Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  This question of caste was more or less satisfactorily resolved, and Pearson found that after a lapse of time as a “new boy” he was fairly well accepted by the senior common room elite of St. Albans and Bletchley Park. Just as Donald Downes in New York had got to know British agents, mostly temporary, like A. J. Ayer, Christopher Wren (son of the author of Beau Geste), and David Ogilvy, so Pearson benefited from the work of Bletchley scholars like J. H. Plumb, Geoffrey Barraclough, Asa Briggs, and Edward Crankshaw; the sorts of names now found chiefly in the pages of The New York Review of Books. Also present were Roy Jenkins and Angus Wilson, and the decipherer of the Minoan and Mycenean inscriptions, Leonard Palmer. Pearson also knew Benjamin Britten and Humphrey Trevelyan. As the American corps of intelligence workers expanded in this English elite atmosphere, it drew in Telford Taylor, William Bundy, and others who were to be important in the postwar world (Bundy as editor of the Council on Foreign Relations review, Foreign Affairs, among other things). Taylor observed that most of the North Americans were New Englanders and had some knowledge of Britain, which helped to smooth the path and to alleviate resentments about British reserve on the one hand and the superior quality of American pay and rations on the other.

  Nelson Aldrich, descendant of the Rockefellers and nephew of Winthrop Aldrich of Suez fame at the London embassy, had a stab at the social quintessences here in his delightful book Old Money:

  It was underground and behind the lines, in World War II’s OSS and the Cold War’s CIA, that the Old Money class finally came into an inheritance of all the glamor and peril they had been reading about for years in the work of such Old World romancers as John Buchan, Compton Mackenzie and H. C. McNeile, the creator of Bulldog Drummond. The honor roll of the OSS-CIA between 1941 and 1975, by which time age and discouragement had pretty well decimated their ranks, reads like an alumni bulletin of a St. Midas or an Ivy League school: Allen Dulles, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Tracy Barnes, Thomas Braden, James J. Angleton, Desmond FitzGerald, Archibald Roosevelt, Kermit Roosevelt, Robert Amory, Richard Bissell, Frank Wisner, Richard Helms et al.

  It is difficult to think of any more harmonious a collusion between unequals, or any more friendly rivalry, than that existing between the American and British “cousins” at this key moment in a just war. In later and more caricatured forms, it has furnished moments of semi-afFectionate confusion in several score novels and films: the American doing his damnedest to choke down the school-dinner food in his plummy colleague’s Pall Mall Club; the Englishman trying to get a scotch without ice in Georgetown. It is the foundation of James Bond’s husky comradeship with Felix Leiter, and of numerous if slightly more awkward episodes in the works of John le Carré. And it was too good to last. By the end of the war, American intelligence chieftains had come to the same conclusion as their political masters—that Britain’s cause was one thing and the British Empire another. Even the Anglophile Donald Downes, who had experienced a few end-of-Empire premonitions in his early travels in the Orient, found himself embroiled in OSS-SIS rivalry. While stationed in North Africa, he saw what happened when Lieutenant Colonel William A. Eddy, late of the United States Marine Corps, was placed in charge of OSS and, as a result of a June 1942 spheres-of-influence agreement, in charge of British operatives in Tangier also. Eddy was, according to Winks, “anti-imperial, a view he had settled on when he had taught English at Cairo University; he was also a much-published scholar, author of books on Jonathan Swift and Samuel Butler, a linguist who moved easily amongst the French and the Arabs, and former President of Hobart College in upstate New York: he was used to command. In World War I he had lost a leg, and the stump and attached wooden leg gave him pain in the heat.” Read in profile, this irascible peg-legged polymath sounds much more like the image of a crusty British colonial veteran than an American amateur newcomer. And herein lay the difficulty. Eddy soon discovered that, while the Resistance-oriented Special Operations Executive (SOE) people were more than prepared to cooperate in any war-winning enterprise, the SIS and Foreign Office elements “did not believe in the Atlantic Charter at all.” He complained to Donovan that, though he, Eddy, was nominally in command, “he actually had to bow to British wishes on most matters because Eisenhower, who was intent on Allied unity, believed the British more competent.” That myth of experience again! (Recall that it was in this very theater of North Africa that Macmillan first proposed his “subtle Greeks to coarse Romans” formulation to Richard Crossman.)

  Pursuing Downes’s career as a metaphor for the “special relationship,” one finds him touching on almost all the themes that have exemplified and bedeviled the alliance. Class and empire were the crosses he bore before the enlistment with Stephenson and then Donovan. American conservatism became his bugbear during the thick of the conflict itself, when he was repeatedly thwarted in his effort to aid the anti-Franco forces in Spain and to cancel what he regarded as the shame of the West’s betrayal of the Republic. His associations with “Jews and Communists,” as he once heard them referred to, made him suspect in military and espionage circles. He became involved in the bitter Anglo-American dispute over Greece, with Churchill convinced that the United States was conspiring against him and America deploring the resuscitation of a “British sphere” in the Near East. Colonel Sir Ronald Wingate was later to tell Anthony Cave Brown, Donovan’s biographer, of the average British Establishment reaction at this period:

  We had been at war with Germany longer than any other power, we had suffered more, we had sacrificed more, and in the end we would lose more than any other power. Yet here were these God-awful American academics rushing about, talking about the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter, and criticizing us for doing successfully what they would try and fail to do themselves later—restrain the Russians. Donovan was very lucky we didn’t send a Guards company to OSS Cairo.

  Depressed with “unlovely British scheming and American ignorance”—a sad judgment on the wily old power and the brash new one—Downes set off for Washington. On the way home he stopped in London and saw Norman Holmes Pearson, who he was later to claim had warned him about Kim Philby. According to Downes in later life, Philby was said by Pearson to be much too interested in reports on Soviet affairs.

  After the war Downes published his now forgotten book The Scarlet Thread, which had extreme difficulty in finding an American publisher because of its revelations about J. Edgar Hoover’s Anglophobia and sabotage of the war effort (Rinehart offered to take the book only if these chapters were cut). So much did the memoir contradict the emerging Hollywood view of wartime heroics that it was largely ignored by reviewers and booksellers. Switching to fiction, he did better, as mentioned above, with Orders to Kill, which was successfully filmed by Anthony Asquith. But he was discouraged from completing Cauldrons Bubble, begun in 1965, which first examined the role of homosexuality in the makeup of a secret agent.

  By then, the balance of forces in the intelligence world had shifted abruptly against the British as teachers and the Americans as students. The appalling revelations about Philby, Burgess, and Maclean not only had compromised the much-vaunted London “Firm” but had done terrific damage to Western intelligence in general and American espionage in particular. The British had to spend—are still spending—much time in winning back American trust. Matters were made several times worse by the realization that Philby and his associates had survived as long as they had precisely because of the features—clubbability, class membership, wit, and polish—that were supposed to be so admirable in the British setup. From the time of their defection, such sentimental attachments and symbols were at a definite discount.

  Moreover, the command and control of U.S. intelligence had shifted into the hands of much less sentimental people. The Cold War had altered the mental atmosphere of the spy world. As Winks puts it:

  Rigid anti-Communists had been prominent in the OSS, especially toward the end, but they had been balanced by doctrinaire and, more important, pragmatic liberals who were, at l
east, reasonably well read and educated to the meaning of the language they used. So too were the conservatives of the time; they had read their Burke (especially if they were Anglophiles, as many were) and they did not think “liberal” a term of disrepute.

  Perhaps, here, Winks is a trifle unfair. James Jesus Angleton, the very model of the new Manichean breed, certainly had a feeling for the language. He it was who recruited Richard Ellmann to the service, posting him to London in wartime and indirectly enabling him to take the long leave in Ireland (authorized by Norman Holmes Pearson) which led to his discovery of the Yeats manuscripts. Angleton himself was a friend and student of T. S. Eliot, once baffling a British television audience by referring to Soviet policy as “a wilderness of mirrors” and thus losing all those who did not recognize the reference to Gerontion. But then he had the advantage, possessed by few of his audience, of an education in the English private school system. Born to a father who had served with Pershing in Mexico and who became a well-connected international businessman, young James went to Chartridge Hill House in Buckinghamshire and then, on the advice of no less a person than Edward VIII’s chaplain, to Malvern College, where he became a house prefect and an active Boy Scout. Pushing on to Yale, he became noticeable for his English shirts and accent, as well as for inviting Ezra Pound to visit the campus under the auspices of his undergraduate review Furioso.

  While in London working on the Ultra material, he often called on Eliot and tried his own hand at poetry. He stood at a slight angle to the “Oh So Social” aspect which jesters attached to the upper-crust Bruce and Mellon OSS, but was considered bright and sortable by Bruce and brilliant by others. He was the only American cleared for top-secret Ultra when transferred to the Italian theater. It was in Italy that he made his reputation, and in postwar Italy that he saw the battle against Communism eclipsing all other considerations. On several occasions he took the lead in challenging British hegemony, at one point asking Washington directly whether British policy was binding, through Allied Forces HQ, on all American operations. Later, he overruled British objection to the use of so many CIA “front” organizations. The British reservations were expressed tactically—they felt that all anti-Communist forces would eventually be tarnished by the accusation of being stooges—but were not unconnected to the “anticolonial” policy that these fronts tended to follow. Angleton no longer felt the need to defer, and simply asserted that pro-American groupings would get support.

  One of the leading anti-Communist intelligence barons of the period, Frank Wisner, expressed the new order of precedence rather bluntly in a conversation with Kim Philby which he must later have regretted. “ ‘Whenever we want to subvert any place,’ he confided, ‘we find the British own an island within easy reach.’ ”

  It was the rising of stars like Angleton in the intelligence world that magnetized people like Peter Wright, who were motivated by power worship and pelf. As Wright himself put it, in his unpleasant but occasionally revealing book Spycatcher, a trip to Washington to see Angleton could become an occasion for full-scale dual loyalty, if not actually single loyalty:

  The Capitol building was a giant fresco of pink blossom, blue sky and white marble, capped by a shining gold dome. I always loved visiting Washington, especially in the spring. London was so drab; MI5 so class-ridden and penny-pinching. Like many of the younger, post-war recruits to secret intelligence, I felt America was the great hope, the hub of the Western intelligence wheel. I welcomed her ascendancy with open arms.

  Not only did many British intelligence officers feel a sense of inferiority when they compared their own resources with those of the Americans after Suez and Cyprus (in both of which episodes, on his own evidence, Wright played sordid colonial roles in assassination plans); they realized that their political masters, too, had accepted American predominance. In his cupidity, Wright even described the Capitol with a “gold dome,” which, Roman though it may look, it does not possess.

  The chief, in fact the only, interest of Peter Wright’s self-serving book, and the principal interest of the British government’s campaign to suppress it, is the light it throws on a dingier aspect of the “special relationship.” He has vindicated the many satires on this relationship penned by the only dissident in the genre, John le Carré. He may even form part of the model for Clive, the gruesome British intelligence functionary in The Russia House, who was “a technology man, not at ease with live sources, a suburban espiocrat of the modern school. He believed that facts were the only kind of information and he despised whoever was not ruled by them. If he liked anything at all in life apart from his own advancement and his silver Mercedes car, which he refused to take out of the garage if it had so much as a scratch on it, then it was hardware and powerful Americans, in that order.”

  Clive tells his team that “it is a common misapprehension of this Service that we and the Americans are in the same boat. We’re not. Not when it comes to strategy. . . . Where strategy is concerned, we are a tiny, ignorant British coracle and they are the Queen Elizabeth. It is not our place to tell them how to run their ship.”

  This is the moral and mental atmosphere that was exposed to view by Wright’s later indiscretions. It represents, not a Greek ceding place to Rome while reserving the right to admonish, but a wholesale collapse into the worship of financial and technical “superiority.” Woodhouse may have been the “brains” for Kermit Roosevelt in Iran and have put his sophistication to work, and have later developed a conscience about it. But that was when “cousin-hood” was in its early days, and still partook of the leftover bravado of wartime cooperation. As to an extent did Angleton, which was what helped him to purvey his mole fantasies and to recruit a cadre of British intelligence officers who were at all events prepared to accept American instructions and to act against an elected British government. This was not to be excused by Angleton’s obsession with Kim Philby, the man who had been named by his father for a player in Kipling’s “great game.” As Kipling makes Kim say:

  Something I owe to the soil that grew

  More to the life that fed

  But most to Allah, who gave me two

  Separate sides to my head.

  There is charm in the story of the Anglophile Donald Downes, who volunteered at some risk to himself to help Britain fight the Nazis and who was prepared to spy on his own countrymen in the process. There is precious little amusement in the story of Peter Wright, who became a paranoid mercenary and who wanted only to be on the stronger side. In these two contrasting accounts, there is a quirky microcosm of the ironies and jealousies of “cousinhood,” and of the abruptly reversed inequalities in the “special relationship” of which it forms such an essential part.

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  Nuclear Jealousies

  In the last decade, nothing has put the “special relationship” under greater domestic strain in Britain than the siting of U.S. nuclear missiles. Even those who in principle might have agreed to the missiles were wounded in their pride to discover that they had been chosen to host them without being invited to do so. George Orwell captured this sort of public feeling in a Tribune column he wrote in 1943:

  Even if you steer clear of Piccadilly with its seething swarms of drunks and whores, it is difficult to go anywhere in London without having the feeling that Britain is now Occupied Territory. . . . Before the war there was no popular anti-American feeling in this country. It all dates from the arrival of the American troops, and it is made vastly worse by the tacit agreement never to discuss it in print.

  In perfect contrast, the classic manner of the “special relationship” was defended by David Owen in a review article for The Sunday Times as recently as April 3, 1988:

  Mrs. Thatcher believes as a matter of principle that she should never display any public irritation with the course of Anglo-American relations, and who can say that she is wrong? For all the occasional problems with public opinion at home, if the Atlantic Ocean is to be bridged and the intimacy of our relationship main
tained, it is not a bad discipline for our friendship that we should differ only in private.

  Only a few months before Dr. Owen wrote his complacent, orthodox article, the British government and Cabinet papers for 1957 had become available under the Thirty-Year Rule and were opened for inspection at the Public Record Office. The most revealing documents concerned a near-catastrophic fire in the plutonium production reactor at Windscale, Cumbria, on October 8, 1957. The fire, which spread from uranium fuel to graphite blocks, was a prefiguration of the Chernobyl disaster. But its details are, still, much less widely known than the Chernobyl ones. Although milk distribution from farms two hundred miles from Windscale was halted, and although workers received 150 times the “normal” lifetime dose of radiation, the British Cabinet decided to censor the inquiry report. In fact, the censorship was considered so important that it was supervised by the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, himself.

  The reason for the censorship of the inquiry, which was carried out by Sir William Penney of the Atomic Energy Authority, was not the usual one of “national security.” Sir William was a trusted official scientist who directed the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston. Sir Frederick Brundrett, chief scientist at the Ministry of Defense, told Macmillan that there were “no security objections” to releasing the report’s conclusions in full. Macmillan’s reasons for insisting on an a bowdlerized summary were purely political. The year 1957 was a two-summit year for him, involving the post-Suez rapprochement with President Eisenhower. The first of these summits had been on the British-held territory of Bermuda. The second, in Washington, was impending just as the Windscale inquiry was complete. And the inquiry contained criticism of the Windscale management, as well as the clear finding that the accident could have been devastating. Had not Sir John Cockcroft, the scientist who first split the atom, insisted on radiation filters on the Windscale air-discharge stacks, there would have been a catastrophe. A pre-summit paper prepared for Macmillan and first made public in 1988 said clearly that the main objective of British policy was a “common research and development programme with the Americans.” It acknowledged that under the Macmillan plan “we should become dependent on the United States for some of the most important of our future weapons,” adding that this was “no more than a recognition of the fact that our national security is already dependent on the United States.”