That apart, MI5 is based at Thames House, on the north bank of the River Thames in London, a few hundred yards from Parliament, and the SIS at Vauxhall Cross on the South Bank almost a mile upstream, after moving from the shabby old Century House in the Elephant and Castle district.
The task of SIS is foreign information gathering and its presence is worldwide, with a “station” somewhere in almost all British embassies and sometimes consulates. Basically, it seeks to discover and forewarn. Politicians are wont to sneer when in opposition but drool with pleasure when, in office, they are taken to a quiet room to have explained to them what is really going on rather than what they thought was going on.
Politicians congenitally loathe to be taken by surprise, which is where the forewarning comes in, but forewarning depends on knowing what the bad people are planning, intending, or have in mind. As that is rarely given away, it has to be discovered clandestinely. Hence the espionage.
This broadly devolves into three categories: electronic intelligence, or ELINT, the scouring of the surface of the world with look-down cameras, mounted either in satellites, drones, or warplanes; signals intelligence, SIGINT, intercepting everything the bad people say to each other, even when they think they have absolute privacy; and HUMINT, or human intelligence gathering.
Britain has never been able to compete with the vast budgets of the United States, and has no space program, but it brings to the table a worthwhile contribution in HUMINT. Infiltrating an agent into the heart of a tricky situation can produce more product than all the “gizmos” could ever see or hear. It is the specialty of the SIS.
As for the terms, those inside the SIS called it “the Office”; those outside use the phrase “the Firm”; and the staffers of the firm are the “friends.” Not to be confused with the CIA, which is “the Agency” or “the Company,” and its staff, who are “the Cousins.”
Considering the sixty million–plus population of the UK and the size of its gross national product, it has always had a smaller SIS than almost any other developed nation in the world, and thus cheaper. The British taxpayer is far from shortchanged. There is a quixotic reason for this.
Unlike all other agencies, the Firm has always been able to rely on a widespread ad hoc army of volunteers prepared to help out if asked nicely. They come from a vast array of professions, something that causes them to travel a bit. They may agree while on a foreign visit for business purposes to pick up a package, deliver a letter to a hole in a tree, make a payment, or just keep their eyes and ears open and undergo a cheerful debriefing when they get home. It appears a bit weird, but it seems to work.
This is because the best “cover” in the world is no cover at all, but the truth. Thus, if Mr. Farnsbarns really is going to a trade fair to sell his paper clips, he might just slip into a phone booth, remove a letter from the pages of the telephone directory, and bring it home in an invisible slit in a specially prepared briefcase. That is where the economics come in; it is not done for money but just to help “the old country.” Very few nations can match that.
There are times in your life when you meet someone and in short order decide he is a thoroughly decent fellow and you can trust him. If you are ever deceived in this later, it is like a hot dagger.
In late 1968, on a brief home visit from Biafra to firm up some correspondent contracts with various London papers, I met a member of the Firm called Ronnie. He sought me out rather than the reverse, and made no bones about what he was, and we hit it off.
He was an Orientalist with good Mandarin Chinese, but to his bewilderment had been made head of the Africa desk. He admitted he knew little about Africa and less about what was really going on inside Biafra. I think we spent about twenty hours over several days while I explained how bad things were, as it became plain the children were now dying of starvation like flies. Had I not trusted his word, I would never have agreed to what came next.
The CRO had amalgamated with the Foreign Office to become the FCO. Both the former secretary of state for the CRO and his deputy, the minister of state, had resigned, one after the other. The former, a deeply devout Scottish Presbyterian, George Thomson, despite the official reason given, simply could not in all conscience continue to preside over a policy he found disgusting and immoral. His deputy, George Thomas, was a religious Welsh Methodist and shared precisely the same opinion.
(The latter went on to become speaker of the House of Commons and retired as Lord Tonypandy, a thoroughly honorable and respected politician, not least for his stand over Biafra.)
But the FCO was in the hands of the appalling Michael Stewart, a complete creature of his Civil Service mandarins. They, headed by Lord Greenhill, had absorbed, lock, stock, and barrel, the policy of the CRO, itself based on the flawed appraisal of Sir David Hunt, still en poste as British high commissioner in Lagos and pushing the pro-Nigeria, crush-Biafra policy line with every dispatch.
But there was a debate beginning after fifteen months of the Nigeria-Biafra war, and made more intense by the torrent of hideous pictures showing Biafran babies reduced to barely alive skeletons.
The public marches of protest were starting, notable figures were protesting; the debate might be at a very high level and in complete secrecy, but the FCO was fighting a rearguard action for the minds of the vacillating Harold Wilson government.
Technically, the SIS comes under the FCO but is entitled to disagree in certain circumstances, specifically if it has factual information rather than mere opinion. Ronnie’s problem was he had no specific eyes-on information from the heart of Biafra to offset the assurances coming through from Lagos to the effect that the horrors were grossly exaggerated and the war would in any case be over in very short order—the song that had now been sung for fifteen months of a two-week war.
I did what I did, not in order to do down the Biafrans—far from it. I did it to try to influence the Whitehall argument that continued intermittently for the next fifteen months until the final crushing of Biafra, with a million dead children.
The argument was between: “Prime Minister, this cannot be allowed to go on. The human cost is simply too high. We should reconsider our policy. We should use all our influence to urge a cease-fire, a peace conference, and a political solution,” and “Prime Minister, I can assure you the media reports are as usual sensationalist and grossly exaggerated. We have information the rebel regime is very close to collapse. The sooner it does, the sooner we can get columns of relief food into the rebel territory. Meanwhile, we urge you to stick with the hitherto-agreed policy and even increase the support for the federal government.”
Neither Ronnie nor I could know in October 1968 how long there was to go or how many more to die. But the argument for a cease-fire lost, for two reasons: the vanity factor and the cowardice factor.
It is said that if a tigress sees her cubs endangered, she will fight with deranged passion to defend them. But her dedication pales into submission compared with the fury with which senior civil servants and most notably of the Foreign Office will defend the fiction that they cannot have made a mistake.
The cowardice applied as usual to the politicians, Wilson and Stewart. Basically, it was: “Prime Minister, if you concede to the ‘reconsider’ argument you would have to admit that for fifteen months your government has made a mistake. How then do you reply to the media question: How can you explain to the public the quarter million children dead so far?” At that point, the response from Wilson and Stewart was, “Very well, do what you feel you must. But hurry.”
So the military, advisory, diplomatic, and propaganda help to the Lagos dictatorship quietly increased. Ronnie convinced me that the Firm might be able to win the argument if it could rebut the charge of media exaggeration with eyes-on evidence that the situation was as reported or worse.
But to do that, he needed an asset deep inside the Biafran enclave, what he termed “someone in on the ground.” When I
left for the return to the rain forest, he had one.
On my return, the job was threefold. To report through the various newspapers and magazines that had accepted me as a stringer (local correspondent on a non-staff basis) the military war as it crawled on its way. To use the same outlets to portray the humanitarian situation, the disaster among the children dying of kwashiorkor (protein deficiency), and the church-based efforts to keep them alive with an air bridge of illicit mercy flights bringing in relief food donated by literally the whole world.
In this, there were at least a dozen other journalists, sometimes twenty, who came and went; there were delegations of parliamentarians, senators, and emissaries from various concerned groups, who simply felt they had to see and report back.
In Europe and North America, the issue, based on the reports and the still and moving pictures, became massive, linking Left and Right, young and old, in marches and protests. There were times when Harold Wilson appeared almost under siege, and twice, I learned later, the “reconsider” policy was almost adopted. Had the opposition Conservative Party leaned its weight, the change of policy might have gone through and the dying of the children would have ended, but Edward Heath, the Tory leader, shared with the FCO his European Union obsession, and he was their man.
The third task was to keep Ronnie informed of things that could not, for various reasons, emerge in the media. Just once, after nine months, things became sticky, when a rumor spread that I was working for London. Had the suspicion developed, my situation might have become thoroughly tiresome. I discovered the source was the ex-Legionnaire German mercenary Rolf Steiner, with whom I had never been on the best of terms.
There was nothing for it but to have a word in the right ear. Two nights later, yelling and screaming, not a happy camper, with his hands roped behind him, Steiner was bundled onto a plane for Libreville and never returned.
A MEDIA EXPLOSION
It should never be forgotten that the Nigeria-Biafra War fell into two quite different periods, and the transition from one to the other lasted no more than a fortnight.
For the first year, from July 1967 to June 1968, it was just an ordinary African war, plodding its incompetent way across the landscape. The Nigerians, with their standing army of 8,000 infantry in the summer of ’67, had presumed they would sweep through the secessionist province as of right. The Biafrans believed that Lagos would wage war for a few months and then, realizing it was hopeless, give up. Neither happened.
After the short-lived debacle of the Biafran invasion of the Mid-West across the Niger, Nigeria introduced compulsory conscription, forcing into uniform tens of thousands of unwilling young men. This huge expansion required weapons from rifles to artillery and armored cars, and staggering quantities of ammunition to replace what had largely been fired into the treetops, as well as training. That was where the British Establishment came in. Behind a mendacious screen of “neutrality,” the Wilson government poured in the equipment without which the war could not have proceeded. That was what the Biafrans had not foreseen.
The Whitehall-sourced propaganda stumbled from lie to lie, but for the first year the media paid little attention, because eastern Nigeria was obscure, far away, and of minimal reader interest. The first lie was that London would only “fulfill existing contracts,” but these were soon swamped by the expansion of the Nigerian Federal Army, and shipload after shipload were needed.
Payment was not the problem; there were always the oil royalties, and Nigeria’s credit was good. It came down to the licenses. Impelled by urgings from the High Commission in Lagos, these were granted without demur.
Another early lie was that no weapons at all were being shipped from Britain to fuel the war. The key word was from, not by. In fact, the supplies were coming from British stocks at the immense NATO weapons park outside Brussels, and thus technically from Belgium. They were then replaced by shipments from Britain to Belgium.
Slowly, both the enlargement and the supplies had their effect. The Nigerian Federal Army crawled across the territory, village by village and town by town. The capital Enugu was taken, to be replaced by the town of Umuahia. Port Harcourt fell and its airport was lost. With Enugu Airport also gone, a new one was created at Uli from a stretch of road two miles long. This became the only entry and exit point, with clapped-out old cargo planes coming in from the offshore islands of Fernando Po and São Tomé.
The transformation started deceptively in May 1968, when the missionaries noticed worried mothers from the deep bush bringing emaciated children for examination.
The missionaries were a network across the country, mainly the fathers of the Holy Ghost and the nuns of the Holy Rosary, both from Dublin. These ran the churches with, attached to them, a school and a dispensary. There were some Protestant missionaries, but the great majority were Catholics. The Ibos were overwhelmingly Catholic, and Islam had never penetrated south of the savannah land.
The priests and nuns knew exactly what they were looking at: kwashiorkor. The total shutoff of protein-rich foodstuffs was finally having its effect. No one had foreseen this, because no one had thought the war would last that long. Without the Wilson government’s intervention, it would not have. But the appearance of kwashiorkor transformed an incompetent bush war into a massive humanitarian tragedy, the like of which neither Africa, Europe, nor North America had ever seen. But they were about to.
The priests appealed in Ireland for funds, and a few suitcases of medications came in. But no one took any notice. The media visit of February, which the BBC had ostracized, had been and gone before the signs were evident. I had arrived back after Israel sometime in May. In June, two British newspapers sent a team of one reporter and one photographer each. They were the Daily Express and the now-defunct Daily Sketch.
Due to the action of Stewart Steven, the foreign editor, I had been retained by the Daily Express, so my job was to escort Walter Partington and David Cairns. The visit started with the usual formalities: a briefing on the military situation and then a visit to a couple of fronts where some combat was going on.
Walter, who had arrived with a half case of whiskey and several cartons of priceless cigarettes, declined to move from his allotted bungalow, where he sat consuming his supplies and sharing with no one. David Cairns and I went off to the fronts with army escorts. When we got back, Walter was a bit too indulged to be able to write copy, so I wrote and transmitted all his dispatches myself, but in his name.
(Rather amusingly, when he got home he filed the lot for the International Reporter of the Year award—and won.)
Then we found the starving children at a Catholic mission house. David Cairns and his colleague from the Sketch took hundreds of pictures, stored the rolls in light-proof capsules, and took them home. Back then, we could transmit words by telex, but not photos.
I never saw the editions of the Express and Sketch that appeared the following week, but the effect was dramatic. Today, we have all seen pictures of starving children from Africa and Asia, but in 1968 no one in the West had ever seen anything like it.
This was the catalyst the situation required. It changed everything, turning a low-intensity, low-interest African war into the greatest humanitarian cause of the decade.
Back in Britain, later Europe, and then the United States, ordinary citizens just expressed their horror, protested, and donated. Out of this was created the most extraordinary mercy mission the world had ever seen, a nightly air bridge from the offshore islands to the ultra-basic Uli airstrip in the heart of the rain forest.
From Denmark, a Protestant minister, Vigo Mollerup, recruited airline pilots from all the Scandinavian airlines to give up their vacations to fly freight planes carrying baby milk concentrates through the night to Uli. That was called Nord Church Air. What they carried was contributed by the World Council of Churches (Protestant) and Caritas (the international Rome-based Catholic charity). The Pope ordered Monsignor
Carlo Bayer, a Silesian, to raid the funds of Caritas and mount the Catholic contribution.
Also in the mix was the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) under the Swiss Karl Jaggi. And what was really extraordinary was that the whole thing was illegal. By law, those lifesaving planes were invading Nigerian airspace against the wishes of the Lagos-based military junta, which acquired MiG fighters and pilots from the Communist bloc to try to shoot them down. That was why the relief planes had to fly at night and land in darkness. It had never happened before, and it has never happened since.
By late autumn, the air bridge, collectively called Joint Church Aid, or mockingly Jesus Christ Airlines, was up and running, or rather flying, and it continued to the end. The three main agencies, WCC, Caritas, and ICRC, all put an estimate of children who died at about a million and a similar figure on those saved from death.
By the end, the network of feeding centers sprawled across the still-defiant enclave, where the children lay waiting for death or a bowl of protein-rich milk, served an estimated transient population of half a million. The burial parties would often put a hundred children from one center into their mass grave in a single day.
And the media came, in hundreds, with their reporters and their cameras, along with hundreds of volunteers who just wanted to help in whatever way they could. Many had to be refused passage—there were just too many.
And the British government of Harold Wilson and the Foreign Office? It stuck doggedly to the old discredited policy, doubling up the supplies, advice, and propaganda aid to the Nigerian junta. The press office of the FCO stooped to quote incredible levels of mendacity to fulfill its brief.
One canard that had seriously been proposed to the attendant press in London was that there were really no starving children in the “rebel enclave” save for a group kept deliberately as living skeletons for display purposes. Whenever a mission of visiting VIPs was touring the villages, these emaciated wretches would be trucked ahead of them so that they were always there to greet the visitors. It was an ex–public school product with an old-school tie and a degree who offered that little gem to the media.
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