The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  After Kenyatta’s return to Kenya in 1946, the intelligence available to the Security Service, much of it from intercepted communications passing between Britain and Kenya, continued to be reassuring. In July 1951 a report from the SLO in Salisbury, Bob de Quehen, belatedly disclosed the disillusion experienced by Kenyatta during his period in Moscow almost twenty years earlier. Kenyatta had revealed to a South African police source how he had witnessed the first black secretary general of the Communist Party of South Africa, Albert Nzula, being dragged out of a meeting in Moscow by two OGPU officers. He was never seen alive again.108 Kenyatta must have reflected that he had been fortunate to leave Moscow in 1933. Had he still been there a few years later during the Great Terror, his political incorrectness and unconcealed preference for ‘bourgeois’ education would probably have led him to share the fate of Nzula. Sillitoe, however, believed that ill-informed accounts of Kenyatta’s period at the Lenin School in Moscow twenty years before continued to be mainly responsible for claims in Nairobi and Whitehall of ‘Communist influence behind Mau Mau’.109

  Shortly after the declaration of a State of Emergency in Kenya by the Governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, on 20 October 1952, Sillitoe wrote to the Colonial Office to offer the Service’s assistance. The PUS, Sir Thomas Lloyd, declined the offer, saying that what was needed instead was ‘a good man from some Special Branch’. The head of OS, Sir John Shaw, had no doubt that Lloyd’s proposal would prove ‘futile’: ‘Sooner or later, too late, we shall be asked for help.’ The request for help came earlier than Shaw expected. On 20 November, at the request of the Governor, Sillitoe and A. M. MacDonald flew to Nairobi, where they were joined by Alex Kellar, who arrived from the Middle East. ‘So’, remarked Shaw to Lloyd, ‘the first XI of MI5 is to play the Mau Mau.’ The Service delegation arrived on a Friday, their recommendations were drafted by the following Tuesday and accepted by Baring the same morning. MacDonald stayed on as security adviser ‘to concert all measures to secure the intelligence Government requires’ and to ‘co-ordinate the activities of all intelligence agencies operating in the Colony and to promote collaboration with Special Branches in adjacent territories’. His first task was to reorganize the Special Branch, which he found ‘grossly overworked, bogged down in paper, housed in offices which were alike impossible from the standpoint of security or normal working conditions. The officers were largely untrained, equipment was lacking and intelligence funds were meagre.’ Reform proceeded so rapidly that in August 1953 MacDonald recommended that his post as security adviser be abolished. He wrote to Head Office in October, ‘Special Branch goes from strength to strength and we now have some excellent sources operating. I have no qualms at leaving this lusty infant to look after itself.’110

  Like Whitehall and the colonial administration, however, the Security Service did not grasp the complexities of the rebellion. Mau Mau grew out of internal factionalism and dissent among the Kikuyu people as well as opposition to British rule. What the British called Mau Mau was not a single movement born of primeval savagery (an image created by the obscene oath-taking ceremonies for new recruits and a series of horrific murders) but a diverse and fragmented collection of individuals, organizations and ideas.111 Given the Security Service’s slender East African resources, it is unreasonable to expect it to have understood Kenyan complexities which eluded the experienced and far more numerous colonial administration. But, unlike Government House in Nairobi, MI5 did not make the mistake of lumping together all those campaigning for independence. Kenyatta told a mass meeting of the Kenya African Union (KAU) in July 1952: ‘KAU is not a fighting union that uses fists and weapons. If any of you here think that force is good, I do not agree with you . . . I pray to you that we join hands for freedom and freedom means abolishing criminality . . .’ The prevailing opinion in Government House, however, was that Kenyatta and all senior figures in the KAU must somehow be responsible for Mau Mau.112 The SLO in East Africa, C. R. Major, wrongly believed that Kenyatta had indeed helped to organize some Mau Mau incidents before October 1952, but that thereafter ‘they had a snowball effect’ which Kenyatta was powerless to prevent.113 He opposed the decision by Government House to put Kenyatta on trial, which, he reported, was motivated by political expediency and the need to find a culprit to placate the settlers.114 As Major had feared, Kenyatta was given what amounted to a show trial. Crown witnesses, it was later claimed, were carefully coached before giving evidence and effectively bribed with substantial ‘rewards’. Kenyatta was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment.115

  During the Emergency all Security Service staff in Kenya, female secretaries included, were issued with hand-guns and given target practice. The secretaries were also warned to be careful whom they slept with. As SLO in Nairobi, Robert Broadbent slept with a revolver under his pillow,116 unaware, however, that a Mau Mau arms dump was hidden in his kitchen. The dump was discovered during a reception at Broadbent’s house after a waiter dropped a tray of drinks and, in the ensuing commotion, Mau Mau guerrillas who had come to retrieve some of their arms were discovered in the kitchen threatening staff.117 Despite the fact that the British media gave most publicity to Mau Mau atrocities against Europeans, only thirty-two white settlers were killed during the Emergency – fewer than died in traffic accidents in Nairobi during the same period. Over 90 per cent of those killed were Kikuyu, in what turned into a civil war between the loyalist Kikuyu Guard and Mau Mau guerrillas. Though the Emergency lasted until 1959, Mau Mau was effectively defeated by the end of 1956. In the view of a number of Service officers, a key step in its defeat was the appointment as director of security and intelligence from 1955 to 1958 of John Prendergast (later knighted), a Kenya police officer who had previously served in Palestine, the Gold Coast and the Canal Zone.118 Black Kenyans, however, paid a terrible price for both the rebellion and the brutality with which it was crushed. During the Emergency Kenya became a police state which imprisoned a higher proportion of its population than any other colony in the history of the British Empire. On a conservative estimate, one in four adult Kikuyu males were held in often brutal camps and prisons at some point during the Emergency.119

  During the mid-1950s, in the wake of the Security Service’s role in the Malayan and Kenyan emergencies, Eric Holt-Wilson’s pre-war vision of a great imperial security network dominated by the Service began to become a reality. Other African colonies facing nationalist unrest became used to seeking the Security Service’s usually reassuring advice. In September 1953, for example, Sir Geoffrey Colby, Governor of Nyasaland (the future Malawi), became concerned that local political agitators ‘might be merely the tool of some dangerous anti-British organisation inspired from outside Africa’:

  After most careful thought I feel sure it is imperative that all available material should be examined by a high level expert from M.I.5 as soon as possible . . . The Special Branch have no knowledge of this situation. They have neither the capacity nor the time to investigate it properly. They are flat out in coping with day-to-day security intelligence.120

  Sir John Shaw reassured the Colonial Office of the improbability of a ‘dangerous anti-British organisation’ inspiring unrest from abroad and recommended that Bob de Quehen, the SLO for Central Africa, be called in from Salisbury to advise the Nyasaland administration.121 While serving in Kenya in 1953, A. M. MacDonald too was asked for advice by neighbouring colonies. That experience prompted him to write a paper on the imperial role of the Service which concluded, ‘The Security Service, with the full support of the Colonial Office, must now undertake the task of surveying the entire field of intelligence organisation.’122 In June 1954 MacDonald was seconded to the Colonial Office to serve as full-time security intelligence adviser to the Secretary of State with the additional task of setting up or reorganizing Special Branches in every colony which would prevent further imperial intelligence surprises such as that in Malaya in 1948 and provide advance warning of any threatened insurgencies.123 On his return from Malaya in 1954, Templer w
as instructed to investigate the state of colonial security around the globe. By April 1955, in consultation with the Security Service, he had completed a mammoth investigation for the cabinet, visiting potential trouble spots from Cyprus to Uganda. His lengthy report placed heavy emphasis on the importance of improving imperial intelligence:

  It is possible that, had our intelligence system been better, we might have been spared the emergency in Kenya, and perhaps that in Malaya. It must be our objective so to improve the present system that we are, so far as is humanly possible, insured against similar catastrophes in future.124

  Templer insisted that in the Empire as a whole Communism was not the principal problem:

  Our enemy in the cold war is of course Communism. But in the Colonies this threat is for the most part indirect and intangible; it operates, if at all, through the medium of other anti-British manifestations which would be present even if the Communist Party had never been invented. Such manifestations are created by a wide variety of irritants, of which some of the most obvious are nationalism, racialism, religion, frustration, corruption and poverty. In Malaya, it is true, the fight is to keep a frontier against Communism. But in the other colonies its immediate impact is small or non-existent.125

  The one colony in which Whitehall saw a serious prospect of a Communist takeover was British Guiana, where, Templer reported, ‘The root of the problem, and consequently the way to deal with it, is a political matter outside my competence.’126 In April 1953, following the victory at the first elections held under universal suffrage of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), led by Cheddi Jagan, an American-educated dentist descended from ethnic Indian sugar-plantation workers, British Guiana had become the first British colony with a Marxist prime minister. Jagan and his wife, Janet (née Rosenberg), a Chicago Marxist, had first attracted the attention of the Security Service in 1947 when he made contact with the Soviets in Washington. From 1948 onwards he was in touch with British Communist Party headquarters.127 In 1950 the SLO in Trinidad, whose responsibilities also included British Guiana, described Jagan as an ‘astute politician’, who ‘wields great influence over a large number of people who have never been, and in all probability never will be, communists or have the slightest sympathy with communist aims and ideals’. Jagan’s support was based on popular opposition to the ‘selfish and high-handed’ sugar-plantation owners (most of them British agribusinesses) and other big employers.128 There was, the Security Service reported in 1951, ‘no evidence that the PPP is controlled or directed by any Communist organisation outside the Colony’.129 The Jagans, however, remained in touch with CPGB headquarters, which Janet Jagan visited soon after the 1953 PPP election victory.130

  Immediately following the formation of the PPP government, Winston Churchill began to consider seeking US assistance in ousting Jagan from power. He wrote to Lyttelton, the Colonial Secretary, on 2 May: ‘We ought surely to get American support in doing all that we can to break the Communist teeth in British Guiana.’ He added satirically, ‘Perhaps they would even send Senator McCarthy down there.’131 At the same time Churchill was enthusiastically supporting preparations for British – American covert action (‘Special Political Action’ in British parlance) to overthrow the supposedly pro-Communist Iranian Prime Minister, Muhammad Mussadeq.132 Though Mussadeq was duly overthrown, Churchill decided it would not, after all, be necessary to seek CIA assistance in British Guiana (CIA involvement was, however, later approved by the Macmillan government).133 In late September 1953 Lyttelton informed the cabinet that Jagan’s government ‘have no intention of working the present constitution in a democratic manner nor have any real interest in the good of the people of British Guiana. They have taken every opportunity to undermine the constitution and to further the communist cause.’134 On 27 September Churchill approved Operation WINDSOR: the unheralded landing of British troops in British Guiana on 9 October, accompanied by the dismissal of the Jagan government and the suspension of the constitution. (The SLO in Trinidad later paid tribute to his wife and the wife of the Commissioner of Police in Trinidad for preparing 600 sandwiches for the troops embarking on a British warship en route to Georgetown.)135 News of Operation WINDSOR, however, leaked out ahead of time and on 7 October, before the British Governor in Georgetown had been informed, The Times carried the dramatic headline: ‘Danger of Communist Coup in British Guiana: Troops Sent to Avert Risk of Bloodshed’.136

  After only 133 days as chief minister, Cheddi Jagan was ousted from office and the Governor given emergency powers which continued for the next three years. Churchill’s government justified Jagan’s overthrow by claiming that ‘the intrigues of Communists and their associates’ in the PPP government had threatened to turn British Guiana into ‘a Communistdominated state’. Despite some support for Jagan on the Labour backbenches, the Leader of the Opposition, Clement Attlee, also dismissed Jagan and his PPP colleagues as ‘either Communists or Communist stooges’.137 In 1955 Jagan’s former ally, the black lawyer Forbes Burnham, split the PPP into two factions and two years later formed the People’s National Congress. Thereafter British Guianan politics increasingly divided along ethnic lines with the PPP deriving most of its support from ethnic Indians and the PNC from urban blacks.138 Though the Security Service had told the Colonial Office some years earlier that Burnham was not of the same calibre as Cheddi and Janet Jagan,139 both the colonial administration and the CIA increasingly saw support for Burnham as one of the keys to defeating the Jagans.140 In most of the Empire, the Security Service contributed to a relatively smooth transfer of power. British Guiana, however, was to be a notable exception. The dominant intelligence agency there in the fraught years leading up to independence in 1966 was to be not the Service but the CIA.141

  8

  The End of Empire: Part 2

  As DG in the later 1950s, Roger Hollis found security in colonies and British-administered territories overseas of greater concern than security in Britain itself. On the eve of one of his many imperial tours in May 1958, he told the Home Secretary, R. A. ‘Rab’ Butler, that colonial ‘Special Branches undoubtedly needed all the help they could have, and we were getting a number of requests for assistance.’ Rab agreed that, as colonies approached independence, ‘it was right to devote considerable time to this aspect of our work.’1 The total number of colonial and Commonwealth police and administrative officers trained in Britain by the Security Service jumped from an average of 250 a year in the period from 1954 to 1958 to 367 in 1959.2 The Service felt it necessary to remind the JIC in 1960 that:

  The task of the Security Service at home differs markedly from its role overseas. In this country it is both producer of intelligence and consumer of its own product; overseas its representatives are not primarily intelligence producers. They are trainers and advisers of those who are purveyors of intelligence to them . . .3

  The most serious imperial intelligence challenge after the Malayan Emergency came in Cyprus. As in Malaya in 1948, there had been little advance warning before open warfare erupted in April 1955 between the EOKA guerrillas led by Colonel George Grivas, fighting for union with Greece, and British forces. The lack of intelligence available to the British authorities was due chiefly to the disorganization of the under-resourced Cyprus Special Branch, which had earlier been described by a head of Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME) as a ‘right royal muddle’.4 The EOKA ‘Death to Traitors’ campaign targeted the Special Branch and CID, as well as their agents and informers, in an attempt to break their morale.5 In May 1955 Donald Stephens of the Security Service was seconded to the Cyprus government to take up the new post of director of intelligence. The appointment in September as governor and commander in chief of Cyprus of Field Marshal Sir John Harding, a Malayan veteran who – like Templer – bridged the political–military divide, greatly strengthened Stephens’s authority. Philip Kirby Greene, who had become head of SIME earlier in the year, reported that Stephens was at the ‘very centre’ of the struggle against EOKA ‘
and enjoying every minute of it’.6 Masked informers, unflatteringly known as ‘hooded toads’, were used to identify EOKA guerrillas when suspects were rounded up.

  In December 1955 Operation FOXHUNTER uncovered a cache of EOKA documents including part of Grivas’s remarkably verbose diaries and almost succeeded in capturing Grivas himself, who at one point was hiding behind a tree within arm’s length of a British soldier. Operation LUCKY ALPHONSE in June 1956 captured seven members of Grivas’s entourage, his favourite Sam Browne belt and a further 250,000 words (two-thirds as long as this book) of his diaries. Once again Grivas had the closest of shaves, escaping just in time after being alerted to the arrival of British forces by a barking patrol dog. Sections of the diaries, which were read out at a London press conference and then published, provided damning evidence of the links between Archbishop Makarios III, the leader of the Greek Orthodox Church in Cyprus, and EOKA (though Grivas personally distrusted him), and helped to justify the decision taken in March to deport the Archbishop to Mahe, the most remote island in the Seychelles.7

  In November 1956 Harding declared for the first time a formal State of Emergency, and began a new intelligence-led offensive against EOKA which achieved a series of successes. Among the tactics employed were ‘Q patrols’ (so named after the disguised British armed merchant ships which had lured some German U-boats to their destruction during the First World War) composed of turned EOKA guerrillas and anti-EOKA Greek Cypriots who arrived in villages pretending to be guerrillas fleeing from British forces and asked to be put in touch with those who could shelter them.8 In his role as security intelligence adviser, A. M. MacDonald wrote to the Security Service after an operation which had, he believed, ended in ‘the complete destruction of the terrorist organisation in Nicosia and the disruption of the [EOKA] Central Courier System’ to say that both Stephens and the head of the Special Branch, W. D. ‘Bill’ Robinson, ‘both deserve the highest praise’.9 In March 1957 alone thirty EOKA bases were uncovered and twenty-two senior guerrillas killed or captured – among them Grivas’s second in command, Gregory Afxentiou, who was killed after an eight-hour firefight. Grivas agreed to a ceasefire in return for the release of Makarios, who was flown back from the Seychelles to begin tortuous negotiations for a political settlement.10 Stephens returned to London in July 1957 and was succeeded as director of intelligence by Bill Robinson, who, in the Service view, proved unequal to his job, particularly in coping with the emergence of a terrorist organization in the minority Turkish community and the growth of intercommunal violence.11