Because of the need to reconcile the conflicting interests of Greek and Turkish Cypriots, the search for a political solution proved much more complex than in Malaya. Macmillan later called the ‘Cyprus Tangle’ ‘one of the most baffling problems I can ever remember’.12 Though the ceasefire lasted until October 1957, the first attempts to negotiate with Grivas and Makarios ran into the ground. The new governor appointed in December, Sir Hugh Foot, brother of the left-wing Labour MP Michael Foot and reputedly a left-winger himself, seemed better fitted than his predecessor to seek a political solution. He also sought to reform the intelligence system, which the former head of SIME, Philip Kirby Greene, who became SLO in Cyprus when SIME was wound up in 1958, told him in July was in ‘an appalling state of affairs’. In October Foot sent a personal request to the DG for a ‘high grade research officer’ to collate and assess all available intelligence with the aim of capturing Grivas and the entire EOKA leadership. To the delight of Foot and the Colonial Office, Hollis approved the appointment of Director E, Brigadier Bill Magan, for a six-month secondment. As soon as Magan arrived in Cyprus, Foot asked him to take over ‘the full intelligence task’, including heading the Special Branch; Magan declined but agreed to act as temporary special adviser to the Branch.13
Hollis wrote to Magan shortly after his arrival, ‘If we could seize Grivas this would surely knock the stuffing out of Eoka.’14 Magan set up a research team to go through the large accumulation of reports and captured documents on Grivas. Kirby Greene reported to the DG on 25 November: ‘Already he has found a considerable amount of intelligence, some of it of importance, which, it seems, passed unnoticed and certainly was not properly recorded or filed and to all intents and purposes was lost.’15 Magan acknowledged Grivas’s ‘exceptional singlemindedness’ and the way in which he had imposed his own austere lifestyle and passion for order on the EOKA guerrillas, but believed that he had serious limitations as a commander. As a result, his guerrillas had killed surprisingly few British soldiers:
Had the spirit of EOKA been more offensive, had there been more courage in their hearts, they could, shielded as they were by nearly the whole Greek Cypriot population, have on any day of the week carried out as many murders as they did in a month, and forced the British, as was the case a decade ago in Palestine, into a life of barbed wire cages, enormously increasing the static guarding commitment of the army.
Magan produced a lengthy personality profile of Grivas which, he acknowledged, might ‘in parts be thought a trifle colourful for an official paper. But I am writing about a man – an unusual man, and not, shall we say, about a gasworks.’16
In February 1959 tense and difficult negotiations on the future constitution of an independent Cyprus opened in the ornate setting of Lancaster House, London, whose ‘dignity and splendour’ were thought to exert ‘a potent and helpful influence’ on colonial delegations.17 While talks were proceeding at Lancaster House, Operation SUNSHINE in Cyprus succeeded in tracking down Grivas to an area in Nicosia where the security forces believed that he could be seized by a snatch squad. Had Grivas been caught, however, he would probably – like his second in command two years earlier – have died in a gun battle with the security forces. Over dinner during the Lancaster House conference, Macmillan inquired of the Greek Foreign Minister, Angelos Averoff, what the consequences would be if Grivas was captured. Averoff replied that the negotiations would collapse and a bloodbath would follow. Later the same evening, Macmillan gave instructions that Grivas was to be left undisturbed in his Nicosia hiding place.18 Magan, whose insight into Grivas’s mind and operations had made a major contribution to his discovery, was thus robbed of the prey he had hunted since his arrival in Cyprus. Sir Hugh Foot, who was one of Magan’s greatest admirers, wrote afterwards:
Just when [Magan] was establishing his mastery of the subject and moving into the stage of positive action, the powers that be were inconsiderate enough to settle the whole thing. I never see him without a feeling of guilt that I had some hand in this! But though his opponent was saved by the bell he is the first to recognise that what has happened has been very much for the best.19
The Lancaster House conference eventually agreed on the establishment of an independent Cyprus republic with a Greek president, a Turkish vice president and a House of Representatives with 70 per cent Greek and 30 per cent Turkish membership, the proportions reflecting the relative size of the two communities in the Cypriot population. Even at the eleventh hour Macmillan feared that Archbishop Makarios, later the first president of Cyprus, was about to torpedo the negotiations. The final difficulties, however, were resolved early on 19 February 1959. Macmillan noted in his diary, ‘An extraordinary day. Colonial Secretary rang at 9 a.m. (followed quickly by Foreign Secretary). The answer is “Yes”. The Cyprus agreement is therefore made.’20
The Security Service intelligence most appreciated by Whitehall during the series of negotiations in London during the late 1950s and early 1960s came from the surveillance of the colonial delegations. The Foreign and Colonial Secretaries both sent personal thanks to the Service via the Home Secretary, Rab Butler, for the intelligence obtained during the conferences which negotiated the independence of Cyprus and, a year later, began three years of intermittent negotiations over Kenyan independence. Hollis confessed to Butler that the surveillance of visiting delegations meant ‘we were moving a little outside the strict terms of my Directive.’ Butler immediately condoned this enlargement of Security Service operations on the grounds that ‘obviously the product was of great importance and of great value to the government negotiators.’21
In 1960, with Jomo Kenyatta still in jail, black and settler delegations from Kenya were invited to another conference at Lancaster House during which the Macmillan government committed itself to African majority rule.22 The Kenyan delegate of most interest to the Security Service during the negotiations was the firebrand future Deputy President of independent Kenya, Oginga Odinga. A bugged conversation at the CPGB’s King Street HQ on 19 February 1960 revealed that Odinga had asked Idris Cox of the Party’s International Department and one of his colleagues to draft a constitution for a new Kenyan political party of which he intended to be the leading figure.23 There was much in the uncompromising programme of Odinga’s Kenya African National Union (KANU), founded after the Lancaster House conference, of which his CPGB advisers undoubtedly approved. Unlike the more moderate Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), KANU demanded confiscation of all settler estates and property, the ending of foreign investment and nationalization of industry. How far the KANU programme was actually influenced by the CPGB, however, is uncertain. A Kenya Special Branch ‘research paper’, forwarded to London by the SLO in Nairobi in September 1960, did not take Odinga’s Communism very seriously:
Throughout it has been manifest that Odinga is not an ideological convert to Communism, but has regarded the Eastern Bloc as a new and untapped source of financial aid with which to bolster his political prestige in Kenya . . . Odinga by himself is not of sufficiently high calibre to subvert African nationalism in Kenya to Communism, although an attempt might be made to groom him for that role.24
Odinga’s fundraising success in the Soviet Bloc and China soon led him to be taken more seriously. According to an intelligence report forwarded to London by the SLO in November:
The assistance he has already obtained, although substantially less than he alleges has been promised him, is enough to ensure that his influence in the next few months will be very disruptive. In the longer term he could become a vehicle for external subversion on a familiar pattern, and as a means for the ultimate return to Kenya of a cadre of trained Communist agents.25
At the 1961 general election, KANU won a sweeping victory but refused to form a government until Kenyatta was freed. Kenyatta was finally released in August 1961 and entered the legislature after a by-election as president of KANU. Odinga had probably expected him to emerge from prison as a shadow of his former self – about seventy ye
ars old (no one knew his exact age), physically feeble, alcoholic, out of touch and a figurehead whom Odinga could dominate. Instead Odinga quickly found himself outmanoeuvred by Kenyatta, who distanced himself from KANU’s election programme, reassuring white settlers that they would be welcome to stay in an independent Kenya and that their property would not be confiscated. ‘Many of you’, he told them, ‘are as Kenyan as myself.’ ‘The mastermind of Mau Mau’, as Baring had mistakenly called him, proved instead to be a master of magnanimity.26 In June 1963, six months before independence, Kenyatta was sworn in as Kenya’s first prime minister. Two months later he made a celebrated appeal to white settlers to ‘forgive and forget’ and stay on in an independent Kenya – as most of them did.
In October 1963 Kenyatta led a KANU delegation to London to complete independence negotiations at Lancaster House. The Security Service was informed by a Colonial Office official that Duncan Sandys, Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations from July 1960 to October 1964 (as well as Colonial Secretary from July 1962), ‘attached great importance to the service of intelligence we were giving him about the activities and views of the delegates to the Kenya conference’.27 Hollis complained that Sandys had risked compromising the intelligence by referring to some of what it revealed during the negotiations. According to a Colonial Office official, the Kenyan delegation ‘looked a little stunned’ after one of Sandys’s indiscretions. The PUS at the Colonial Office, Sir Hilton Poynton, agreed that Hollis’s complaint about Sandys’s misuse of intelligence was well founded. Sooner than ‘attempt to rebuke my Secretary of State’, he told Hollis that he was trying to ensure that Sandys did not make the same mistake again.28
Though Kenyatta was thought to suspect that his delegation was under surveillance, these suspicions, remarkably, did not affect his relations with the Security Service. While in London, he and his attorney general, Charles Njonjo, called on Hollis in Leconfield House, apparently at their own request. Hollis began by saying he was pleased that Kenyatta had got to know the SLO in Nairobi, Walter Bell.29 Kenyatta replied that ‘he had had interesting talks with Mr Bell,’ who lived next door to his daughter. He had been pleased to learn that two Kenyan policemen were currently on MI5 training courses and said he would like to send more. He asked whether the Security Service might also send officers to conduct less advanced training courses in Kenya. Though Kenya already had its own police training college, ‘he thought it very useful to have trainers from outside. They carried greater authority and might have fresh ideas.’ ‘It was’, Hollis informed the Colonial Office, ‘a friendly meeting.’30 Kenyatta had clearly signalled his desire for continuing liaison with, and advice from, the Security Service after independence. In December 1963 he begame the first prime minister of independent Kenya with Odinga as his deputy. A year later, Kenya became a republic with Kenyatta as president.
Intelligence obtained from the surveillance of colonial delegations was also highly valued by British negotiators during the protracted and fraught negotiations which eventually led to the winding up in 1963 of the Central African Federation, whose ill-considered creation in 1951 had lumped together Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, both overwhelmingly black, with the white supremacist regime in Southern Rhodesia. Macmillan developed a personal dislike for the volatile and pugnacious white Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, Sir Roy Welensky (a former prize fighter), and seems to have taken a particular interest in the transcripts of his private conversations. He later recalled an occasion during negotiations in March 1961 when Welensky’s room at the Savoy Hotel was bugged: ‘. . . Welensky always thought he was very clever . . . [He] would say to his entourage, “We pulled a fast one on the British Government.” But this was immediately relayed to me . . . so he was not so clever as he thought . . .’31 The Security Service officer responsible for providing intelligence to ministers on the Southern Rhodesian delegation recalls that Duncan Sandys reacted in such an ‘impetuous’ manner that he decided to ration what the Secretary of State was told.32
The Security Service relationship with Kenya and most other newly independent African colonies in the early 1960s followed the pattern established in Ghana in 1956 when the SLO, John Thomson, had introduced himself to Kwame Nkrumah.33 Alex Kellar noted in 1962: ‘It is our custom to declare the role of the Security Service, and in particular of its S.L.O.s, when the office of Chief Minister is first held by an indigenous politician. It is our normal practice to do this at the same time as indigenous ministers are officially informed of the Special Branch and the local intelligence community as a whole.’ Before the independence of Tanganyika in 1961 and Uganda in 1962, Kellar personally assisted the local Governors in briefing their leaders, Julius Nyerere and Milton Obote.34 Following the acrimonious winding up of the Central African Federation, however, Hastings Banda, the leader of independent Malawi (formerly Nyasaland), declined to continue the existing arrangement under which a Central African SLO based in Salisbury also had responsibility for the other two states in the former Federation. After discussions between Banda and the DDG, Furnival Jones, early in 1964, it was agreed to station a new SLO in Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia) who would also be accredited to Malawi.35 In Asia, as well as in Africa, some of the SLOs won high praise from their newly independent hosts. In 1962, for example, Hollis showed the Home Secretary a letter from Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore ‘thanking us for [SLO] Christopher Herbert’s work’.36
For Kellar, as Director E from 1958 to 1962, the success of SLOs in winning the confidence of newly independent governments, ‘so strikingly recognised at each Commonwealth Security Conference’, was a matter of enormous pride:
In the case of the African Commonwealth countries, I have felt – profoundly so – that the contributions that we as a Security Service have been making to their own security by our training facilities, by our service of information, and by the close links which we are building up in running joint agent operations, together constitute a record of which we can be legitimately proud . . . we have built up in these new emergent territories cadres of indigenous officials who admire, respect and trust us and who can do much to influence their political masters in the right direction.
. . . We shall never be able to make any African country pro-West but, by this kind of support, we can at least assist them to sit on the fence and not to fall over on the wrong side.37
The close relations between SLOs and a number of independent governments and their security departments increased their value to British high commissions, which no longer had the direct access to all branches of the local administration that they had enjoyed during the colonial era.38 SLOs were thus formally given the additional responsibility in 1962 of providing political intelligence (not, however, involving the use of agents) to high commissions – as had happened informally in New Delhi and some other Commonwealth capitals for some years.39 The increased Soviet presence in newly independent Commonwealth countries also strengthened the importance of SLOs’ liaison with their special branches and security services:
Newly independent countries invariably loom large in the Cold War; they are targets of a political and economic offensive by the Communist Bloc and they often welcome embassies, delegations and advisers from these countries. This creates a demand for intelligence about the Communist Bloc from the newly independent Commonwealth countries.40
Some security liaisons with former colonies, however, proved short lived. The SLO in Uganda reported in 1962 that ministers were ‘unwilling or unready to absorb our advice’.41 The SLO in Tanganyika, who also failed to establish a productive relationship with the post-independence government, was withdrawn in 1964.42 The SLO in Zambia in 1965–7 found himself frozen out when an African head of Special Branch took over from a British expatriate. The posts in both Uganda and Zambia were closed in 1967.43
The relationship between the SLO in Accra and the Nkrumah regime was also under threat. When the first SLO in independent Ghana, John Thomson, had left Accra in June 1960, he had regard
ed Nkrumah as ‘a bastion against communism’. On his return for a second posting in June 1962, he discovered what the British high commissioner dramatically called ‘a lurch to the left’.44 Nkrumah was deceived by forged KGB documents which purported to reveal that the CIA had assassinated the Prime Minister of Burundi and attempted a coup in Tanganyika. After an assassination attempt against him in 1962 Nkrumah became obsessed by the belief that the Agency was plotting his overthrow, gave visitors copies of a book denouncing CIA conspiracies,45 and accepted a Soviet offer to send a KGB officer to give advice on his personal security.46 Other officers from the KGB and the East German Stasi followed to train a new National Security Service which ran a large network of informers (a particular speciality of the Stasi).47
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