A Hack’s Progress
Phillip Knightley
Jonathan Cape, 1997, £17.99
This is a highly enjoyable and very well written memoir by one of our senior investigative journalists. As a young-Aussie-leaves-home-and-sees-the-world tale this is nearly as entertaining as the celebrated Clive James version (and with fewer forced jokes). Any journalist’s memoirs are welcome: it’s always interesting to get a glimpse into the inner workings of the major media, and Knightley was around the Sunday Times at its peak – and during its subsequent decline – and a participant in a number of that paper’s more famous (and infamous) episodes, including Thalidomide, the Hitler diaries (in which he was blameless, I hasten to add), and, most famous of all, the investigation of Philby.
His work for the Insight team on Philby was the beginning of a career in which he has repeatedly brushed up against the secret warriors of Langley, Virginia, and SIS. The revelation here in respect of the Philby affair is his discovery, years later, that Dennis Hamilton, the editor-in-chief of Times newspapers at the time of the Philby investigation, was routinely passing all the journalists’ work on Philby to SIS; and all the retired SIS officers interviewed by the Insight journalists were reporting back. It was a ‘controlled operation’.(1) Which is blindingly obvious once stated, but, I confess, it had never occurred to me – nor to Knightley; and it says something about the man that he cheerfully acknowledges this.(2)
On his way to London, Knightley worked in India for a company which published a magazine called Imprint, offering condensations of books. Years later he discovered that the magazine was part of the U.S.’s psy-war activities in India. In 1975 he was invited to lunch by an MI5 officer to be informed that Mountbatten was unreliable and had on his staff a homosexual who was a commie. Nothing got reported.(3) The great thing about Knightly is that being an Australian, he never bought into the Queen-country-loyalty-old-boy bullshit which surrounds so much of the spooks’ work in the U.K.. There are some now distinctly unfashionable – but very welcome – radical touches to this memoir. At the end of his chapter on his twenty years of dealings with the Philby story, he comments:
‘I suppose the crunch question is, knowing all you do now, would you have stood with Philby against the Fascists in Vienna in 1934? And for me, the answer has to be yes.’ (p. 248)
The Hamilton and Mountbatten anecdotes are in the only chapter devoted to his contacts with the secret servants. He calls it ‘The Greatest Con Trick of the Century’. Knightley thinks spies have been a waste of time and money in time of peace. He lists many instances of farce and chaos. He quotes imprisoned CIA officer Aldrich Ames’ opinion that it was all ‘a self-serving sham carried out by careerist bureaucrats who managed to deceive policy-makers and the public about the necessity and value of their work.’ Knightley reports attending an historical conference on intelligence in Germany in 1994.
‘I challenged a panel that included Sergei Kondrashov; his colleague the former head of the KGB Leonid Sherbarschin; former head of East German intelligence, Markus Wolff; and former head of West German intelligence, Heribert Hellenbroich, to name a single important histo-ical event in peacetime in which intelligence had played a decisive role. No one could so so.
He points out that despite the frequent penetration of U.S. and U.K. intelligence by their Soviet counterparts, the Soviet Union, not the West, collapsed.
‘The conclusion is obvious: intelligence can have played little or no role in this outcome. Economic strength, technological ability, political institutions, geography and population were far more important factors. The simple fact is that the Soviet Union was unable to prevent its citizens from learning about the West and it was obvious from the way the young of Moscow dressed, and from the music they played, that they considered life abroad better than what they had at home. The media, not the spies, won the Cold War.’
I think Knightley is a little too harsh here. In the first place, if we accept it was the media wot won it, whose media? For a goodly chunk of the Cold War the answer, where the Soviet bloc was concerned, would have been Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty or the Voice of America – and the first two named were certainly run by U.S. intelligence. (About VOA I am uncertain.) By asking for an event in which ‘intelligence’ as opposed to ‘intelligence services’ played a decisive role, Knightley has equated intelligence services – KGB, CIA et al – with the gathering of intelligence with which policy-makers could make decisions, when that was only one of their roles, and maybe not the most significant. The CIA played a major role in facilitating the take-over (and retention) by U.S. multinational capital of a goodly chunk of the so-called Third World in the post-war era.(4) A similar role was played by the British intelligence and security services in the British state’s attempts to hold on to its empire in the post-war era.(5) It is becoming increasingly clear that MI5 have played a considerable role in fragmenting and frustrating the British Left, and the FBI a similiar, albeit bloodier, role in the USA. I suspect we will find that throughout the Commonwealth countries the same thing happened. Little fragments keep cropping up. The latest is the report from New Zealand that their Security and Intelligence Service recruited the former general secretary of the New Zealand Communist Paper, Victor Wilcox in the mid-1980s.(6)
Significant if not decisive
By asking for a ‘decisive role’ played by intelligence Knightley is asking for too much. Even during the Cold War there have been occasions when the intelligence services, the CIA and SIS for example, actually did provide intelligence of substance. The first that springs to mind was the Cuban missile crisis, when the information from the Soviet intelligence officer Penkofsky about the actual accuracy of Soviet missiles did appear to play a major role in the outcome of the crisis.(7) The second was the role of Oleg Gordievsky in explaining Soviet policy and thinking just at the point when the Soviet Union was cracking up, thus smoothing to way for the Gorbachev relationship first with Thatcher and then with the Americans. ‘Decisive’ – maybe not; but not insignificant.
The cry that intelligence services are useless is a variation on the more specific cries in the last twenty-five years that the CIA’s predictions were useless; and these cries have often been fuelled by domestic U.S. politics. Think of the so-called ‘Team B’ exercise in the late 1970s when, unhappy with the CIA’s estimates on the Soviet strategic ‘threat’ at the time, a group of ‘hawks’ were given the same data and asked to do another estimate and, to no-one’s surprise, came up with a bigger ‘threat’, and thus the support for the increased expenditure on U.S. armaments sought by the neo-conservatives and the Pentagon and its satellite arms corporations.(8)
If the U.S. arms industry needed a bomber gap, a missile gap, or a psi gap, if the government needed a ‘communist’ menace in Guatemala or El Salvador, it was the job of the intelligence agencies, and particularly the CIA, to provide one, no matter how absurd they thought the request.(9)
Philby and other myths
Knightley’s feeling of having wasted a lot of time on piffle seems initially more justified when he looks at the amount of time he has spent on Philby et al, but even there I think his pessimism is a little misplaced. For with the Cambridge spy-ring we are dealing with one of the major components of the British ruling elites’ myth of Britain. Faced with inevitable British decline in the post-war years, the British ruling elites pursued three themes.
The first was that World War 2 had really been won by British know-how and little groups of specialists and brave men, and not by military and industrial power.(10) (This theme can be seen today in the belief that we need not have any industrial base in this country but can rely on providing services to those who do have such vulgar things. This is the expressed view of De Anne Julius, now one of the committee advising the Bank of England on setting interest rates in this country.)(11)
The second theme, a variation of the first, which only became apparent in the post-Philby era of increased candour about intelligence affairs, has been that while the Americans had all the money, it was British expertise which really counted in the diplomatic and intelligence field: clumsy Yanks, subtle Brits – the Romans and Greeks metaphor used by Harold Macmillan. This is the sub-theme in Verrier’s account of the Penkofsky affair in his Through the Looking Glass;(12) and it recurs in the British spy literature of the post-war years, from Ian Fleming to John Le Carré. The power of this myth was illustrated recently when, asked how Britain’s tiny SIS could make any impact on the world drugs trade when the U.S. agencies had failed with hundreds of times the resources of SIS, a ‘man from the FO [Foreign Office]’ replied:
‘Ah yes, but you have to take account of the fact that MI6 is the most professional and efficient intelligence in the world. This is not to criticise the Americans, of course, but….'(13)
The third theme has been that British decline was caused by treachery – the enemy within. Hence the anti-communist activity since the war which reached a peak in the hysteria of 1974-5 when a considerable section of the British ruling elites believed that a Labour government which had just received less than 40% of the vote in two elections was a harbinger of a Soviet-style state. Within the intelligence and security services, this myth took the form of the obsession with ‘moles’ which climaxed with ‘Spycatcher’ Peter Wright. In his affidavit to the court in Australia where the British government was trying to suppress his book Wright wrote, ‘The present state of Britain is in part due to the penetration of the establishment by the Russians’.(14)
By helping to expose the Philby story while with the Sunday Times Insight team, Knightley may have unwittingly helped propagate one of the establishment’s myths about class betrayal in the short term, but in the longer term the Philby exposé opened a door into the secret Whitehall world which the manderins could never close again.
Notes
- This section of book was published in the Sunday Times 24 August 1997.
- The episode also involved Prime Minister Harold Wilson acting as go-between – another example of Wilson trying to be a ‘good boy’ where the spooks were concerned.
- MI5 had it in for Mountbatten and I suspect it was they who relaunched the defunct International Times circa 1981 to run disinformation through it, including the Mountbatten-is-gay story. I have to write ‘circa’ because there is no date on these suspect editions.
- William Blum’s The CIA: a forgotten history, Zed Books, 1986, illustrates this was well as any single volume can. There has been a U.S. rewrite/update of this not yet made available in the UK.
- No single volume deals with this subject. Mark Curtis’ The Ambiguities of Power, Zed Books, London, 1995 gets closest, though it is thin on the role of the intelligence and security services.
- New Zealand Sunday Star-Times 16 February 1997.
- On which see Anthony Verrier’s Through the Looking Glass, Jonathan Cape, London, 1983
- On this see Lawrence Freedman’s U.S. Intelligence and the Soviet Strategic Threat, Macmillan, London, 1986, pp 197-8, or Peddlars of Crisis, Jerry W. Sanders, South End Press, Boston, 1986, chapter 6.
- See, more recently, for example, the comments of former CIA officer Ralph McGehee on his inability to persuade the CIA circa 1968 of the existence of a ‘mass-based popular movement in Vietnam’. Unclassified, no 42, Fall 1997,p. 14. Unclassified was founded by David McMichael as the organ of the Association of National Security Alumni after he had resigned from the CIA over its politicisation under Ronald Reagan. It is worth remembering that the Reagan administration actually tried to persuade its population that the U.S. was threatened – and threatened militarily
- This is discussed below in the review of John Newsinger’s Dangerous Men.
- See ‘The View from the Bridge’ in this issue
- See footnote 7 above.
- Sunday Telegraph 31 August, 1997.
- The Guardian 9 December 1986