Liberalism at Large
Page 31
Brian Crozier and Foreign Report
Recruited as the Economist’s East Asia correspondent in 1954, Crozier also took control of its new ‘confidential bulletin’ called Foreign Report. Crozier seems to have landed the job through British secret service contacts picked up as a reporter for Reuters in Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaya, and he returned the favour – printing propaganda from MI6, the CIA and other Western spy agencies in this eight-page bulletin for the next decade: indeed, Foreign Report explicitly marketed itself to corporations, governments, news outlets and select individuals as containing information ‘too hot’ to go in the Economist itself, though in practice much of it did. Crozier’s links to the Information Research Department, set up secretly in 1948 by the Labour government to lead the ‘propaganda counter-offensive against Communism’ from inside the Foreign Office, were very close. Andrew Boyd, an Economist colleague, introduced Crozier to his IRD contact over lunch at the Traveller’s Club in 1955. Afterwards, around 20 to 30 per cent of each issue of Foreign Report came from the IRD.125 As Crozier saw it, there was no conflict between this sourcing of stories and journalistic ethics. The Soviet Union was an evil so pure – an ‘irredeemable obscenity of history, condemning humanity to inescapable enslavement’ – that it had to be fought by any means necessary, and that meant using not just physical but psychological force. Crozier felt it his mission to rouse the West, whose ‘timidity’ in the Cold War thus far shocked and dismayed him. How else, in his opinion, to explain the Truman Doctrine and McCarthy trials? The former was limited to containment when the need was ‘not simply to resist further encroachments, but to liberate countries that had fallen to the Soviet Empire’; the latter had allowed itself to be misperceived as ‘hysterical’ when ‘there was indeed a vast network of Soviet spies in America’.126 In this worldview, national movements for independence did not take place, and there was nothing inevitable about decolonization. There were only ‘Moscow-directed insurgencies’, which spread in one unscrupulous chain from East Asia to North Africa to the Middle East and on to Latin America.
Crozier’s ‘outside interests’, which sent him on constant trips abroad, seem to have been an open secret at the Economist. ‘I don’t know who pays for Brian, you see’, Tyerman joked.127 On a flight back from an intelligence-gathering trip to Algiers, Crozier happened to sit next to Colonel Antoine Bonnemaison, of the Service de Documentation Extérieure de Contre-Espionnage, who became one of his important sources. Bonnemaison was reading a letter from General Salan, thanking him warmly for talks on ‘psychological warfare’ he had given to the French Army. ‘On learning I was the editor of the Economist’s Foreign Report he told me he had long been a regular reader and admirer of “my” bulletin.’ Crozier obtained a scoop – predicting in Foreign Report that General de Gaulle, popular among the demoralized French officer corps in Algeria, was about to have a ‘second coming’.128 On assignment for the Economist in Francophone Africa in 1961, Crozier hailed the ouster and murder of the first elected leader of the independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba, who ‘had many Communist friends’, and applauded Mobutu Sese Seko, who ‘gave Communist embassies forty-eight hours to leave the country’.129 The same year, Crozier worked up his field notes into The Rebels – on independence struggles in Palestine, Cyprus, Malaya, Indochina, Algeria and West Africa – which, he boasted, was soon the ‘textbook on counter-insurgency’ and ‘stasiology’ for security services in Israel, Greece, Lebanon, Taiwan, Columbia and the US. His only regret was that ‘in deference to my connection with the Economist, I had written impartially’. Incredibly, some readers were not sure which side he was on: ‘in future I would give priority to objectivity over impartiality’.130
Crozier led a busy life after leaving the Economist in 1964. He published a biography of Franco based on an interview with ‘Spain’s saviour’ in 1967, questioning whether the Nazis had really bombed Guernica after all.131 He ran two CIA-funded media mills, Forum World Features and the Institute for the Study of Conflict, which fought moves towards ‘peaceful coexistence’ and détente – with FWF sending stories to press outlets both abroad and at home, such as the Sunday Times and the Guardian, until 1975, when Time Out exposed it.132 Undeterred, Crozier then ‘closeted’ himself with General Augusto Pinochet to draft a post-coup constitution for Chile; supplied juntas in Uruguay and Argentina with ‘psychological techniques’ to use on leftist dissidents; and later that decade founded Shield – a committee of experts to ‘educate’ the Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher on communist subversion, the ‘political equivalent of AIDS’, inside the Labour Party, trade unions, schools, universities, churches, media and local councils (‘the site of a possible Marxist-Leninist coup’). In 1977 he set up a ‘boutique’ intelligence firm, ‘the 61’, to spy on the peaceniks and pink journalists these civil society groups contained, with a wink from nominally law-abiding Western governments.133
Crozier had a continuing impact on the Economist. Brian Beedham, the foreign editor from 1963 to 1989, was a friend and collaborator, who brought another Crozier protégé, Robert Moss, onto the paper in 1970. Four years later, Moss was editing Foreign Report, which at that point, fumed Barbara Smith, ‘was being written by Mossad’.134 The bulletin’s vantage point on empire differed from that of Kyle or Ward. Crozier dismissed the idea of developing the commonwealth with British capital as ‘a morass in which billions of pounds were sunk without a trace by Western banks’, while decolonization failed to register, vanishing from a radar that only picked up the Cold War.135 At times liberalism itself became a byword for blindness to this all-encompassing struggle. Those who opposed abridgments of civil liberties or nuclear arms were ‘bien-pensant liberals’ and ‘soft liberalism incarnate’, while the Liberal Party – through which Crozier passed a ‘regretted membership’ of six months in 1962 – was filled with ‘wets’ and ‘pacifists’, had ‘no understanding of the real issues and was unlikely to learn.’136 Crozier and his allies clashed spectacularly with those they found too soft at the Economist in 1956, as a sudden crisis engulfed the paper and its new editor.
The Suez Crisis
For the Economist, the Suez Crisis began in July 1956, when the US pulled its loan offer to build the Aswan Dam in Egypt. Britain was forced to follow suit, suggesting that London might now be unable to act alone as an investor; the same soon became clear about its military capacity. Of the first loan instalment, $200 million was to come from the World Bank, $56 million from the US and $14 million from Britain; when Dulles demurred, so did new prime minister Anthony Eden. One week later, the Egyptian president Abdel Nasser took over the Suez Canal. On 4 August, in ‘Europe’s Achilles Heel’, the Economist advised calm, pointing out that Nasser was guilty of ‘bad manners’ for nationalizing the waterway, but had not restricted traffic through it; that by the terms of the concession, ownership would pass to Cairo anyway in 1968; and that an occupation would solve nothing. There were better options, some picked up from the earlier fight with Mossadegh over the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in Iran: diplomatic isolation, building a second canal and more pipelines, and above all threats to withhold capital, since Nasser had struck ‘the severest possible blow to the principle of investment in underdeveloped countries’.137
It came as a complete shock to the editors when Eden instead launched an attack with France to retake the canal, on the pretext of breaking up a prearranged Israeli assault. News of the Anglo-French ultimatum to both ‘sides’ reached Keith Kyle at Washington’s Press Club, where he had gone to find out the latest news on the Hungarian uprising. Stunned, he let telexes fly. First, to the Conservative Party central office, whose representative he was due to meet at the Mayflower Hotel two days later to discuss his joining a party of ‘fine liberal fellows like Eden, Rab Butler and Iain Macleod’. ‘I had seen, as if in a burning flash, just why I could never be a Conservative and why it had been a mistake to suppose I ever could have been.’ He also sent messages to Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, and to Tyerman, recounting an
off-the-record discussion between the secretary of state John Foster Dulles and several journalists, in which Dulles fumed at the British government’s ineptitude. Americans were just as committed to removing Nasser, but ‘the British had to have it by Christmas’, and Dulles warned that Imre Nagy’s announcement that Hungary would withdraw from the Warsaw Pact – eleven days before the Soviets intervened to stop this – meant ‘the US would not need to defer so much as it had done to the colonialism of its NATO partners’.138
Back in the Economist’s London office, Barbara Cruikshank and Nancy Balfour pointed at Kyle’s message to show that Britain was out on a dangerous limb. John Midgley seconded them, and Elizabeth Monroe, the Middle East editor, channelled their views into ‘Splenetic Isolation’ the next week. US reluctance to confront Nasser was indeed frustrating, Monroe granted, but acting alone, ‘under cover of a smoke-screen of obfuscatory statements’, France and Britain had done ‘their worst to justify the “imperial” label they so much (and, as it seemed, so rightly) resented’. ‘In the larger Asian world, they have supplied Soviet propagandists with enough anti-colonial material for a decade’, in an operation with an improvised air about it, this ‘strange union of cynicism and hysteria’.139 Monroe returned later to what she and some of her colleagues felt was lost at Suez. ‘The consequences of Eden’s decision to the remainder of British power and influence in the Middle East were great and detrimental’, she wrote in 1963’s Britain’s Moment in the Middle East. France and Israel could hate Nasser. ‘Britain, beset by extraneous interests, could not’; it had to consider ‘Commonwealth opinion, particularly Nehru’s pacifist opinion’ in India and ‘think of the effect on their faithful ally, Nuri Pasha in Iraq’.140
Tyerman called on Eden to resign the next week, but added a new reason, evoking the intensity of the crisis. ‘A British Prime Minister must not be alienated from the uncommitted countries and very much more, must not be at loggerheads with the leaders of America’, especially given the opportunities this created for ‘our real potential enemies’. Suez had already emboldened ‘Russian imperialism’, which ‘ten days ago looked as if it might be drawing back’ in Hungary.141 Crowther expressed heartfelt agreement. ‘Eden’s worst crime was not using force’, he wrote, emphasizing his own slant on the situation in a letter to Tyerman. ‘It was endangering the Anglo-American alliance by disloyalty, fraud and deceit.’ Repairing ties was impossible so long as the ‘vain, petty, vindictive’ Eden was in office. ‘He must go.’142 With only Brian Crozier opposed to caving to the Americans, Crowther’s words were decanted directly into the leader of 17 November.143 ‘The great task of statesmanship now is to rebuild the alliance’, it declared. ‘We cannot go it alone, we must learn that we are not the Americans’ equals now, and cannot be.’144 This was also the first time the paper registered the magnitude of the run on sterling that had begun with Eden’s ultimatum, as ‘no ordinary crisis’. Having failed to predict the financial fallout, the Chancellor, Harold Macmillan, now exaggerated it, telling colleagues on 6 November that £100 million had gone – one-eighth of the reserves.145 Faced with the break-up of the sterling area, devaluation, and a return to rationing, Eden halted the operation that morning; only then did the US allow Britain to draw on IMF funds to defend the exchange rate.146
If dissent was minimal within the newsroom, criticism rained down from outside the Economist. ‘From a heavy postbag this week’, ran a special letters section, ‘we have selected a few from the large majority which take an opposite view from that expressed in our leading article “Splenetic Isolation”.’ For K. Clarence Smith of Surrey it ‘dealt a shattering blow to the respect with which I have hitherto regarded your opinions’. ‘As an old and regular reader of your paper, I write today for the first time to any paper to say how deplorable I think your leading article was’, ran another. Many bristled at the idea that absolute deference should be shown Washington. ‘I do not think the majority of our people would find that proposition acceptable.’147 J. E. Simon, the Conservative MP from Middlesborough West attributed ‘obsessional attacks’ on Eden to ‘a psychological malaise’ at the Economist, which ignored ‘the likelihood of a general war in the Middle East, Russian intervention leading to world war, loss of oil supplies’ if Nasser had not been punished.148 Kyle, just returned to London, recalled his chilly reception at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, where he and a friend joined a few young men gathered around a small coal fire, the one source of heat during the fuel shortage caused by Suez:
‘Of course, I’ve cancelled my subscription to the Observer’, said one, amid murmurs of approval. ‘It’s such a shame about the list of Oxford dons signing that letter to The Times,’ said another. ‘It means that I shan’t be able to go to my tutor’s sherry parties ever again.’ There was a general sigh of sympathy. ‘And then,’ said a third man, ‘there’s the Economist.’ The party then noticed the two of us sitting silently by the fireplace. ‘Do you read the Economist?’ I was asked. ‘No,’ I answered with studied venom, ‘I write it.’ There was a stunned silence and then, slowly and sadly the young men rose and without a word left the club.149
From Liberal Commonwealth to Special Relationship
Suez was only the first salvo in a war of words over the future of empire, as a subtle difference in emphasis between Crowther and Tyerman gradually sharpened into a disagreement – not over the ‘special relationship’ (‘much the most important thing’ for both), but whether this left room for independent policy with respect to imperial and ‘uncommitted countries’ (a reference to the Non-Aligned Movement announced at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955). ‘Though the paper accepted, in a general way, that European empires had had their day’, Barbara Smith wrote of her first years at the Economist, which she joined in 1956 covering Latin America, ‘we argued heatedly over the timing and the pace of Britain’s departure from Cyprus, Aden, huge chunks of Africa.’150 Keen to ‘witness the process of decolonisation in Africa’, Kyle also joined the fray, writing on Kenya starting in 1960, and meeting Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya and other leaders in London during independence negotiations. Next year he flew to Tunis for the All-African People’s Conference. If decolonization in some form was inevitable, at least Britain, he consoled himself, was better at it than France: the ‘pragmatism’ of ‘Africans from the English-speaking colonies such as Chief Enahoro from Nigeria’ impressed him more than the French-speakers, who talked loftily and with paranoia, he felt, of ‘le néo-colonialisme’ and ‘la balkanization’.151 Indifferent to these larger questions, Kyle viewed decolonization in processual terms: in books on Kenya and Cyprus after leaving the Economist – drawing on his work for it, the BBC in East and Central Africa, and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House – there is little criticism of British statesmen (who, outside Suez, are seen to have carried out an orderly end to empire), or those to whom they passed the baton in the ex-colonies.152 Editorials were therefore mainly cautious compromises, and not just because of pushback from Crowther. Smith recounted her one ‘nose-to-nose meeting’ with the latter at around this time in a painfully slow-moving office elevator, as decolonization sped up after 1960. ‘Valiantly making conversation, I suggested that the colonial secretary of the day was doing rather well, but Crowther harrumphed, “Yes, if you want him to give the whole damn lot away!”.’
The notion that after 1945 the Economist accepted the end of empire ‘in a general way’ is unsustainable. As Smith discovered, arguments over ‘pace and timing’ were not mere technical details, and turned on the preservation of property rights, resource-access, strategic interests, and connecting these – the likely ideological direction of the successor state; in other words, the very issues of ‘neocolonialism’ that Keith Kyle had so airily dismissed in Tunis. What did arguments about ‘the end of empire’ look like in practice?
The Economist backed ‘self-determination’ for Cyprus after the start of armed nationalist insurgencies there in 1955, but only if British military bases remained. The Me
diterranean stronghold, acquired from the Ottomans in 1878, had a new purpose – as Britain’s imperial ‘headquarters for the Middle East’ and NATO’s ‘eastern flank’. In 1960, the paper endorsed a castrated version of independence, which made the bases on Cyprus sovereign enclaves, and severely restricted the freedom of its new government to direct or alter its affairs: a Treaty of Guarantee between Britain, Turkey and Greece allowed all three powers to intervene at will on the island, while constitutional ‘safeguards’ for the Turkish Cypriot minority blocked Nicosia’s exercise of legislative, administrative, judicial or military power on a national basis.153 The same year also began with a special issue on Africa, where Harold Macmillan embarked on a whistle-stop tour – set to meet ‘the challenge of Black Africa in Ghana and Nigeria, and the obduracy of White Africa in Salisbury and Cape Town’. The Economist proposed speeches for the prime minister with the ‘right clichés’ to satisfy a ‘strong, liberal African lobby or crossbench’ – about free elections and a free press, with highlights on Cameroon, Nyasaland, Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland, which had all expressed a cross-racial preference to ‘hold onto their connections with Britain’.154 The paper read the actual ‘winds of change’ speech Macmillan gave in South Africa along the same lines as its own drafts: not a shift, but a restatement of the policy of gradually preparing colonies for self-government. Nigeria, in contrast to neighbouring Congo, was a shining example of this, moving ‘with almost majestic calm and self-confidence towards its date with national destiny’, when it would become ‘Africa’s greatest democratic state’ thanks to a federal ‘British-made constitution’. The Central African Federation offered similarly rosy prospects, if only black nationalists in Nyasaland would agree to set aside their ‘neuroses’ about union with Northern and Southern Rhodesia in exchange for guarantees of parity with whites during a five-year federalist trial period.155