The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  The creation of the Special Branch proved insufficient to solve the problem of intelligence during the Emergency. Lieutenant General Sir Harold Briggs, who became director of operations in Malaya in 1950, complained: ‘Unfortunately our Intelligence organisation is our “Achilles heel” . . . when it should be our first line of attack. We have not got an organisation capable of sifting and distributing important information quickly.’51 At the heart of the problem was poor civil–military co-ordination; the Chief of Police and the Director of Military Intelligence were not on speaking terms. Faced with a flurry of attacks by Communist guerrillas and declining morale among the European population in 1950 and 1951, there were moments when the British feared they might be losing the war. In October 1951 the high commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, was killed by guerrillas while being driven in his Rolls-Royce.52 Oliver Lyttelton, who had just become colonial secretary in Churchill’s government, had no doubt that Malaya was his most pressing problem: ‘It was evident that we were well on the way to losing control of the country, and soon.’53 Lyttelton, however, was too pessimistic. During the latter part of 1950, Briggs had begun establishing throughout the squatter areas of Malaya fortified ‘new villages’, floodlit at night and constantly monitored during the day to prevent guerrilla penetration. As Chin Peng, the guerrilla leader as well as secretary general of the Communist Party of Malaya, later acknowledged, during the first half of 1951 the ‘Briggs Plan’ ‘began directly affecting our food supplies’ and eventually severed the supply lines.54

  The problems of civil–military co-ordination in Malaya were largely solved by the appointment in February 1952 of General (later Field Marshal) Sir Gerald Templer, a former director of military intelligence in London, to the combined post of high commissioner and director of operations, which gave him greater power than any British general since Oliver Cromwell three centuries before.55 ‘The Emergency’, he declared, ‘will be won by our intelligence system – our Special Branch.’56 The Special Branch, however, required urgent reform and he turned for assistance to the Security Service. ‘Special Branch people here are tricky,’ Templer wrote to Sillitoe. ‘. . . They pout like a lot of petulant children and cannot bear criticism.’57 Templer asked Dick White, who, like Sillitoe, had made a personal tour of inspection in Malaya, to become his director of intelligence. Doubtless with one eye on the succession to Sillitoe, White refused.58 Templer then chose another senior MI5 officer, Jack Morton, previously head of SIFE in succession to Kellar, to become director of intelligence with responsibility for intelligence co-ordination and advising him on the reorganization of the Special Branch.59 The two men worked remarkably closely together.60 Templer accepted Morton’s recommendation to split the Special Branch from the CID to allow it to concentrate wholly on counter-insurgency.61

  The Communist guerrillas became steadily less effective as Templer’s counter-insurgency campaigns and disruption of their supply lines forced them to withdraw deeper and deeper into the jungle. Agent penetration of the guerrillas by the reformed Special Branch achieved some striking successes. In the summer of 1953, after two months of ‘slogging through the world’s thickest jungles’, Chin Peng set up a new headquarters at Grik in Northern Malaya, not far from the Thai border, only to be told by the local guerrillas that, though he had yet to be identified, there must be a traitor in their midst. For the past year: ‘Intended guerrilla operations had been thwarted by the British before they could be launched. Weapons, ammunition and food supplies had been revealed to the enemy and seized. Key Party officials had been betrayed and arrested.’ Soon after Chin Peng’s arrival in Grik, the traitor was identified when a government cheque for $50,000 was found in the shirt pocket of a local Party secretary. Late in 1953 Chin Peng was forced to move his headquarters into deep jungle across the Thai border.62 In February 1954 Morton reported to Templer, ‘There has been a very real all-round progress in the development of the intelligence machine in the last two years.’63 Templer agreed. Morton, he wrote later, ‘has done an absolutely first-class job of work and I have a very high opinion of him indeed.’64

  Templer’s leadership and the close co-ordination of the Special Branch with the security forces turned the Malayan campaign into probably the most successful counter-insurgency campaign of modern times. ‘Winning hearts and minds’, though the phrase was not invented until after the campaign, was an essential part of Templer’s strategy. A major programme of road and electricity-grid construction ‘resulted in an infrastructure that few countries in Asia could match’. There was also, as a senior police officer acknowledged in 1954, ‘less beating up’ of suspects.65 The Security Service accepted that ‘an Interrogation Centre cannot be run as a welfare institution. It is a place where firm discipline needs to be maintained.’ During decolonization, as in the wartime Camp 020,66 however, the Service was firmly opposed to physical violence during interrogation: ‘Moral consideration alone should suffice to prohibit it. Further, it is the purpose of interrogation to elicit valid intelligence, whereas extorted confessions are likely to be unreliable.’ ‘Less beating up’ thus produced, in the Service’s view, better intelligence.67 Particular care was needed when interrogating women. The SLO in Malaya commended guidelines drawn up in 1957 by the Malayan Special Branch: ‘In order to command respect from the prisoners, the interrogator must exercise self-respect and avoid foul language. It is completely erroneous for the interrogator to threaten the removal of a female prisoner’s clothing and to threaten to expose the prisoner in the nude.’68

  By the time Chin Peng emerged from the jungle in 1955 in a vain attempt to seek an amnesty from the Malayan government, it was clear that he had lost the war.69 In the run-up to the independence of the Malayan Federation in 1957, the SLO developed such a close relationship with the future leader of the Federation, Tunku Abdul Rahman, that he was entrusted with the numbers of the combination locks to the Tunku’s security safes. Two Security Service officers were seconded to Special Branch in 1958 to help train a new generation of Malay officers.70 When the Emergency was formally ended in 1960, three years after independence, a despondent Chin Peng abandoned his base in the border region and retreated to Beijing.71

  While the Malayan Emergency was continuing, Security Service intelligence was also influencing British policy on decolonization in West and East Africa. Soon after the riots in Accra of February 1948 which marked the active beginning of the struggle for independence in the Gold Coast (the future Ghana), Robin ‘Tin-eye’ Stephens was appointed SLO with direct access to the Governor, Sir Charles Arden-Clarke.72 Stephens’s influence in Accra owed much both to his own powerful personality (previously demonstrated as head of MI5’s wartime interrogation centre, Camp 020) and to the fact that for the previous two years the Security Service had been supplying the Colonial Office with reports on the activities of the West African National Secretariat (WANS), founded in London late in 1945 to campaign for independence.73 The politically astute WANS secretary general (and future first Ghanaian prime minister), Kwame Nkrumah, later described the WANS office as the London ‘rendezvous of all African and West Indian students and their friends. It was there that we used to assemble to discuss our plans, to voice our opinions and air our grievances.’74 Thanks to an HOW,75 many of these plans, opinions and grievances were overheard by the Security Service. The grounds for obtaining the HOW on WANS had been its contacts with the British Communist Party. Telechecks on the CPGB and eavesdropping on its King Street HQ provided further evidence of these links. A note on Nkrumah’s file records that, when he called King Street, he spoke with a ‘foreign sounding accent’ (presumably to disguise his identity), making it difficult for MI5’s transcribers to understand him.76 In November 1947, an intercepted telephone conversation between Nkrumah and King Street revealed that he was planning to leave Britain for the Gold Coast.77

  When riots broke out in the Gold Coast in February 1948, Nkrumah was arrested and imprisoned by the colonial authorities. After his arrest, he was found to be
carrying an unsigned CPGB membership card, together with notes on an organization called the ‘Circle’, led by Nkrumah, whose aim was to establish in West Africa a Union of African Socialist Republics.78 Plans for the Union reflected Nkrumah’s own grandiose but unrealistic vision of a united post-imperial Africa, which he claimed implausibly was ‘probably better equipped for industrialization than almost any other region in the world’ and would develop its own distinctive brand of socialism.79 Hampered by the almost complete lack of reliable intelligence from Moscow during the early years of the Cold War, however, MI5 desk officers admitted to Accra that, though they had never previously heard of the Circle, they thought it possible that Nkrumah’s plans might have derived from ‘outside’ (Soviet) guidance.80 In reality, the KGB – unlike the British Communist Party – still took so little interest in sub-Saharan Africa that it was not until 1960 that its foreign intelligence arm established a department to specialize in that region.81

  The Security Service view of Nkrumah and of African nationalism in general, however, was far from alarmist. The DDG, Guy Liddell, told the JIC in December 1949:

  in so far as West and East Africa were concerned, there was no evidence of Communism as it was understood in Europe, there was no local Communist Party. There was, however, a lot of nationalism, which received considerable encouragement from all sorts of people who went out to preach British democracy. It was true that niggers coming here often went to the C.P. This did not mean that they were Communists or that they understood anything about Karl Marx or dialectical materialism: it merely meant that they found the Communists sympathetic because they had no racial discrimination and were all in favour of the niggers running their own show.82

  Though ‘nigger’ was less outrageously insulting in 1949 than it later became, it was clearly derogatory. Liddell would have been highly unlikely to use it in a formal report to the JIC.

  The Security Service concluded in June 1948 that Nkrumah’s main motivations were African nationalism and personal ambition: ‘His interest in Communism may well be prompted only by his desire to enlist aid in the furtherance of his own aims in West Africa . . . Although an undoubted nationalist, N’krumah’s aims are probably tainted by his wishes for his own personal advancement.’83 Nkrumah’s periods in jail after his return to Accra for leading strikes and demonstrations against the colonial administration merely added to his popularity as the Gold Coast’s leading nationalist politician. In June 1949 Stephens forecast accurately that, when a general election was held, Nkrumah’s newly established Convention People’s Party (CPP) was likely to win.84 Over the next year he reported growing popular support for Nkrumah’s demands for ‘Self Government Now’.85 Like Whitehall and the colonial administration, however, the Security Service failed to foresee the pace of change in both the Gold Coast and the rest of the African empire. Liddell wrote dismissively in his diary after a visit to West Africa in December 1950:

  There is no doubt in my mind that the West African natives are wholly unfitted for self-rule . . . You need only to try to buy a set of stamps for 1/- at the Accra Post Office on a hot afternoon; the place is a seething mass of blacks milling round the counter. After a long delay a black clerk will endeavour to add up the sum; it will come out wrong, but it is better not to argue as the delay and frustration would only be greater!86

  The head of the Security Service Overseas Service, Sir John Shaw, as well as the SLO, remained in close personal touch with the colonial administration in Accra. On New Year’s Eve 1951, Shaw stayed up until 2 a.m. talking on the telephone with the Governor, Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, about the political situation. The future of the Gold Coast, he noted on New Year’s Day, depended on Arden-Clarke’s ability to get on with Nkrumah. The Governor doubtless welcomed the evidence provided by MI5 from the bugging of the CPGB HQ that Nkrumah had fallen out of favour with the Party. In October 1950, the Daily Telegraph ran a story entitled ‘Red Shadow over the Gold Coast’, which claimed that the CPP was orchestrated from Moscow, ‘using Ju Ju of darkest Africa’. Nkrumah’s intercepted correspondence in both Britain and the Gold Coast told a quite different and far more reassuring story, showing his intention, when he became prime minister in March 1952, to follow the constitutional path to independence. In Shaw’s view, intelligence provided grounds for ‘quiet optimism’.87 As Shaw had forecast, Arden-Clarke’s ability to build a successful relationship with Nkrumah was crucial to the smooth transfer of power which led to Ghana becoming the first of Britain’s African colonies to achieve independence in 1957.88

  The main issue for the Security Service in the months leading up to independence was whether Nkrumah would set an example to other future leaders of Anglophone Black Africa by keeping on the current SLO, R. J. S. (John) Thomson. In September 1956 Thomson identified himself to Nkrumah as a Security Service officer and quickly persuaded him of the advantages of maintaining a link with the Service to keep him informed of subversion sponsored by Colonel Nasser’s regime in Egypt (of which Nkrumah was then increasingly suspicious) and by the Soviet Bloc countries, which were Nasser’s main foreign backers. Referring to Egypt and its Soviet backers (though not by name), Nkrumah declared: ‘Colonialism and imperialism may come to us yet in a different guise.’89 When Thomson’s tour of duty came to an end in November 1959, it was extended until June 1960 at the request of Nkrumah, who sent a personal letter of thanks to the DG. Nkrumah’s Interior Minister, Asford Emmanuel Inksumah, said that, ideally, they would have liked Thomson to stay ‘for ever’.90 Thomson shared the optimism of a senior Colonial Office official who said proudly of Nkrumah, ‘We have turned an LSE Communist into a progressive Socialist.’91 The remainder of Britain’s former African colonies followed Ghana’s example after independence in keeping a Security Service SLO, usually until the late 1960s.

  The Kenyan leader, Jomo Kenyatta, aroused greater fears among the colonial administration than Nkrumah. Like its counterpart in Malaya at the beginning of the Emergency, the Special Branch in Kenya was unprepared for the outbreak in 1952 of the Mau Mau rebellion, which its head described as a ‘most dangerous subversive organisation’.92 As Oliver Lyttelton, the Colonial Secretary, read reports from Kenya of ‘bestial, filthy’ Mau Mau atrocities, he felt that he saw ‘the horned shadow of the Devil himself’.93 Some officials in Nairobi, the Colonial Office and other parts of Whitehall believed from the outset that the Mau Mau rebellion was a Communist plot. Kenyatta, whom they wrongly regarded as ‘leader’ of Mau Mau, was, they had no doubt, a ‘Communist’.94 The Governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, was convinced that, ‘With his Communist and anthropological training, [Kenyatta] knew his people and was directly responsible [for Mau Mau]. Here was the African leader to darkness and death.’95 The Security Service strongly disagreed. Sillitoe wrote in January 1953: ‘Our sources have produced nothing to indicate that Kenyatta, or his associates in the UK, are directly implicated in Mau Mau activities, or that Kenyatta is essential to Mau Mau as a leader, or that he is in a position to direct its activities.’96 Some Colonial Office officials as well as Baring were unconvinced.97

  Suspicions of Kenyatta’s Communist connections went back to the moment when he first arrived in Britain to study at the London School of Economics in 1929 as the leader of the Kikuyu Central Association. His activities had been monitored by the Special Branch, which compiled a ‘large file’ on him.98 In April 1930 it reported that he was believed to have joined the CPGB and that a leading British Communist, Robin Page Arnot, had called him ‘the future revolutionary leader of Kenya’.99 The Security Service opened its own file on Kenyatta three months later after receiving a report from SIS that he was off to Hamburg to attend a ‘negro conference’.100 Unknown to British intelligence, he went on from Germany to Moscow to study at the secret Comintern-run Lenin School and Communist University of the Toilers of the East under the alias ‘James Joken’.101 MI5 first learned of Kenyatta’s time in Moscow soon after his return to Britain late in 1933 from a Special Branch informer, who reported that
, while studying at the Lenin School, he had received ‘instructions’ to become a Comintern agent.102 (Training in underground work, espionage and guerrilla warfare were indeed on the secret Lenin School curriculum.)103 Sir Vernon Kell personally informed both the Colonial Office and the Commissioner of Police in Nairobi.104 MI5 simultaneously obtained an HOW on Kenyatta, who was then living in London. So prompt was postal delivery in pre-war London that, on two occasions over the next few months, Kenyatta complained to the Post Office that he believed his mail was being opened because of the delay in receiving it. To calm his suspicions, the HOW was suspended in July 1934.105

  MI5 did not discover for almost twenty years that Kenyatta had been disillusioned by his period in Moscow. While at the University of the Toilers of the East he had joined in a written protest at the ‘derogatory portrayal of Negroes in the cultural institutions of the Soviet Union’ as ‘real monkeys’, and had complained to his lecturers that ‘in all respects’ their teaching was inferior to that in ‘bourgeois schools’, which encouraged pupils to think for themselves. When an earnest South African Communist in Moscow accused him of being a ‘petty-bourgeois’, Kenyatta was said to have replied: ‘I don’t like this “petty” thing. Why don’t you say I’m a big bourgeois?’106 In the course of the Second World War, the monitoring of CPGB headquarters and intermittent surveillance of Kenyatta, who in 1940 moved to West Sussex, gave the Security Service other evidence of his declining links with Communist politics. O. J. Mason, soon to become the first SLO in East Africa, reported to the Colonial Office after Kenyatta spoke at the Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945: ‘During the last few years, Kenyatta appears to have led a fairly quiet and non-political life, but previously he had been known as something of an anti-British agitator. It is believed that he was at one time a Communist, but is thought to have quarrelled with that Party . . .’107