Foote and their distinguished colleague Leopold Trepper, who ran other Red Orchestra networks in wartime Europe, were all persuaded to return voluntarily to Moscow in January 1945 to submit a final report on their wartime activities. The offer had been made by the Soviet Military Mission which had arrived in Paris in November 1944 to join the growing army of intelligence outfits that were establishing themselves in the newly liberated capital. 97
But Moscow placed a more arcane interpretation on Rado's disappearane,suggesting that MI5 had 'liquidated' him to prevent him from traveiling to Moscow and revealing Foote's position as a double agent working for British intelligence. Foote was not in fact a double agent but a loyal wartime servant of Moscow. Accordingly, although Foote loathed Rado, it was nevertheless fortunate for him that the Soviets reclaimed Rado in the summer of 1945. Once Rado had been transported to Moscow, it was the turn of London to conclude that Rado lo had probably been shot by the Soviet authotities for failing in his mission for the GRU. In fact Rado endured ten years of prison, before being released at the same times Leopold Trepper, following the death of Stalin.102
By the evening of the same day, 6 September, the Soviets had settled the issue. A tough four-man Soviet security unit arrived at the Gouzenkous' flat, broke down the door and began to turn it upside down. The RCMP surveillance team then arrived and the Soviets retreated into the night, refusing to be held and claiming diplomatic immunity. Wisely, Gouzenkou and his family had been hiding with a neighbour. Only at this point, after dangling in the wind for some thirty hours, were they taken into protective custody and given asylum. 104
Bevin wanted 4,000 copies of the report ordered from Canada and persuaded Mackenzie King to promise that they would be printed quickly He also wanted the Blue Book circulated to various trade unions in Britain and had got King to promise to supply sufficient numbers. The addresses of the union secretaries were to be obtained from Labour Party headquarters at Transport House, and officials would then 'send the books out in "a plain sealed wrapper" from the Foreign Office, i.e. there should be no indication that they have come from the Foreign Office'. 106-7
In India a great deal of material was destroyed before government was handed over in 1947. 114
Clement Attlee was a tough-minded individual. Despite the scares provided by these cases he was determined to avoid an American-style 'security purge'. He was repelled by the sort of Inquisition that had already begun under the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington. 115
Civil Service representatives had already smelt a rat and were pressing for assurances that employment would not be refused on grounds of membership of a political party. So far Whitehall had artfully evaded offering any reply to such enquiries. 117
When asked about the BBC he [Atlee] insisted this was a matter for Governors of the BBC and not for the State. But in reality the State was pushing a clandestine purge of the BBC, especially the overseas services. to the dismay of the Director-General, who then had to placate the angry unions. 118
There was no evidence against [Professor PMS] Blackett, but in the prevailing climate he was bound to be purged. Ironically, freeing Blackett from official duties had unpredictable consequences. His overseas links were not to Moscow but to Delhi, where he admired Nehru's vibrant post-colonial State. Blackett became a military scientific adviser to India, visiting a dozen times up to 1971. Knowledgeable and well connected in the world of defence science he was now a free agent. One of the fields to which he made a substantial contribution was the Indian atomic bomb programme. 119
At this point the Labour leadership chose to expel several MPs for continually supporting the communist position against Bevin's foreign policy. 119
As late as 1945, Roosevelt had regarded de Gaulle and his government in exile as closet fascists bent on establishing a right-wing police State after the war. Considerable work had to be undertaken, notably by OSS, to disabuse him of this notion. By 1946, the wheel had turned full circle and Washington considered Paris to be riddled with communists. 119-20
By November 1945, Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, the British Ambassador in Moscow, was urging London to take more action to stem the Soviet practice of obtaining control of international labour, youth, women's and other organisations 'for the purpose of using them as instruments of Soviet foreign policy'. He expected 'similar attacks' on students' organisations, as well as on those with humanitarian and cultural objectives, and wanted counter-measures stepped up. Clark-Kerr wrote again on 15 December warning about the Soviet search for an 'instrument for influencing international youth'. CRD in London was already hard at work on this problem.
The principal battleground was the struggle for the mind of Europeann youth. CRD was particularly irked by the fact that the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, had permitted a communist-organised World Youth Congress to take place in London in November 1945. 122
Motions had been passed asserting that conditions in Belsen were nothing compared to those in colonial West Africa and that monstrous British colonialists 'cut off the thumbs of Bombay cottonworkers to avoid Indian competition' with British home cotton producon. To add insult to injury, two of the three Balkan delegations proved to be armed with briefcases full of counterfeit sterling currency. 123
She [Elizabeth Welton, the Secretary of the Standing Conference of National Voluntary Youth Organisations] offered to help set up a secret group that would work against the communists. She was also in close touch with similar-minded groups in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and the USA, and reported that other private anti-communist groups were being set up in Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland. In the late spring of 1946 she prepared to depart on a tour of Holland, Belgium and France to cement relations with these groups, especially the Union Patriotique des Organisations de la Jeunnesse in Paris. But she confessed to being filled with trepidation. Her European collaborators had warned her that life was dangerous for the opponents of organised communism on the continent. Recently there had been 'two cases of sudden death by poisoning and a mysterious disappearance of anti-communist organisers' in Europe, and everyone was on their guard. Welton was not exaggerating, for by 1948 fifteen individuals involved in youth work in Denmark had been 'liquidated' by their communist opponents. CRD noted that Welton's connection with the authorities was to be 'kept dark', but she would be given some training and preparation before departing. 'Mr Hollis of M.I.5. is expected to brief her,' it recorded, in order to give her the benefit of Whitehall's intelligence on European youth movements and the issue of 'who is a Communist and who is not'. 124Together with MI5, CRD busied itself checking the background of the NUS delegation members. MI5 alleged that a number of them, including Carmel Brickman, were members of the Communist Party and that A. T. James, the President of the NUS, 'had a record of close association with Communist activities'.^^ By July 1946 CRD had built up what it saw as a detailed profile of the links between the NUS and other political groups. Founded in 1922, the NUS had what CRD called 'an innocent record' up to 1940, when it had come under growing communist influence. CR! 125
Special attention was paid to Kutty Hookham, Joint Secretary of the World Youth Federation, and one of the few British nationals to elude Foreign Office restrictions. SIS explained that she had achieved this by first visiting the headquarters of the new WFDY in Paris, then going on to Moscow, and then travelling from Moscow to Vienna. 125
These CRD-sponsored groups would constitute 'a Standing perpetual challenge to gang-rule wherever it becomes manifest - whether by Nazi parties or Soviet parties, or by Zionist movements'. 125
But there was much secret work to be done. In the summer of 1946 the developed political warfare apparatus that CRD needed for countering organised communism at the international level was not there. 125
Sir Patrick Nichols, the British Ambassador in Prague, was watching preparations for the Student Congress there. Nichols thought it would be difficult to block communist students attending, so instead the tactic should be somehow to get more non-communist students on to the British delegation. 126
By January 1947, CRD's longer-term project, a rival youth Conference, was under way. George Haynes, Secretary of the National Council of of Social Service, an umbrella organisation of British youth groups, was leading the effort. 126
... the NUS had broken away from communist control by mid-1948 and left the WFDY later that year. 127
International Youth Congress, held at London University in January 1948, gave birth to the World Assembly of Youth or WAY, Britain's first covertly orchestrated international Organisation. 128
[Frank] Roberts was a clear-minded individual who punched above his weight and, like George Kennan in the US context, his despatches from Moscow were important in forming British policy in the first year after the war. Roberts stressed the global nature of Soviet policy, connected by the ubiquitous activities of the communist parties 'directed, if not controlled in detail from Moscow'. This, Roberts remarked, required an equally co-ordinated response. The result was the creation of the Foreign Office Russia Committee, which then oversaw the gradual revival of a department of British covert political warfare. 128
By 1946 there were no more arguments about 'co-operation' with the Soviets. The arguments were now about how far to go in responding to Soviet hostility. 128-9
[Ivone] Kirkpatrick was ordered to draw up a detailed programme for a covert propaganda offensive that would involve the BBC, the Royal Institute for International Affairs and the press. Bringing in the BBC increased the importance of having its workers vetted by MI5. 129
Orme Sargent liked these ideas, but Bevin most definitely did not and was persuaded to approve this policy only in Iran, where the confrontation with the Soviets was becoming intense. Instead Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, called for something that would 'put over the positive results of British attitudes', rather than negative attacks on Moscow. 129
Bevin's change of policy on British use of the hidden band was justified by the setting up of the Soviet Cominform, a propaganda organisation and the successor to the inter-war Comintern, in 1947. 130
Despite his slavish devotion to Stalin, Molotov was eventually sacked and his Jewish wife arrested during the purges of 1949. Continuing to slide into disfavour in the early 1950s, he was probably saved from execution only by Stalin's own death in 1953. 131
Returning with Bevin on the Queen ' Mary, he advocated a new Foreign Office department to conduct covert or 'black' propaganda. Within months this would emerge as the Information Research Department. 131
IRD differed from the diverse bodies dealing with wartime propaganda in that it was entirely under Foreign Office control. The impor tance of IRD is difficult to overestimate. Before 1950, when defence programmes were being cut and the secret Services were pleased to hold their programmes steady, it was expanding rapidly. By the early 1950s, IRD, working closely with SIS, constituted the largest department of the Foreign Office. It received £150,000 a year from the Foreign Office Budget, boosted by a further £100,000 from the secret Service vote, the budget for clandestine activities 131
Bemærk at hertil, fra side 96 har USA/CIA været holdt helt ude af billedet. Forklaring ?
... the British and the Americans had uncovered clear evidence of a bungled Soviet plot to assassinate the King. But the Soviet Colonel in charge of the plot had been too talkative and had blabbed details to his Rumanian girlfriend; as a result, the King had narrowly escaped death. The Soviets then thought it expedient to eliminate the incautious Soviet colonel, and his car was mysteriously showered with hand-grenades in January 1947. No attempt was made to catch the perpetrators.
Events in Rumania paled beside what British diplomats described as he 'bestial' goings-on in Bulgaria. Here the leading non-communist, Petkov, was arrested and sentenced to death on charges of working for Anglo-American imperialism. Western protests on his behalf were useless and he was executed in September 1947. The Bulgarian commulist leader seemed to enjoy telling Western diplomats that Petkov would have been spared but for their protests, which, he insisted, constituted an intolerable interference in Bulgaria's internal affairs. Such provocations were hard to take and communist behaviour in Eastern Europe seemed actively to invite a propaganda campaign. After all, the real details were so lurid that they required no embellishment. IRD's favouritc subject was the Stalinist forced labour camps such as the terrible Arctic mining outpost at Kolyma. This allowed IRD to reply in kind to the accusatitions of forced labour in the British colonies and also suggested comparison between Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. 132
Malcolm Muggeridge was one example. having served with SIS in Africa early in the war he ended up as SIS liaison to French military security in liberated Paris in 1944. He found post-war employment with the Daily Telegraph and was soon writing leaders on the international situation. 132
Muggeridge was soon back in regulär journalism and by the outbreak of the Korean War he was Acting Editor of the Daily Telegraph. In the 1950s he would help to run one of the larger CIA-backed efforts to influence intellectual opinion in Britain. 133
He moved in a circle of writers, including George Orwell, who had been involved in wartime propaganda work, and were now being used by IRD. 133
Orwell had spent a long time in the Burmese police before becoming a wartime propaganda broadcaster. 133
Orwell's books, especially Animal Farm and 1984, were far more valuable than the work of intellectuals like Koestler. First, the books were more accessible. Secondly, they were strongly anti-totalitarian but no more anti-communist than they were anti-fascist. Thirdly, Orwell had fine left-wing credentials including Service during the Spanish civil war in the International Brigades. 133
The rise of IRD denoted a British acceptance that struggles between states were becoming struggles to the death between societies, involving new areas of propaganda such as religion, another subject in which Muggeridge took an interest. On both sides of the Atlantic no stone was being left unturned in the new propaganda war. Harry Truman attempted to construct a remarkable religious anti-communist front against an atheistic Kremlin. But although he established close bilateral co-operation with specific religious leaders, such as Pope Pius XII, his efforts to form a broad religious united front, including the Dalai Lanna in Tibet, came to naught. 134 [her burde Moralsk Oprustning have været med - og Pius XIIs konkordat med Hitler, OJ].
IRD received formal approval in late 1947 and came on stream in 1948. 134
The Americans too had been busy, often using the substantial number of wartime secret Services officers who had ostensibly returned to their pre-war occupations. Iran, a cause of immediäte post-war abrasion between London and Moscow, was a natural setting for the rapid and extemporised revival of British secret activities. 134
Wartime Iran had been jointly occupied by Britain and the Soviet Union to keep the Germans away from the oil and to ensure a free flow of Lend-Lease supplies to the Soviets. But in 1945 the Soviets revealed a marked reluctance to withdraw from the country, which then became the scene of the Azerbaijan Crisis of late 1945 and early 1946. A radical pro-Soviet dement, the Tudeh Party, seized power in Iran's northern province and set up an autonomous government. Under these diverse pressures, the weak central government in Teheran appeared to be on the brink of permitting this large region to break away to join the Soviet Union. 134-5
Iran was critical for the balance of payments of the ailing post-war British economy. Iran's southern oilfields, owned by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company or AIOC, in which Britain had a controlling interest, represented the most important of Britain's many areas of informal empire; indeed they were its biggest external asset. The Soviets were aware of this and since 1944 had directed a relentless stream of propaganda against the exploitative British imperial presence. 135
British officials together with key figures in AIOC began to develop their own plans. Their answer was to develop a counter-secession by encouraging rebellion by the pro-British tribes in south-west Iran, centring on the friendly Khuzistan Arabs and the Bakhtiari and Qashqai tribes. If the worst came to the worst, a pro-British south-west Iran, together with its invaluable oil reserves, could break away and declare for London. 135
Bevin, who was of an opposite persuasion when it came to the use of the hidden band, was horrified. 135
But the stakes were too high and Bevin's orders were simply ignored by officials below him and by the informal network of British influence in the region 135
The ensuing propaganda battle with the Soviets in Iran was crucial. It constituted an early lesson in the critical role of this activity in the coming stfuggle with the Soviet Union, not only in areas like Germany, but throughout the Third World. More significantiy it underlined the importance of such propaganda alongside growing information activity by the United States. The Soviet threat was the more immediate, but in the long term the Americans would prove the more formidable rival in the lucrative Gulf region.In December 1948, Washington considered its contingency plans for a Soviet invasion of Iran. Again the Qashqai tribes to the south, in the Shiraz-Bushire area, were immediately identified as the most likely prospects for long-term resistance: 'they would fight any invader - especially the Russians' and offered an ideal base for 'clandestine operations'. The tribes were mercurial and, while they would fight against anyone, who they would fight for was 'debatable' - their decision would probably be 'influenced by gold and other material things'. What they really needed was their own version of Underwood. 136-7
In remote regions, where commercial interests were strong and governments were weak, the needs of local ambassadors were often unusual. 137
The initial aim of early American covert action was undermining communism in Greece, Italy, Germany, and, especially France. 137
But after reflection London and Washington chose less direct methods. including the provision of large sums of money to buy off communist strikers and to subsidise non-communist newspapers. British and American secret Service Intervention in Italy and France followed in the wake of American private networks. The lead elements here were the links between American, British, French and Italian labour organisations. 137
The $600 million of aid authoiorised by the Marshall Plan to Italy and France was supplemented by $10 miUion of'unvouchered funds' fed by the CIA and other covert methods to pay for anti-communist propaganda and for bribes to aid the Christian Democrats and other non-communist parties. 138
He [Irving Brown] was also adamant that there should be concerted action to break up the pro-Soviet Organisation, the World Federation of Trade Unions, which was based in Paris, in order to reduce the communist hold on French and Italian unions. Brown was clearly driving American policy on organised labour in Europe. 138
It is easv to imagine that an agency couid be set up in l'rance for the distribution of the advertising of a certain number of American firms who are directly or indirectly interested in the products or manufactured articles imported under the Marshall Plan. Such advertising could be given to a certain number of judiciously selected newspapers. The income which these papers would thus receive would allow them to balance their budget, which usually shows a deficit. [Paul Devinat, a French official, wrote to Willidam Donovan. In May 1948] 139
Encouraged by the French themselves, Paris became a testing ground for all sorts of Anglo-American psychological operations, including 'blip-verts', short subliminal messages inserted into film material supplied under the auspices of the Marshall Plan. It was also a testing ground for some of the first CIA-sponsored defector literature. 139
It reinforced the impact of Darkness at Noon, written by Arthur Koestler, who was now working with the CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom, and of George Orwell's 1984. 139
Between 7 and 9 September the French arrested and expelled 288 foreign communists, most of whom formed part of the 'para-military apparatus' of the French Communist Party. They expelled the exile base of the Spanish Communist Party from France and its journal Mundo Obrere. They set up an anti-communist propaganda organisation Paix et Liberté, with semi-official sponsorship, and considerable assistance from IRD and the CIA. 140
Especially satisfactory was a decree banning the Paris-based headquarters of various Soviet front organisations including the World Federation of Trade Unions, the International Democratic Federation of Women and the World Federation of Democratic Youth. 140
World Asscmbly of Youth, now set up its Paris headquarters. In November 1950 the CIA's Frank Wisner helped to create the International Federation of War Veterans' Organisations, representing ten million non-ommunist veterans across Western Europe and North America. 140
'Pope Pius XII gave us his blessing,' enthused Wisner, and 'good wishes were also received from Trygvie Lie', the UN Secretary General.
By the early 1950s Western covert propaganda was taking on more diverse qualities. No longer purely anti-communist, it had broadened out to become an instrument that could be deployed against anything hostile to British or American policy. 140
[Bedell Smith:] We have asked both the French and British to assist in sustaining an increasing campaign of attack, exposure and ridicule against "Le Monde" and Beuve-Méry. 140
In February 1947, Iceland - because of its strategie value in the North Atlantic - was one of the first targets for British anti-communist propaganda. 141
By 1950 the Commander-in-Chief Atlantic had developed four separate plans 'to land forces in Iceland against possible opposition in order to restore the democratic government of Iceland'. 141
On 30 December 1946 the American Naval Attache at Odessa, the principal Soviet naval base on the Black Sea, reported some remarkable events to Washington. 142
Here Germany had been able to raise the most formidable of several Waffen SS units composed of Soviet Citizens: the Galicia Division. Although the war was now over, elements of the Ukrainian Galicia Division were still fighting on against Moscow in the name of Ukrainian independence. 142
MGB officers were a favourite target for the guerrillas. They would vanish by night and their bodies would be found the next morning in a prominent public place. 143
Western secret service operations linked to the myriad Ukrainian exile groups were well under way by 1946. 143
With the final achievement of Ukrainianan independence in 1991, a vast stone memorial to the SS Galicia Division was erected. 144
If Whitehall [både Eden og Bevin] had set its face so decisively against post-war special Operations and secret armies in 1945, how did Britain's SIS find itself embroiled in a clandestine war in the Ukraine, and indeed elsewhere on the periphery of the Soviet empire? 144
Yet by May 1946, with London infuriated by Soviet activities in Canada, Australia and, especially, Germany, underground warfare was being revived. 144
The formation of the Special Forces Club, a few streets away from Harrods in Knightsbridge, was no mere social exercise. Its membership was a roster of available figures with unique skills and experience. By 1946, some of its members had already found themselves recalled to fight in unpleasant insurgencies in the colonies. Small-scale units, often created unofficially, carried out reprisals and other unattributable activities. 145
Liddell Hart replied giving his approval. You go to the root of the matter in emphasising the vital necessity of the psychological counter-offensive, based on a "religion of freedom". Less than three years later, Liddell Hart had a change of heart and turned decisively against SOE-type operations and the promotion of resistance movements. But in 1947 there was no inkling of these future doubts. 145
note 9. By 1950 he would question resistance work as carrying with it an erosion of civil morality and law and order, which was permanent and irreversible, Liddell Hart, Defence of the West, 54-8. 657
In September 1948 the Chiefs of Staflf told Cabinet Ministers that Britain should seek 'to weaken the Russian hold' over the areas the Soviet Union dominated and that 'all possible means short of war must be taken.' 147
There followed a vast and rapid expansion of American covert activity whose cost grew from $2 million in 1948 to nearly $200 million by 1952. 147
George Marshall, Secretary of State, was adamantly opposed to anything that might sully the State Department's reputation. 147
Allen Dulles, then acting as a high-level outside Consultant on United States intelligence organisations, and privately hoping to succeed Hillenkoetter as DCI, identified this problem as early as 1 January 1949. Dulles wanted OPC fully embedded in the CIA. But this happened only when Walter Bedell Smith took over as DCI in October 1950. 148
By August 1948, with the onset of the Berlin Crisis, Forrestal called for an overall policy towards the Soviets. 148
Kennan and the CIA were careful to co-ordinate some of these ideas with London, especially with the British Chiefs of Staff. In the middle of the busy summer of 1948, Hillenkoetter took the time to visit London. He was especially impressed by Britain's efforts with IRD. 149
The military were proposing nothing less than the removal of the direction of the Cold War, by now the central concern of British foreign policy, from Bevin's grasp. Their alternative concept of a new ministerial supremo in charge of fighting the Cold War was left deliberately vague. 150
The Russia Committee, the central brain set up to manage Cold War issues in May 1946. 151
As Kirkpatrick himself confessed, Sir Ian Jacob, the head of the European Service of the BBC, was a regular member. 151
He urged his Cabinet colleagues to take a firmer approach to ideological competition with the Soviet Union, by pushing British social democracy and the values of Western civilisation. Cabinet gave its approval for a small IRD Organisation, but under Bevin it became big, expanding faster than any other section of Britain's overseas policy machine. Bevin wanted IRD's work to be largely 'positive'. projecting British achievements instead of turning the Soviets into bogeymen. In his view this approach 'could be expected to relax rather than raise international tension'. 151
A month later, on 25 November [1948], Tedder finally had his chance when the newly expanded Russia Committee met. Major figures from Britain's Cold War were there to oflfer their opinion on the value of 'special operations'. Kirkpatrick introduced the central question: should they begin stirring up trouble in the Eastern bloc? He stressed that the idea was to emulate the sort of costly civil war that the West had confronted in Greece. Equally prominent in everyone's mind was the ongoing Berlin Crisis and the surprise breakaway of Tito's Yugoslavia from the Eastern bloc the previous June. Both events strongly influenced the discussion. Kirkpatrick was cautious, proposing that Britain should 'start any kind of offensive operations in a small area', partly for reasons of financial stringency, and he suggested Albania. 152
Yet, despite this scepticism, the Russia Committee sanctioned the operation against Albania. Albania was probably the price that Bevin had to pay to prevent a füll showdown with the Chiefs of Staff. 153
Why had this decision been taken, when the practical problems of encouraging resistance inside the secret police states of the Eastern bloc had been so clearly identified at the outset? The answer was the pressure exerted by the recent Czech coup and the continuing Berlin Crisis, together with worries about France, Italy and Greece, resulting in a fear of being nibbled to death. The Chiefs of Staff warned that the West was being gradually pushed into a corner by Soviet Cold War methods and that by the time a hot war erupted it would be too weak to resist. 153
In 1948 and 1949, officials in Washington, also heartened by events in Tito's Yugoslavia, adopted a similar, but wider-ranging, programme of covert action, designed to hasten what they presumed to be the gradual disintegration of the Eastern bloc. 154
At the end of 1948 the Chiefs of Staff seemed to have won. The Russia Committee confirmed a sea-change in Britain's Cold War tactics that embraced liberation and all methods short of war. But in fact they had lost, for they were now confronted by two immovable obstacles. 154
Required to begin liberation, they were also busy with contingency preparations for a hot war vhich some thought might be only months away and which most believed would begin in the Middle East. 154
Planning for a hot war had been under way for a while. In 1947 and early 1948, Kim Philby found himself SIS Station Commander in Turkey. One of his principal duties was to roam about in a Land Rover conducting detailed survey work for SIS wartime contingency plans, involving for example the demolition of roads and railways in case the Soviets advanced. 154
'At present there is a Foreign Office ban on carrying out any preparatory measures for Special Operations. [1948] 155
Moreover, SIS feared that the populations of many countries of the Middle East 'may be actively hostile to us, in which case Special Operations would not succeed in the early stages of the war. 155
Even at the end of 1949 there was little more capacity. The Turks were also setting a great deal of store by special Operations and had developed three large units whose sole purpose was to prepare for wartime guerrilla operations. 155
Britain's Middle East Land Forces HQ was reorganising an Engineer Regiment 'to carry out special demolition tasks in Persia and Iraq'. It had considered the introduction of sleeper agents in peacetime but concluded that this was 'not practicable'. Targets included the Iranian railways and the oilproduction facihties at Iran, Iraq and Qatar. 156 [min fremhævelse, OJ]
Bevin had used the term ["Cold War"] repeatedly in his exchanges with the Soviets at the Paris Conference in September 1948. 156-7
Preparations for PUSC and PUSD bcgan in late 1948 and these bodies formally began operations on 1 February the following year. William Hayter, Secretary of the JIC, was initially responsiblc for the operations of the Secretariat. In April, he told the Americans that this PUSD had arisen partly in emulation of 'George Kennan's outfit in the Department' and he expressed 'a lively interest' in the workings of the Policy Planning Staff. He added that Gladwyn Jebb was touring the States and was 'looking forward to an opportunity to compare notes with Mr Kennan' with a view to improving the workings of PUSD. As with other mechanisms, the British hoped that a mirror would become a window if they copied the American system they would achieve closer consultaion on its activities. 158
By September 1949, a year after gaining access to the Russia Committee, the Chiefs of Staff realised they had been completely sidetracked. Bevin had agreed to liberation, but the only significant outcome was a small unsuccessful operation by SIS and the CIA against Albania. 158
But the British military, and more importantly the Americans, had secured the green light to conduct operations in Albania, Poland and even within the Soviet Union itself in the volatile Ukraine. 159
SOE had the dubious honour of arming and trainining Enver Hoxha, a wartime communist resistance leader and by far the most effective killer of Germans. By 1946 he had secured power in Albania, declaring himself the new president and establishing close links with Moscow. 160
Britain was embroiled in a vicious civil war in neighbouring Greece, supporting the government against the communists. Stalin largely respected the Balkan 'percentages deal' which he had concluded in Moscow with Churchill in October 1944, and so did not send aid to the communist guerrillas in Greece. Instead they received it from the Albanian communists and, prior to 1948, from the bellicose Tito. 160
Two British destroyers sank in the three-mile-wide Corfu Channel safter hitting Albanian mines. The International Court of Justice found Hoxha guilty. but he had refused to accept responsibility. 161-2
[SIS] It ransackcd the Displaced Persons camps of Germany and Iltaly for likely agents. The result was a motley crew of over 200 volunteers, mostly in a poor state of health, a proportion of whom were almost certainly working for Albanian state security. Smilev trained his Pixie teams on Malta during the summer of 1949 and planned to deliver them to the Albanian coast by boat. Meanwhile the Americans trained their Albanians in southern Germanv and prepared them to be dropped by parachute from C-47 Dakota aircraft.
Political preparations for a new regime had also begun. An Albanian National Committee was created to provide a semblance of gowernment in exile. Washington noted politely, the Albanian émigrés 'are too heterogeneous to be placed in any definite political and social classihcation'. Predictably, no single figure could be found who would command universal support inside and outside Albania. 162
The first move in Operation Valuable took place in October 1949. A flotilla of SIS-chartered boats ferried a group of twenty-six Pixies to the Albanian coast. They were ambushed soon after landing and suffered four casualties. The remainder fled. Most were fortunate to escape over the mountains into neighbouring Greece, where the local authorities took them to be communist guerrillas. 163
Things had got off to a bad start in early 1949 when the British and French had uncovered an amateur and undeclared US operation to overthrow Tito in neighbouring Yugoslavia, of which they knew nothing. Wisner's OPC had begun to infiltrate right-wing exiles into Yugoslavia, mostly Serb Chetniks. 163
During the war similar tensions had arisen between OSS, which favoured young nationalists, often middle-ranking officers in the armed forces, and the British, who had preferred to sponsor the traditional, golf-playing sultans and rajahs. 163
By 1951 Albania was a purely CIA operation. 164
Instead Operation Valuable fell foul of the danger that awaits all large-scale covert paramilitary operations, namely that they require forces on a scale that makes them impossible to screen. 164
On 20 December 1946 Moscow Radio accused the Tsaldaris government in Greece of 'forming in secrecy a corps of Hitlerite mercenaries and traitors'. These bands were not just for counter-insurgency, they were also intended for 'sabotage in Yugoslavia and Albania with a view to destroying the peaceful work of the peoples of those countries'. 164-5
In Poland, the Baltic states and the Ukraine, extensive anti-Soviet resistance groups had certainly been present on the ground in 1945. 165
Moreover, there were vast numbers of Polish exiles in the West, especially in Britain, the Commonwealth and the Empire. These were not the starving and the ragged of the Displaced Persons camps, like those Albanians who had thronged to Operation Valuable, but regular military units that had proved themselves in main-force engagements during the last war. Indeed some were still serving within the British Army's Pioneer Corps.
The central figure was General Wladyslaw Anders, wartime Commander of the Polish Forces. Unsullied by factional political allegiance he was probably the most prestigious East European exiled in the West in the late 1940s. Throughout those years SIS attempted to persuade him to stay in London and to run operations into Poland for intelligence-gathering purposes. But Anders became increasingly disillusioned with the small scale of the British operations and increasingly enamoured of American plans for a Volunteer Freedom Corps, a sort of foreign legion made up of Eastern bloc exiles. In June 1950 he left London for Washington to discuss plans for the emigration of 38,000 Polish Army veterans from the UK to the US to join the planned Corps. 166
By 1950 a huge programme of material support, consisting largely of airdrops of arms, money (in gold bullion [barrer]) and radios was in progress. supervised from the CIA's large stations in southern Germany. WIN, with its headquarters in London, claimed 500 active members, 20,000 parttimers and 100,000 resistance fighters on call awaiting the rising against the communists. But the UB collected this material because many of the WIN operatives were unaware that at a higher level they were controlled by the security police, which lent their activities greater credibility. [??] Most of the effort was put in by the CIA. 167
...reality only dawned in December 1952 when Polish official media chose to reveal the nature and extent of the operation. 167
Depressing experiences across Eastern Europe, capped by Poland, triggered Lindsay's decision to quit the CIA at the end of 1952. He had come to the conclusion that the chances of such networks being penetrated were very high. 167
Resistance groups managed to perpetuate insurgencies in the Baltic states and the Ukraine into the 1950s. 167
Only the guerrilla war in the Ukraine appears to have resisted the insidious penetration of security' forces. Perhaps more than anywhere, what remained of the population of the Ukraine had to develop an extraordinarily tough mentality merely to survive. 168
The NKVD was reliably reported to have executed more than 10,000 political prisoners and suspects in Lvov alone (1941). 168
The Germans set about removing the ethnic Russians and the Jews actively assisted by the Ukrainians. 168
But by 1943 the nationalist guerrillas were fighting a two-front war against all foreign occupiers. 169
But in the Ukraine the guerrilla effort was run by an MGB officer - Babenko - who had defected to the nationalists. 169
The Ukrainians fought on into the mid-1950s and were clearly regarded by Moscow as the most dangerous of the nationalist opponents. It was for this reason that they singled out Western-based Ukrainian exile leaders for special treatment, sending an unsuccessful assassin to elinminate Ukrainian emigre leaders in Berlin in 1950 and a more successful agent, Karl Anders, to murder Stephan Bandera in 1959. Several groups of SIS agents had been dropped into the Ukraine by mid-1951. 170
Liberation had little chance of liberating the 'captive' nations' of the East. But for many in Washington this was not the central goal. For Kennan, the individual success of particular covert actions was relatively unimportant and what mattered was to maintain the pressure on the communists. This ensured that the Soviets would be kept off balance, and so less likely to pursue probing activities in the West's own 'sore spots': Italy, France, Greece, the Middle East. 173
The first major trials began in Albania on 12 May 1949. Laszlo Rajk, the Hungarian Foreign Secretary, was arrested and tried in the autumn of 1949, quickly followed by Traicho Kostov, the Bulgarian Deputy Premier. Both were quickly executed, and many others followed. Curiously, the linking element in many of the trials in Eastern Europe was contact between the accused and Noel Field. Field was an American who had taken a PhD in political science at Harvard, joined the State Department and then worked with relief organisations in Europe since the Spanish civil war. Field was also a friend of Allen Dulles.
The Czech purges were complex but offer a good example of the manner in which external contacts served as a trigger. The Czech authorties had begun by targeting intellectuals who had spent the war in Britain ind who were 'suspected of involvement with Western intelligence services', together with Slovak nationalists. 174-5
For good measure the Czechs added that the SS archives had now fallen into the hands of the British and American secret services, so they were making use of all the agents the Nazis had infiltrated into the communist parties of Europe. This latter charge, at least, was not entirely without foundation. 175-6
The purges in Eastern Europe were vigorous and far-reaching, so much so that they even damaged the German Communist Party the KPD - in the Western Zones. In 1949, General Serov, the MGB chief in the Soviet Zone, required the East German security elements known as is the Stasi to investigate all German communists who might have had contacts with Noel Field. Thereafter KPD officials from the West were oftenen arrested while visiting the Soviet Zone and then subjected to torture. Remarkably this included Kurt Müller, the deputy head of the KPD, who was arrested by Stasi officers pretending to be Soviet security. Müller's treatment was supervised throughout by the Soviets and the evidence collected included forced confessions of collaboration with the usual Western intelligence agencies. He endured three years of interrogation before being sent to Siberia, initially for twenty-five years. However, in 1955 he and several other KPD officials were set free with one of the last batches of German POWs released from Siberia and allowed to return to the West. 176
But the question that remains unanswered is the extent to which the West deliberately attempted to encourage the purges to bring down more destruction upon the communist cadres of the Eastern bloc. Were the purges free-standing extensions of Stalin's paranoia over events in Yugoslavia, or was there some deliberate external provocation? ... Inevitably, the key figure in this story is Noel Field. Some have claimed that Field was used to place individuals sympathetic to the West in Central European communist parties. He was certainly still in Prague in the spring of 1949, when he was seized by the Hungarian [sic ???] security police, held and interrogated repeatedly until 1954. His brother was held in Poland. Were Field and his contacts part of a deliberate plot to smear the communist parties of Eastern Europe with a suspicious taint of Western contact?
Allen Dulles reportedly claimed that provoking the purges was his 'biggest ever success'. Dulles had been one of the forerunners of American post-war covert operations in Western Europe, and had helped to run SSU in Germany in 1946, taking an interest in anti-communist operations in Italy from 1947. He was the main consultant to the CIA on covert operations in 1949 and joined the agency in a formal role to superintend all covert action in 1951. He served as DCI from February 1953 to November 1961. Allen Dulles was perhaps in a better position than anyone else to fathom the extent of connections between liberation and the purges. But expert commentators on the history of the Eastern bloc remain perplexed and divided by Steven's idea of a 'Splinter Factor'. Bennett Kovrig regards the book as quite persuasive and asserts that the arguments rest on 'corroborated evidence'. Votjech Mastny considers the same book to be 'scurrilous' and based on 'hearsay' but nevertheless thinks the 'basic idea is credible'. Most writers on SIS are unconvinced, or the claims of Allen Dulles are easily dismissed as an attempt to take credit for an unexpected windfall, offsetting an otherwise lamentable episode of reverses and failures.
New material lends support to the claims of Dulles, suggesting that at :he very least, as the purges developed, the CIA and SIS sought to increase their ferocity as an additional objective for liberation. Sceptics have pointed out that the purges began before the West gave the official green light for liberation in late 1948. But new accounts reveal American liberation efforts as being stronger and beginning sooner than previously lought. SIS was running exploratory operations in the Baltic as early as 1944. Support for anti-communist groups was ongoing in Rumania and Bulgaria through the remnants of OSS and American Army Intelligence as early as 1946. In October of that year SSU was having to exfiltrate resistance leaders from Rumania with whom it had maintained contact as the security police closed in on them. British diplomats complained about this vigorously. Bits and pieces of Western destabilisation had begun as early as 1946. 177
Kennan certainly intended to turn the gigantic Eastern bloc security apparatus in on itself and explicitly said so in the plans he helped to draft. By September 1949 the National Security Council was approving papers that set out a policy to 'attack the weaknesses in the Stalinist penetration of satellite governments and mass organisations' and by this means to 'reduce and eventually eliminate their power'. 178
Stalin's fantastic paranoia was the central factor in the extraordinary wave of arrests and executions that swept over the Eastern bloc between 1948 and 1953. But the purges had more than one cause and Western intelligence played its part - after 1949 quite intentionally - sanctioned by both the National Security Council and the Permanent Under-Secretary's Department. 179
'What role did Noel Field play - he whose ghostlike figure propelled the wave of purges from Budapest through Prague and Warsaw to East Berlin?' The question remains unanswered. What is now clear is that the purges, far from resulting in weakness and disorder, resulted in a consolidation of the Eastern bloc. The front line in the conflict with this increasingly resilient Soviet empire was Germany and Austria. 179
Many units seemed to march out of the Second World War into the Cold War without breaking step. One such was the Nazi Werwolf movement, which organised stay-behind forces designed to slow the Allied advance. Most were quickly exterminated. But in the ethnic German regions of Poland and Czechoslovakia some survived, and here MGB detachments initially found themselves outgunned by large elements of the Polish and German counter-revolutionary undergrounds. Through the autumn of 1945 MGB troops launched raids against Werwolf strongholds and the core was soon eradicated, but some cells survived until early 1947. 180
When an anti-Soviet resistance leader came their way [British intelligence officers] offering his services in late 1947, they debated his usefulness against the Soviets. In the event they sidestepped the issue and handed him over to the Americans, whose work in this area they thought more aggressive and advanced. The MGB was not tardy in this area itself and had already recruited SS men as spies and saboteurs. The question of which side first recruited former Nazis is largely academic. This was not the first or the last conflict in which secret service sersonnel quickly found re-employment. 180
The most spectacular episode is probably the absorption of an entire SS Division of Ukrainians who temporarily retained their weapons and were hidden by the British Army. 184
For the most part the British approach to war criminals was unenthusiasdc, incompetent and lacklustre rather than conspiratorial. 184
Thus by 1947 considerable numbers with an unpleasant past were at large and available for hire, instead of facing imprisonment or worse, which was surely their due. 184
There were certainly those ready to offer them new employment as they emerged from prison in 1947 and 1948. 184
In early July Ivone Kirpatrick informed London that British authorities were now holding senior officers of the Vlasov Army. Hitler's corps of Anti-Soviet Russian Fascists. They had also senior members of General Schilenkov's Free Russia Committee 'under house arrest in Tyrol', although the whereabouts of Vlasov and Schilenkov themselves was not known. They asked for guidance. They were told that the Secretary of State had ruled that they 'must be repatriated to the USSR regardless of their own wishes in the matter'. 185
... and by November 1945 more than half of the 19,500 Soviet nationals in Britain had been repatriated. 185
Remarkably, at the end of the war, one in eight soldiers serving in the German Army was a Soviet citizen. 185
What mattered to the British was the Yalta Agreement, in which Britain had agreed to return these people to the Soviet Union. London saw Yalta as a good deal, with Stalin promising to keep out of France and Italy and allowing communism to be crushed in Greece. 185
Secondly, intelligence was also centrally involved in the business of processing prisoners and information for war crimes. This was soon overshadowed by a third task, finding intelligence arand security personnel, together with their archives and agents, who would be of use against the Soviets. The detailed military intelligence that the Germans had gathered against the Soviets in battie was invaluable. 186
The search for 'intelligence assets' overlapped with a fourth, much wider activity which was only intelligence in its widest sense - the quest for booty. As early as 1943, British military chiefs had begun to recognise the massive revolution in the nature of warfare brought about by science and technology. Germany was patently ahead in many fields such as rocket technology and chemical warfare. 186
The struggle for German assets was complex. Allied officials concerned with reconstruction wished to create a prosperous environment Upon which to build democratic foundations. They were determined to resist 'piracy' by those working for British ministries ranging from the Air Ministry to the Board of Trade. The 'pirates' were anxious to remove the best material unofficially before it became entangled in the vexed inter-Allied politics of formal reparations. In this sense, all four administrating powers were competing against themselves and against each other. 187
In 1944, E,isenhower's SHAEF headquarters set up a joint Allied group to exploit captured material in the ongoing war against Germany called the Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-committee. At an early stage one of its units captured Dr Werner Osenberg, the head of the planning office of the National Research Council, together with his records of the names and specialisms of 15,000 of the top German scientists. But once Germany had been occupied SHAEF ceased to exist. CIOS was replaced by competing agencies in each zone. 187
Stern efforts were made to prevent the key scientists from migrating to the Soviet Zone even if they were not of value to the West. This widened the field of intelligence interest to lesser figures who were initiallv too numerous to track. 187-8
The Americans had just decided to move 1,000 German experts and their families to the USA 'expressly to deny them to a potentially hostile power'. [1946] 188
The new 'denial' programme, which eventually encompassed over 3,000 scientists and technicians, was codenamed Operation Matchbox. 188
Individuals who worked in these areas found themselves traded like commodities and moved from one holding-tank to another. Key German scientists ended up in a compound with the appropriate codename Dustbin. This was the main interrogation centre which, from June 1945, was located at Schloss Kransberg, close to Frankfurt. 188
The Royal Navy repeatedly assured the Soviets that three extant submarines of the newest class had been badly damaged and then sunk in deep water by the Germans. In fact they were undergoing detailed examination by the Admiralty, and the Soviets failed to press their claim for a sizeable portion of the U-boat fleet 189
The V-2 rocket experts, General Walter Dornberger and Dr Wernher von Braun were transferred to the United States with the agreement of British intelligence. Braun's programme had made extensive use of slave labour drawn from the Soviet Union and he had hidden his Nazi Party membership. 190
The issue of the extent to which denazification programmes were evaded and war criminals provided with safe havens is too broad to be dealt with in this book. However, persistent researchers have demonstrated that it was substantial. 190
But London and Washington were also aware that the Germans had been fighting the Soviets for four long years, so opportunities to collect military intelligence on the Soviet armed forces abounded. In late May 1945 British security captured 'a group of 30 German Air Force Officers who are intelligence experts on the Russian Air Force'. 190
What German material and scientists the Soviets had captured offered a benchmark of Soviet capacity in these areas about which little was otherwise known. 191
In 1948 many in SIS and MI5 believed that a war, focused on Germany and the Middle East, was perhaps only weeks away. 192
By 1948 US Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) units were clearly using ex-Gestapo personnel to investigate communism. 197
On 19 September 1950, Britain's Public Safety Division searched the recentiy completed KPD national Party headquarters in Düsseldorf and a week later decided to requisition the building for use as a British barracks. This was transparent harassment, and implementation of this decision meant overcoming a cordon of 2,000 demonstrators. 197
The civil rights of KPD members were seriously infringed, not least their being denied compensation open to other citizens for persecution under the Nazis. 198
In 1956, the Party was finally banned by the West German courts as unconstitutional, but the ban did not make much difference because it had been harassed, its papers closed down and its vehicles impounded, often through the abuse of petty legislation, for more than five years.
The best-known example of a Nazi security chief who escaped justice and found comfortable re-employment in Allied secret service was the Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie. Barbie committed terrible crimes against the civilians of Lyon, including women and children. 198 [Barbie fortsætter til p. 202]
US Army intelligence, which had recruited him, actively protected him for some thirty years before French persistence brought him to trial in the 1980s. This frustration of justice was an organised campaign by elements in the US Army. Allan R. Ryan, who conducted a belated enquiry for the US Attorney General's Office, concluded that it could not be dismissed as 'merely the unfortunate action of renegade officers'. 198
There were several British near-misses. From late 1945, British and American intelligence were watching a group of former SS officers who had formed a sophisticated resistance organisation in occupied Germany. These men hoped to achieve some rapprochement with the Allies and offer a cadre of experienced post-war leaders while Germany was rebuilt as a bulwark against communism. 199
The security elements of both the British ID and American CIC were aware that one of the leading figures was Klaus Barbie, and watched this group for some time. 199
In early 1947 ID and CIC felt they knew enough to make what was hoped to be a final swoop on Nazi groups. 200
Seventy people were caught in these dragnets, but Barbie, who had fled to the Munich area, was not among them. He was recruited in Munich by an entirely separate American CIC unit that had not been involved in Operation Selection Board and was used by it against the KPD, the Soviets and, remarkably, the French. 200
But curiously he was interrogated only about his contacts with Nazis and subversives in Germany in 1945-6 and not about his years in wartime France. This is peculiar because it was precisely upon his French expertise that his CIC operations were drawing. 200
The US CIC was anxious about communist penetration of the French secret services, even to the extent that some considered them close to being hostile services. CIC told Barbie that one of his key tasks would be to gather intelligence on this French apparatus. It wanted:
1. Information pertaining to the degree of collaboration between the Soviet and the French Intelligence Services.
2. Degree of Communist penetration of the French Intelligence Service.
3. Activities of the (Communist party of France in the French Zone of Germany and of the KPD in that Zone.
4. Any information concerning the activities of French Intelligence for the Soviets in the US Zone.
Barbie was also tasked with penetrating the KPD in cities such as Munich, where the Party was reported to run a clandestine radio Station 201
US Army CIC was increasingly aware of the nature of his wartime past, but it concluded that the real reason the French security wanted to get hold of him was because French communist sympathisers in its ranks wanted to discover more about the extent of American penetration of the KPD. It decided to arrange his escape down a 'Rat Line' to resettlement in Bohvia, rather than hand him over to the French. The Rat Line was an operation used to move valuable contacts out of Europe and resettle them elsewhere, often in South America. It ran throug Italy, where visas, documents and the co-operation of local officials could be purchased with ease. 202
The general issue of how to handle liaison was all the more pressing because in early 1946 Allen Dulles had been discussing the need 'for the closest possible collaboration with the Swedish, the Danish and the Norwegian LUtelligence Services', especially in penetrating Germany. The Swedes had recently doubled their intelligence budgeret and Washington knew there were liaison dividends to be had.
In the event the well-worn solution of a structural division, or liaison firewall, had to be resurrected to deal with the problem. On the Cold War's new front line and indeed eventually all around the world, CIA stations would be divided into two sections: officers conducting joint operations with the host country; and officers conducting independent American operations, hopefully unknown to the host. On 3 May 1946, Colonel R. Dodderidge, who commanded the SSU station in Paris, argued strongly for just such a firewall between joint operations with the French and his more sensitive independent activities. SSU in Paris, he complained, was carrying out its own clandestine intelligence operations, semi-overt work with a range of informants, liaison with the French secret services and investigative security work for the American Embassy, all from the same location. 204
Leo Amery the wartime secretary for India, once noted in his diary that although all the American services were 'jealous' of the British they 'will always fraternise with their sister service on our side against their enemy service'. [i denne sammenhæng den konkurrerende amerikanske tjeneste. OJ] 206
1947 ... Washington separated the US Army Air Force from the Army and created, for the first time, a US Air Force. 206
In 1946 Major-General Carl Spaatz, the head hat was then the US Army Air Force, met with Air Chief Marshal Lord Arthur Tedder, Chief of the Air Staff in London, to negotiate the Spaatz-Tedder agreement. This provided for the preparation of four or five East Anglian airbases for use by American bombers in time of crisis. 207
American long-range bombers such as the B-36, with a range of 4,000 nautical miles, only began to make their appearance in 1951, leaving the US desperate in the short term for airbases close to the Soviet Union. 207
As we have seen, Bletchley Park was already eavesdropping on the Luftwaffe signals intelligence service and its work on the Soviet Air Force as early as 1943. But in May 1945 British and American intelligence teams had overrun Luftwaffe intelligence centres with vast stocks of priceless mapping photography and aerial target traces for the Soviet Union that had been gathered by Heinkel photo-reconnaissance aircraft throughout the campaign on the eastern front. 207
The best material came from Hitler's mountain retreat at the Berchtesgaden in Bavaria and was codenamed Dick Tracy. An American team secured this only by a matter of hours. It lad 'just moved this material under cover when the Russians, who knew of its existence and were looking for it, arrived on the scene. Dick Tracy was supplemented by other collections from places as far afield as Vienna codenamed Orwell, from Oslo codenamed Monthly and from Berlin codenamed Tenant. There were nine different collections in all. In mid-June the material was flown to Britain, arriving at the US 8th Army Air Force Headquarters and then moved to the Anglo-American Central interpretation Unit at Pinetree in Essex. 208
As one batch was brought off the plane, a box crashed to the floor and split open. It was found to contain not photo materials but smuggled Swiss watches. Lurking under GX were also some private enterprise Operations conducted by individuals. 208
There was also a mass of plots, target traces, maps and other valuable documents providing air intelligence cover of the whole of the Soviet Union as far as Siberia. 208
In October 1945 the project was moved to Medmenham in Berkshire and the main work on copying the excellent Dick Tracy material was completed by a target date of March 1946. Further material, captured from the burning river barges by Montgomery's Twenty-first Army arrived that March. 209
In 1954 it acquired more material in the form of annotated target prints of vital areas of which the RAF and USAF did not yet have cover. They were obtained for an undisclosed sum from 'two gentleman of Europe' and proved to be of 'great intelligence value'. Even in 1958 new areas of the collection were still being discovered by analysts, including 3,200 mosaics of Finland. 209
Although the British and Americans would make a number of clandestine flights over the Soviet Union in the 1950s the coverage obtained was small and GX was replaced only with the arrival of satellite photography in the 1960s. 210
McDonald wanted the German experts as well as the GX material. In the event, the German intelligence officers 'were happy to go to England, as we asked them to do. They were afraid of what the Russians might do to them.' The deal was that they would share all the intelligence they had on the Soviet Air Force, and the Allies would release them within a year. 'It was fascinating to work with these German intelligence officers. We put them up in house outside London.' Powell remained as the American Air Intelligence liaison chief in London. Partly as a result of his presence there some German specialists on the Soviet Air Force travelled on to Washington rather than returning to Germany in late 1945. 211
By 1946 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff had asked none other than General Alfred Jodl, who had commanded the planning staff of OKW, Hitler's High Command, to set out his ideas for the most effective Western attack against the Soviet Union. In his typically thorough report Jodl urged air attack against the southern Soviet Union:
The vital key-points for the entire Soviet war machine are in the oil areas of Ploesti, Baku and Maikop, with the Grosny refineries, and about eight (8) to ten (10) large power plants which deliver practically all the energy (power) required by the Russian armament industry. 211
Perversely, London and Washington sometimes had to hide their cooperadon from their mutual friends. In the summer of 1946 Swedish intelligence requested Bnrish help in investigating mysterious reports of missiles flying over Sweden. Initially they were dismissed as meteorites, but later pieces of missiles began to be found in remote areas of Sweden. Assistance with tracing radar was given and missile fragments were brought back to the UK for analysis. The source was thought to be Soviet missile-testing stations inherited from the Germans in the Baltic. Understandably the Swedes were irked to find that their country was being used as a free missile testing range, but they were also twitchy about the possibility of compromising their neutrality. A British offer of a flight of specially equipped aircraft to track the missiles was eventuallv declined. The Chief of the Swedish Combined Intelligence Board urged the 'extreme delicacy' of co-operation, asking the British 'to take all possible measures to prevent the Americans finding out about Swedish full cooperation with us in investigating the mysterious missiles'. The British gave the Swedes assurances vis-à-vis the Americans and promptly dishonoured them. Air Vice Marshal Elmhirst, the head of Air Intelligence in London, at once gave everything to George McDonald in Washington. But he warned McDonald that the Swedes were developing 'cold feet' and they agreed to maintain the fiction of their non-cooperation in this area. 212-3
'The centres of Russian towns generally provided compact and inflammable targets for incendiary attack,' but, the Bureau noted, the industrial areas were dispersed and would be hard to bomb. 213
Rear Admiral Tom Inglis, the US Navy Intelligence chief. 214
Tom Inglis had serious reasons for why the Americans should avoid the embraces of London's senior intelligence officials which he set out before James Forrestal during October 1947. He conceded that the British had made all their intelligence available to the United States 'with practically no restrictions', including 'very valuable material', but parallel efforts by British officers to access American long-range research and development were also 'more and more persistent'. This problem had to be handled with 'some finesse'. 'The British have been very inquisitive and acquisitive and missed very little information which we have. 214
He stressed that it 'must also be remembered that British Government is British Business'. Moreover, he argued that general British decline combined with a tendency to 'pull the rug out from under the US in countries like Greece and Iran' made Britain look 'less of an asset and more of a liability'. He was also alarmed by the strongly socialist credentials of figures such as Stafford Cripps. By early 1948 alarms about British Commonwealth security gave the warnings offered by Inglis a rather prescient air. 214
Air intelligence co-operation was a close Allied partnership, but not everything recovered in Germany was exchanged. In February 1946, US Air Technical Intelligence teams were making their way through the massive archives of Göring's Luftwaffe headquarters in Berlin. They happened upon a most interesting collection of documents on the British, including papers giving details of the mission by Major Christie of SIS to Holland in November 1939 to explore peace terms with Prince Hohenlohe-Langenberg, who was close to Göring. The archives also disclosed a range of embarrassing pro-German activities by prominent British personalities and evidence of large-scale leaks from Ambassador Henderson's British Embassy in Berlin before the war. 215
The RAF certainly had the capability for such flights. In November 1947 it had reformed two strategic photo-reconnaissance squadrons at RAF Benson - No. 541 with Spitfire XIXs and No. 540 with the special Mosquito PR34. The latter was an aircraft of remarkable speed and range, capable of 2,500 miles with its under-wing drop tanks and extra tanks in the bomb bay. It was probably this aircraft that began to probe the Soviet Union in 1948 from bases in Iraq, Crete and Cyprus. 215
Perhaps prompted by being used as an ersatz missile-testing range, and encouraged by the British, the Swedes tried their hand about the same time. In November 1948 a special Swedish photo-recce unit ecjuipped with high-flying aircraft reported that 'while over-flying Soviet-controlled territorv in Finland at 38,000 feet' its plane had been intercepted by fighters and came under accurate radar-controlled anti-aircraft fire. Although it was undamaged, the pilot reported that 'flak bursts beneath him shook his plane'. 215-6
(American atomic weapons would not arrive in Britain until July 1950, prompted by the outbreak of the Korean War.) 216
In late 1948, in the midst of the Berlin Crisis, British and American chiefs were beginning to turn their minds to these atomic problems in the knowledge that the eventual arrival of the Soviet bomb would change the situation irrevocably. However, none of them had guessed that that event was only months away - a spectacular intelligence failure. Once the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb on 29 August 1949, the situation was reversed. Britain then became very vulnerable and anxious to avoid war, while Washington faced a limited period of relative invulnerability. 217
Moscow's surprise test on 29 August 1949 dealt the West a shattering psychological blow. This explosion, followed by Allied encounters with the superior MiG fighter in Korea the following year - secretly piloted by Soviet crews - banished any thoughts of the Soviets as technically inferior. 218
That senior German atomic scientists were living openly in Germany in 1948 cannot help but prompt the thought that there was more to their presence than meets the eye and that some atomic deception operations against the Soviets may have been afoot. 223
During 1948 two Germans who passed throrough Britain's interrogation camp at Friedland. 224
During the war the Americans had developed a full-scale production plant for anthrax which could produce enough bombs for a substantial attack over six major cities in a period of nine months. The Americans were focused on a virus called Brucella which was a superior agent, being easier to produce and presenting no problem of long-term contamination. 227
The British chemical programme was well advanced by the late 1940s and possessed new nerve agents, some captured from the Germans, but they were thought too nasty for testing in Britain. In 1947 Dr Perren from Porton Down went out to visit the Benin area in Nigeria to identify a new testing ground for 'new chemical warfare agents now being developed in this country', a reference to nerve gas. One of the requirements of any testing site in Nigeria was a good supply of pigs and goats, the unfortunate subjects of this expanded testing programme. 228
In 1966, GCHQ and its attendant supporting collecrion arms commanded about 11,500 staff. This was not only more than SIS and MIS combined. It was also larger than the entire Diplomatic Service, including the Foreign Office in London and all its overseas embassies and consulates. Yet we know almost nothing of this vast army of technicians and codebreakers who spied on the airwaves.
This curious disparity is not difficult to account for. And those who prefer a conspiratorial approach can identify a deliberate element in the improbably low profile of GCHQ. As we have seen, in the summer of 1945, the JIC deemed signals intelligence, together with deception, to be he two areas that were absolutely beyond the pale in terms of the writing of the history of the Second World War. Both the JIC and the London signals Intelligence Board devoted much time to airbrushing these matters out of history. 233
The arcane matters of modern code- and cipher-breaking - or cryptanalysis - are not an immediately attractive subject for historical writing. The work of special operations or secret agents, dependent on human beings for their progress, has seemed more accessible and more comprehensible. Market forces have also played their part. Since the 1960s British popular culture has developed a strong appetite for revelations about Soviet agents in high places, especially 'molemania', with its rich tapestry of governmental embarrassment and tales of nefarious doings. 234
They were also sensitive to the shift to peacetime intelligence, arguing that, in the post-war period, Bletchley would have to give equal weight to 'all types of intelligence about ut foreign countries, including scientific, commercial and economic matters'. This was a tacit reference to the targeting of neutral and friendly states. 236
Many in government did not know of its true value. There was, too, the 'potential danger' of a Labour government coming to power, recalling the inter-war Labour government and its aversion to things secretive. Clarke paused to consider Roosevelt's emerging United Nations, observing that if the new international organisation took the step of abolishing all code and cipher communications this action 'would contribute more to a permanent peace than any other'. 236
Although the official history of British intelligence insists that Churchill ordered this to stop when Moscow became an ally in June 1941, it is now clear that it never stopped completely. John Croft, who worked at Britain's wartime diplomatic codebreaking centre, at Berkeley Street in London, was one of those who soldiered on. Croft did not mix with the majority of specialists working on Axis communications but was one of those rarer types working on the communications traffic of neutrals and allies on Berkeley Street's upper floors. He was engaged on wartime Comintern traffic in Europe, codenamed Iscott. Although circulated to only a very select group of individuals within Whitehall, this matenal revealed little more than a dutiful struggle against their shared enemy. Nazi Germany. 237
British intelligence began to value the Germans for their knowledge of the Soviet Union as soon as Ultra came on stream. The Luftwaffe had an especially efficient sigint system and was busy listening into Soviet traflic. German messages used to send sigint summaries back to Berlin were, in turn, intercepted. This 'second-hand' sigint proved to be London's best source on the performance of the Soviet forces. As early as 1943 the JIC was able to produce detailed and accurate reports on the capabilities and characteristics of the Soviet Air Force in battle, based on Luftwaffe sigint material. 237
Suitably briefed, by early 1945 Intelligence Assault Units were moving into Germany with the forward elements of Allied formations, looking for all kinds of German documents, experimental weapons and atomic plant. 237-8
By June 1945 the British and Americans had scooped most of the senior Luftwaffe sigint officers. 238
In 1947, Dr Erich Hutenhain laid the foundations of a new German crypto service based at Camp King, Oberursel, co-located with the early Gehlen Organisation, a revived German wartime body that had dealt with Army intelligence on the eastern front. 238-9
[Roy Jenkins] When the Russians got to Berlin they took over the Fish machines in the War Ministry, somewhat changed the settings, and proceeded to use them for sending signals traffic to Belgrade and other capitals in their new empire. 239
In September 1945, British Field Security Units located a valuable prize, capturing Admiral Chudoh, the Japanese Chief Signals Intelligence Officer for the southern armies, in Saigon. 239
These derived partly from the fortuitous coincidence that the deputy chief of the SIS station in Rome from 1944, Sheridan Russell, had previously worked at Bletchley Park and was sensitive to the fact that the Italians were talented cryptanalysts and was scooping them up where he could. 239
After the Italian surrender in 1943 a substantial remnant of eighty Italian sigint Staff under Major Barbieri continued to work for the Germans at a Station near Brescia until April 1945. When this latter group were finally interrogated in Rome in mid-1945 they proved to have a large quantity of naterial, including photostatic copies of the codebooks of Turkey, Rumania, Ecuador and Bolivia. They had reconstructed codebooks from France, Switzerland and the Vatican. 240
Berkeley Street in London was already doing extensive work on Free French communications, but more help was always welcome. Britain monitored the traffic of most of its allies throughout the war and felt justified in continuing to do so, for it regarded many of its partners as either insecure or untrustworthy or both. 241
French traffic from Moscow was of great interest to London, permitting a precise measure of an uncertain Cold War ally In March 1944, the former French Air Minister, Pierre Cot, began a special diplomatic mission to Moscow to examine the possibility of reviving traditional Franco-Soviet co-operation against Germany in post-war Europe. 241
British Army sigint collection units went from 4,000 personnel in December 1945 to about 1,000 by the following March. Reorganisation was facilitated by relocation, for some of its equipment was constructed at the laboratories of the Post Office Research Department at Dollis Hill in north London and it was no coincidence that Travis chose to move his organisation to Eastcote near Uxbridge in north-west London, only a few miles from Dollis Hill. 242
Many Soviet messages employed one-time pads, a secure system which, if correctly used, could not be broken. The extent to which Britain was surprised by the Tito-Stalin split in 1948 underlines the limited success enjoyed against its diplomatic targets. 242
The JIC also asked GCHQ to look at subjects such as Arab nationalism, the relations of Arab states with the UK and USA, and the attitude of the Soviet Union, France, Italy and the Arab states towards the future of the ex-Italian colonies, especially Libya. GCHQ was also urged to focus on the Zionist movement, including its intelligence services. These subjects proved more accessible. 243
In the Middle East, the base of Ayios Nikolaos, just outside Famagusta on Cyprus, became a critical intelligence centre, receiving Army and RAF sigint units as they gradually departed from Palestine, Iraq and Egypt. Further east, the Navy maintained its intercept site at HMS Anderson near Colombo on Ceylon, and the Army began reconstruction of its prewar sigint site at Singapore. But the main British sigint centre in Asia after war 1945 was Hong Kong, initially staffed by RAF personnel. Here, with help from Australia's budding sigint organisation, which was effectively under GCHQ management, Chinese and Soviet radio traffic was captured. 243
The Chiefs of Staff wanted 'increased expenditure on intelligence' within the general programme of rearmament, but were unsure of the figures or how much detail to give to ministers. 244
In the autumn of 1945, when Truman was publicly winding up OSS, he was also secretly giving permission for American sigint activity to continue and approvecd legotiations on continued Allied co-operation. 244
As UKUSA [a vast Western sigint alliance] emerged, Britain derived considerable benefit from its dominance over its Empire-Commonwealth partners. The semi-feudal relationship which London enjoyed is no better illustrated than in Australia, where sigint operations were controlled by London. Only in 1940 did Australia establish its own separate organisation. When this became the Australian Defence Signals Bureau, formed at Albert Park Barracks in Melbourne on 12 November 1947, it remained in the shadow of GCHQ. Four Australian applicants for the directorship were rejected in favour of Britain's Commander Teddy Poulden, who filled the senior posts with twenty GCHQ staff and communicated with GCHQ in his own special cipher. 245
There are some indications that the British continued to undertake limited wartime work on medium-grade American communications. 247
The recovery of a range of sigint files from the Baltic states at the end of the war - codenamed Stella Polaris - was a fascinating aspect of this issue. In May 1946, American naval codebreakers received reports that the Stella Polaris files originally contained a range of American State Department and military codes obtained from the American Embassy in Sofia and elsewhere. Reports varied as to where these came from, perhaps the Russians, the Japanese or the Hungarians, but the consensus was that they had been obtained by bribery Stella Polaris was also reported to have obtained a great many other codes from the head of the Hungarian sigint unit, General Petrikovicz. It was widely believed that much of the Stella Polaris material had now been transferred from Stockholm to a new French sigint centre based at 9 Avenue du Marechal Maunouroy in Paris. [undersøges nærmere, lyder mærkeligt, OJ]. 249
Stella Polaris material, together with other fragments of Soviet codebooks, was fed into the most important Anglo-American sigint programme codenamed Venona, which, as we have seen, would be producing the names of Soviet spies in the West by 1948. This was an attempt to exploit weak operational practice in Soviet intelligence traffic. Periodically short of fresh enciphering materials the Soviets had abused their theoretically very secure one-time pad system and re-used materials hat were safe only if used once. 249
In early 1948 Venona offered its first tantalising clues to the possibility of spies within the Brirish Foreign Office and in various Commonwealth governments. It was lot until three years later, in the spring of 1951, that their precise identities were uncovered. Yet Philby, Burgess and Maclean eluded the authorities. On Friday, 25 May, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess headed for tthe continent, tipped off that the net was closing in on them. Remarkably, Kim Philbv, suspected of involvement, remained and bluffed it out. This denied Venona the fruits of more than three years of Anglo-American cryptanalytical struggle.
But it was another [Black] Friday, three years earlier, that had marked the greatest disaster for British and American sigint. On Friday, 29 October 1948, just as Venona really began to produce some dividends, the Soviets implemented a massive change in all their Communications security procedures. All radio nets, including military systems, moved over to onetime pads, which henceforth were not re-used. 250
The wipeout was almost total. In 1955 when the CIA and SISS began their famous operation to tunnel under East Berlin to tap into Soviet telephone communications, one of the motives was to try and claw back some of the ground lost. The CIA remarked that this new operation 'provided the United States and the British with a unique source of intelligence on the Soviet orbit of a kind and quality which had not been available since 1948'. Accordingly American cryptographers referred to the fateful events of Friday, 29 October 1948 as 'Black Friday'.
The instigator of 'Black Friday' had been William Weisband, a US Army Security Agency cipher clerk. Weisband had been recruited by the Soviets as an agent in 1947, but his espionage was not discovered until 1950. 250
By 1947 a fleet of specially equipped Lancaster and Lincoln aircraft was patrolling the East German border, complmented by the monitoring of basic low-level Soviet voice traffic by ground stations at locations such as RAF Gatow in Berlin. British ferrets began their first forays into the Baltic in June 1948 and into the Black Sea in September 1948. Other flights operated out of RAF Habbaniya in Iraq. 252
Their US partners had not heen inactive. In July 1946 the first post-war American elint operations with ferret aircraft were launched from Thule airbase in Greenland. The early flights were designed to test new airborne equipment with a view to beginning to map emissions in the polar region, where gaps in Soviet radar cover were suspected. 252
Elint in northern areas was a multinational activity. During the war, Bletchley Park had worked with the Norwegians and, as we have seen, by 1946 the RAF was assisting the Swedish Air Force in investigating what were thought to be Soviet rocket tests that had intruded into Swedish air space. Washington took responsibility for co-operation with the Norwegians and encouraged reconnaissance in the area of Murmansk and Novaya Zemlya. By January 1949, detailed material on Soviet radars from Swedish intelligence was making its way to Washington via British representatives who had taken responsibility for co-operation with Sweden. There was particular interest in the possibility that the Soviets might be attempting the further development of German stealth technology, such as radar-absorbent coverings for submarine periscopes and snorkels. 254
Trouble had begun in 1919 when Britain was mandated Palestine by the League of Nations and opened the territory up to Jewish immigration. The shifting balance of the population and contradictory agreements resulted in unrest and violent riots. 257
By 1939 the Irgun had already begun to turn its violence from the rival Arabs on to the British, but the advent of the Second World War highlighted their common cause against Germany and a temporary ceasefire followed. 257
Sterns group was initially known as the Lehi group and only later as the Stern Gang. 257
The British eliminated Abraham Stern in 1942. 258
But by 1944, with the German threat banished from the Middle East, the Irgun was free to resume its anti-British position. 258
Even in 1944, the policing and intelligence system in Palestine, last revised in 1938 by Sir David Petrie, who was soon to become wartime director of MI5, was focused on the rural Arabs not on the urban Jewish population. 258
Undeterred, the Lehi turned its attention to a bigger target, the British Minister of State for the Middle East, Lord Moyne. 258
Although his killers were executed, Churchill ordered restraint, knowing that sweeping and systematic searches would drive more in to the arms of the guerrillas. 258
On 29 june, [1946] known as 'Black Saturday', Londons restraint broke down. Widespread raids netted 2,700 of the overt leaders and members of the Jewish Agency, but no Irgun leaders nor the missing British officers. 260
Begin was also worricd about documents captured in earlier raids and now held in government offices located in the King David Hotel, which would reveal the links between political figures such as David Ben-Gurion and the underground groups. He wanted them destroyed before the British could make them public. Most importantly he feared that the operation would be blown unless it went ahead soon. On 22July 1946, six young members of the Irgun entered the basement of the hotel. They appeared to be delivering churns of milk, but these were packed with 5001b of explosive. At 12.37 p.m. an explosion sheared off all of the south wing, causing ninety-one deaths and forty-five further casualties. 261
Although the language was vague, pressure from the top for direct action was intense. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these exhortations from Attlee to 'take all possible steps' - only declassified in 1999 - sit congruently with accounts from several sources that direct action was authorised. Former SOE officers were employed by SIS to attach limpet mines to some of the ships leaving Europe for Israel. [1947]. 264
Faced with a choice of increasing troop levels to impose martial law, which would create a furore in the US and at the UN, or withdrawal, it chose the latter. All military personnel were to be gone by May 1948. The Irgun seized its opportunity and carried out a series of massacres against Arab villages in their departing wake. 264
American pressure for withdrawal from Palestine had pushed Anglo-American relations to breaking point. Washington refused to act against newspaper advertisements collecting funds to support terrorist groups working against the British. 265
Meanwhile in Europe the CIA was also aware of illegal air-traffic in arms moving between Prague and customers in Palestine using American crews and American C-54s. They would land in Prague and in one instance the protests of air-traffic controllers were overruled by the 'senior secret police officer who stated that the flight was a government operation'. Some thirty-five heavy crates were loaded on board. 265
On 7 January 1949, four RAF Spitfires of 208 Squadron were sent out to reconnoitre and photograph an incursion of some twenty miles into Egypt by an Israeli force. 266
Meanwhile the remaining three RAF Spitfires were attacked by Spitfires of the Israeli Air Force. 266
This engagement - resulting from intelligence overflights - remains Britain s greatest loss of operational aircraft on a single day since 1945. 267
Indeed the overflights took place because of fears of an impending war between Israeli and Transjordan in which Britain and the United States might find themselves supporting opposite sides. 267
The Korean War erupted early on the morning of Sunday, 25 June 1950 with the surprise invasion of South Korea by North Korea. 271 (271-292
This had not led to a direct prediction of the invasion. But it had allowed the CIA to circulate warnings on 20 June about the North Korean mobilisation to members of President Truman's Cabinet, including Acheson. 271
All this reflected the fact that the very limited resources in Asia had been largely directed at the Soviets. Little intelligence effort had been directed at China, and effectively none at North Korea. 272
With the exception of Ed Lansdale's successful campaign in the Philippines, OPC had made little impression in Asia. Real obstacles confronted it on that continent. The CIA's predecessor, OSS, had established itself widely in Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist China by 1945, to the dismay of Chiangs own xenophobic security service. 273
But the main CIA problem in Asia was its narrow focus on the soviets. On 11 December 1947, the improbably named Lloyd George, who superintended the CIA's Far Eastern Division, explained the hierarchy of targets for ESD 44. 'Mr George said that ESD had two fundamental directives, (1) to observe and report on Soviet activities in China and (2) to follow closely Soviet penetration in northern Korea, and one secondary objective, to observe Chinese Communist activities.' In other words Chinese and North Korean activities were of little interest in themselves. 273
This was exacerbated by the wider problem of Anglo-American antagonism over the British recognition of communist China in 1949, which reflected London's policy of recognising whoever was de facto in power. 276
In 1950, the brief withdrawal of the Soviets from the UN Security Council allowed the reinforcements to be designated a UN force, though they were mostly American.) 278
'Every service was intent on running its own intelligence network,' recailed one officer. The biggest turf battles were fought in Washington and Tokyo, but 'the differences filtered down and the result was we all worked independently'. 281
The improbably named Ivor Pink, a British diplomat in Tokyo, warned London about the severitv of the anti-communist witch-hunt that MacArthur had allowed his intelligence chief to launch in Japan. Those with liberal or Jewish associations, often seen as essentially the same thing, were removed from posts. 285
The unpleasant police state existing in South Korea quickly revealed itself to British personnel there. 287
On 15 December British troops witnessed a particularly nasty massacre by Rhee's security police. 287
Informal pressure was applied to editors, and IRD [information Research Department, p. 128 - [British] proper covert political warfare section] was brought into play to contradict the massacre stories which London knew to be correct. 287
There were few regimes less worthy of Western support. 288
The wider impact of the Korean War cannot be overestimated. It sped Up the militarisation of the Cold War and extended it from a largely European-Mediterranean conflict to a global confrontation. More than any event prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis ir threatened to turn the Cold War into a hot war. 289
Days after the Korean War broke out the British Ambassadør in Moscow held 'certain conversations' with Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, about bow to 'put a stop to present hostilities in Korea'. A deal seemed possible in which the Soviets might 'put some pressure on North Korea to end hostilities'. The Russians 'price' seemed to be an American cancellation of the commitment to defend Taiwan (Formosa) if attacked by the Chinese, an option that was also very attractive to Beijing. 290
These tensions boiled over repeatedly during the Korean War. London increasingly feared that many in Washington actively wanted a wider war, with China if not with the Soviet Union, in which Britain would be in the front line. 291
This growing divide between London and Washington also extended to policy on the Soviet Union. Throughout his second period of office (1951-5) Churchill sought some kind of deal on mutual coexistence with Moscow, both before and after Stalin's death in 1953. The Geneva Conference of 1954, which Washington had fought hard to avoid, was as :lose as London got. Here Eden and the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov co-operated to drag a reluctant John Foster Dulles, the US Secretary of State, towards a general settlement which was not of his choosing. Eden and Dulles had begun to articulate their differences very freely. 292
On the other hand, the developing activities of American psychological warfare and covert action all around the perimeter of the Soviet Union and China, which were mostly carried out by the secret services, looked increasingly dangerous. In the early 1950s the British JIC concluded that one of the most likely causes of war would be a Western attempt to detach one of the Soviet satellite nations. 292
Intelligence-collection assets, unlike defence forces, enjoyed a low profile that could survive the withdrawal of Empire. Prolonged through Commonwealth connections, discreet leasing arrangements and so-called 'communication facilities' on remote islands, Britain's intelligence power in the wider world survived the turning points of 1956 and 1968, much beloved of the historians of the 'End of Empire'. What Washington termed the 'strategic value of residual Empire' lasted into the 1970s. 293
The intelligence dimension of Britain's residual Empire is of immense importance. It helped to maintain Britain as an intelligence power and a valued partner for the United States. 293
These operations underlined the CIA's general inchnation towards covert action rather than intelligence-gathering. 294
As in Europe, CIA operations in Asia represented more a means of venting frustration against the general intractability of Cold War problems, and a means of finding ideological expression, rather than realistic plans to overturn communist rule. 294
Atlee was exceedingly blunt. stating that he 'did not want to become involved in a major war with China'. He was also uncomfortable about supporting a government in South Korea which was 'very corrupt and inefficient'. 294
Attlee was bothered by the insidious spread of war. There was, he insisted, a growing trend in American policy towards a covert war all around China's borders which seemed pointless and certainly would not draw China towards the peace table. 294
Attlee wanted to get the Chinese communists seated in the UN and to get talking with them. Truman understood where Attlee was going but replied that it was not practical politics on Capitol Hill and that what Attlee was suggesting 'was political dynamite in the United States'. 295
Wherever the West could gain access to the perimeter of China the pinprick war was accelerated. Pakistan, India, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea all served as springboards for insurgency against Beijing. 295-6
The CIA on Taiwan conducted its activities through cover organisations: Western Enterprises Inc. and the airline Civil Air Transport (GAT), which together dropped teams of Nationalists on to the mainland. 296
These operations were of two main kinds. Resistance missions sought to build up a long-term resistance movement in remote areas, while commando raids using small boats sought to 'destroy key installations'. The CIA and the Taiwan Secret Service had different objectives, with the former wishing to keep some of these activities secret while the latter preferred to trumpet them. 296
The inner meaning ot Cold War fighting has often heen misunderstood. This is not surprising since, even at the time, its general purpose was not agreed. 297
William Donovan, one of Amenca's longest-serving practitioners of covert warfare. 297
'Whether it is fought on the battlefield of Korea or in the ballot boxes of Italy, it remains a war which involves the survival of the kind of life we want to live.' The era of a big shooting war, he thought, was over while war by conspiracy and subversion remained. 297
For instance, last year in Kansu Province in Northwest China 20,000 peasants rose in open rebellion against their Communist leaders.' But he was equally clear that he was not advocating liberation, only making trouble for the communists. 297
In Burma, the CIA gave extensive support to the Chinese Nationalist warlord General Li Mi from Yunnan Province, whose Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) forces loyal to Chiang Kai-shek had retreated into northern Burma at the end of the Chinese civil war. 298
The plan was presented at a high level to Harry Truman and the National Security Council. Lloyd George, head of the CIA's Far Eastern Division, recalled Truman's orders clearly: 'Don't tell the American Ambassador in Rangoon what the hell is going on.' Accordingly Ambassador David McKendree was told nothing about this operation. Once established in the remote Shan States of northern Burma, Li Mi ran a semi-independent kingdom based on banditry supplied by both Western Enterprises Inc. from Taiwan and the ClA's Sea Supply Company in Thailand. 298
. Thereafter his troops settled down in northern Burma and diversified into a more comfortable existence based on opium cultivation, smuggling and banditry. 298
They offered to ignore Washingtons previous transparently dishonest assurances that the US was not involved if, they said, 'British and American undercover agents "get together" on this matter in Burma to the end that common action to solve this problem be taken'. State Department officials realised that London and Rangoon were now 'convinced' that the CIA was behind the provision of supplies to the guerrillas. However, American diplomats insisted that neither they nor Taipei had any control. 299
Co-ordination and control across the whole field were certainly poor Washington was still attempting to make the fusion of Wisner's OPC and the CIA's intelligence-gathering arm a realitv' in the field. In Bangkok in particular, the main CIA centre in South-east Asia, the covert action arm of the CIA tended to exceed its authority and undertake wild activities, to the dismay of the intelligence-gathering arm. 299
In March 1954 the Burmese Prime Minister complained directly to President Eisenhower. The much touted withdrawal, he said, was partial, with no arms being surrendered. The few troops that were leaving were doing so with 'bad grace' and were handing their arms to the Karen rebels. He deplored the fact that Taiwan was 'permitted to commit this aggression in this country under the guise, so blatantly false, that they are crusaders against the menace of communism in the East'. He demanded that Eisenhower place 'the utmost pressure' on Taipei. 301
As one American diplomat put it, 'we'd been caught red-handed supplying KMT guerrillas in the Shan state and contributing to the disruption in the Shan state, making efforts to make trouble for the Communists in Yunnan Province next door at Burma's expense'. 301
More recently, the wartime British authorides in India had co-operated with Donovan's OSS in supporting Tibet, to the intense anger of the wartime Chinese government. The arrival of new governments in Delhi in 1947, and in Beijing in 1949, seemed to point to warmer Sino-Indian relations. 302
American officials from Delhi worked with the Tibetans by visiting the border town of Kalimpong as 'tourists', although their activities were known to the local Indian Secutity Service, known as IB, that watched all movements intently. It was the CIA that financed the move of one of the Dalai Lama's elder brothers, Thupten Norbu, to the United States in 1950. 302
Washington now approached Nehru and offered to 'help India 'in every possible way' to support the Khampa and Amdoan resistance groups in Tibet. The Indian IB opened bigger offices in northern India at Kalimpong, Darjeeling and Gangtok, to counter communist infiltration and to help forge resistance groups into a unified Force now called the National Volunteer Defence Army or NVDA. A low-level border war now began. Detailed arrangements were finalised by Nehru's sister, Vijaylakshmi Nehru, the Indian Ambassador in Washington, and in March 1951 a secret Indo-American agreement was signed relating to military aid and secret service co-operation. 303
But in late 1953 Delhi got wind of American plans to draw Pakistan into the South East Asian Treaty Organisadon (SEATO) and of an American security agreement with Pakistan. This had a neuralgic effect upon Nehru which no amount of reassurance from Eisenhower could counteract. Nehru now began talks with China to defuse tensions over Tibet. 303
Most liberation operations against China had a KMT input. But Taiwan did not enjoy a monopoly and Chiang Kai-shek was not viewed by the CIA as an ideal partner. Even in late 1948, some of Chiang Kai-shek's most experienced warlords had recognised that the corrupt nature of the KMT regime was the largest impediment to full Americican support. 304
The widespread Cold War fighting across Asia in the early 1950s confronted Britain's SIS with a perplexing dilemma. Although it disapproved of many American policics, one of Britains most highly valued contributions to American securitv was its intelligence on China and Vietnam. 305
But provoking communist China through Cold War fighting was the last thing that London wanted. Thus Hong Kong was one British island where secret service co-operation was anything but straightforward, and indeed it was often hidden-hand activity that created the flashpoints. 305
But it did not resist American policies or Cold War fighting in Asia because of some prescient anticipation of a Sino-Soviet split that was still ten years away. Instead it dragged its heels because it saw CIA activities as unrealistic and dangerously adverse to its own imperial interests in Asia, especially the survival of Hong Kong. 306
As in Germany and Austria, the key American intelligence operation at Hong Kong used refugees rather than agents. The vast 'China-watching group' was a mirror-image of 'Project Wringer', which debriefed refugees trom the Eastern bloc entering Austria. It involved the in-depth interrogation of knowledgeable refugees and defectors, many from academia, the military or business, escaping from communist China. 307
The main instrument here was COCOM restrictions, an agreed programme of Western economic blockade that tried to prevent useful Western products from reaching communist countries and indeed to prevent the East exporting profitably to the West. 308-9
But Watson now knew that USIS had broken agreements on activity into China based in Hong Kong and was used for CIA activity. 310
One of its most successful ventures was a seemingly independent magazine in Mandarin hinese called World Today which enjoyed a huge circulation in Taiwan and South-east Asia. Its popular mixture of current affairs together with 'quite a bit of stuff on movie stars' competed on the newsstands with straight magazines, and the fact that it was not free added enormously to its credibilitv. 310
In November 1958 they issued a long and detailed press story entitled 'US spy ring seeks to control education, culture in Hong Kong'. 310
They correctly identified the attempts of the Asia Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Mercius Foundation to draw in local schools with offers of grants. 310
Plenty of American front organisations in Hong Kong were identified, including the Asian Film Company, established in 1954. 310
Matters reached a crisis point on 11 April 1955, towards the end of the First Taiwan Straits Crisis. Against the background of growing artillery barrages between Taiwan and mainland China, Taiwan's secret service arranged the bombing of an Air India airliner, The Kashmir Princess, carrying Chinese communist journalists to the neutralist Bandung Conference of Asian leaders in Indonesia. The bomb was planted when the plane refuelled at Hong Kong and the plane exploded and plunged into the sea as it approached the Indonesian coast. All passengers and crew were killed. Beijing claimed that it had warned the security authorities in Hong Kong that Taiwan's secret service would attempt to sabotage the plane. Chou En-lai, the Chinese Foreign Minister, had intended to travel on this aircraft, but wisely changed his mind at the last minute. 311
Shortly after the attack the Beijing authorities had secured very detailed intelligence on the perpetrators from one of their agents. This identified the chief saboteur as one Chou Chu, alias Chow Tse Ming, a member of the ground crew at Kai Tak airfield. They asserted that the device was a small time bomb supplied by the United States and that it was part of a batch of bombs shipped from Keelung to Hong Kong on 5 April on the SS Sechuan, a merchant vessel owned by Butterfield and Swire; they also knew the identities of the individuals who had transported the bombs. Taiwan's secret service in Hong Kong, they added, had arranged for Chou Chu to receive training in bombing airliners that emphasised placing the device 'close to a fuel tank in one of the wings'. 312
Beijing was furious. In August 1955 it complained that, despite the provision of detailed intelligence, including a list of the names of thirty-nine secret agents connected with the case, among them Chao Pin-cheng, Taiwan's secret service chief in Hong Kong, no prosecutions had been secured. Beijing insisted that the raids provided evidence that Chou Chu had received his training in explosives from Taiwan and had 'escaped ... under cover and aid of the United States'. 312
How true were Beijing's accusations? Files declassified in 1999 show that the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, was told in October 1955 that the Hong Kong Special Branch was in no doubt that evidence it had pro cured independently proved that Chou Chu had indeed been recruited by raiwan's secret service. 312-3
Attlee, then Churchill and Eden, also worried that the United States would become embroiled in the 'wrong war', a vast conflict in Asia which would absorb its strength, leaving Europe exposed. 313
The answer was that ]ohn Foster Dulles wanted neither a hot war with China, nor did he want restraint. Instead he desired something just short of a hot war that kept up intense psychological pressure and was designed to serve as part of a broader project against the entire communist bloc. 314
Accordingly, in the four years between 1949 and 1952, Frank Wisner's Office of Policy Co-ordination grew from 302 personnel to 2,812, with 3,142 additional overseas contract employees. Its budget increased from $4.7 million to $82 million per year. American covert action staff had been stationed in only seven countries in 1949 but by 1952 they were present in forty-seven. 315
The Foreign Office, SIS and even some military figures in Britain now regarded a strategy of liberation as much too provocative. Increasingly, Britains purpose, they declared, was to opt for stable containment. Not everyone in London favoured Churchills idea of a summit with Stalin, but all were anxious that the Cold War should stay cold. 316
Beyond the late 1950s, there would be a period of mutual assured destruction and relatively stable deterrence. Meanwhile, between 1949 and the late 1950s, there appeared to be a 'vulnerability gap' that favoured the Americans and allowed them to 'do something'. 316
But propaganda was also off the menu, for in the same month the Foreign Office decided to halt BBC overseas broadcasts in Baltic languages, fearing that it 'might further stimulate the unrest that alreadv exists in these regions'. Meanwhile, it observed, clandestine resources were best directed towards the quiet gathering of intelligence rather than stirring up trouble. 317
But the crucial links between high-level strategic superiority and the low-level business of subverting the Eastern bloc have not been fully recognised. A careful reading of this famous Cold War blueprint which was finalised in April 1950 makes these connections between overt nuclear superiority and covert warfare very clear. 317
NSC 68 stated that 'unless our combined strength is rapidly increased, our allies will tend to become increasingly reluctant to support a firm foreign policy on our part. 317
... and stand as a firm testament, not only to the continued commitment of the British Chiefs of Staff to the idea of Cold War fighting ... 318
Like the United States they believed that military superiority was an essential precursor to liberation. They asserted that 'our ability to win the cold war' was 'rightly our first defence priority', and added: It is essential to our ability to win the cold war, which we cannot do without an increasing assumption of the offensive in the political and economic fields, that Allied foreign policy should not be cramped by the fear that if we go too far we could not defend ourselves against armed attack. In this respect Western superiority in atomic power and the security of the UK against air attack are vital factors. Cold war policy must therefore be related to military strength ... The Aim in the Cold War... first a stabilisation of the anti-Communist front in the present free world and then, as the Western powers become militarily less weak, the intensification of 'cold' offensive measures aimed at weakening the Russian grip on the satellite states and ultimately achieving their complete independence of Russian control ... 318
... even now the Allies could afford to adopt a more forward strategy in the cold war, and should be making all possible plans and preparations to be more and more offensive as their military strength grows.''
More than a year after the concept of winning the Cold War had been outlawed in the higher reaches of the Foreign Office, the British military were still anxious to increase the pace. 318
But this was exactly what the diplomats intended. The Russia Committee was gradually stripped of some of its original functions and was reorganised in November 1952. Direct military input on Cold War operations had been reduced to a minimum. 319
Indeed, the approach of Truman, and then Eisenhower, to liberation has often been characterised as more talk than action. 320
Chester Opal saw himself as creating an 'incendiary potential', adding that the Ukraine was top of our list. Number two on our list was Poland, Number three on our list was Hungary.' 320
'A group of social and natural scientists have already been engaged to investigate every possible method of getting information into the Soviet world.' 320
... but by 1952 aggressive broadcasting had been handed över to Radio Liberty allowing Voice to cultivate a more civilised image. 321
Both Truman and Eisenhower certainly exaggerated liberation to placate the American right. On Capitol Hill, McCarthyites, the China Lobby, Captive Nation campaigners, the Catholic Church and many others, although separate, tended to hunt as a pack. 321
Frank Wisner, C. D. Jackson and Allen Dulles interpreted these guidelines generously. The dominant culture of the CIA already leaned towards special operations rather than intelligence, a trend that accelerated when Dulles became director in 1953. 322
This involved the construction of sleeper groups with arms caches, in both Eastern and Western Europe, which would awake only in a hot war, to collect intelligence and to create mayhem in the Soviet Army's rear areas. 322
These ideas were finally endorsed by the Permanent Under-Secretary's Committee in January 1952 and emerged as 'Future Policy towards Soviet Russia', which set out a new gradualist approach to liberation that might be called 'general softening. PUSD argued that the West should abandon the idea of promoting mass insurrections and revolts completely. Instead it should aim at reaching peaceful coexistence with the Eastern bloc by negotiating a number of local settlements that 'might be expected to lead cumulatively to a general stabilisation'. 324
More fundamentally, the issue was not Soviet vulnerability. It was instead different British and American appreciations of their own national vulnerability, in other words a 'vulnerability gap' between the two allies. 326
In the summcr of 1951, the Director of Naval Intelligence, Vice Admiral Eric Longley-Cook, was preparing to retire, liberated trom the constraints of office he now felt free to speak his mind, at least to a select group at the highest level. In a vemarkable presentation entitled 'Where are we going?' he argued that, although the Soviets were paranoid, they were also conservative and defensive. Cautious by nature, they were going nowhere and presented Britain with little real threat. If anything the stolid Russians were a force for stability in the world system. They would try to move their objectives forward by means of psychological or economic means but 'not bv a general military offensive'. The main threat to strategic stability and indeed to the survival of the United Kingdom, he suggested, came from America:
(vi) Many people in America have made up their minds that war with Russia is inevitable and there is a strong tendency in military circles to 'fix' the zero date for war.
(vii) Il is doubtful whether, in a year's time, the US will be able to control the Frankenstein monster which they are creating. 327
Longley-Cook argued that, at the very least, the British ''should tell the United States that it 'cannot expect to use our territory for a war against Russia or to have our support'. 327
Orla Jordal, 2007
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