The final testimony of George Kennedy Young
Introduction
When this was published we believed that it had been written by a close friend of his. Subsequently we learned that it had been written by Young himself. As far as we were able to judge, it is accurate. But this is by no means the whole story. Hardly anything about Young’s political activities in the late sixties and seventies is included. Even with those omissions this is an interesting document. We tried to meet and correspond with Young, but to no avail. This account will have to do. Whether you agree with Young’s politics or not, Young was an important figure in post-war history. Apart from some minor disagreements with the author over punctuation and sentence construction, no changes have been made to the original.
As with others in World War Two it was chance that brought Young into intelligence work. Seconded from the K.O.S.B. (presumably, King’s Own Scottish Borderers) to the King’s African Rifles, he arrived in East Africa in January 1941 just as the campaign against the Italians was launched. On the basis of his rather sketchy Italian, he was posted to General Staff Intelligence and on the fourth day off the troopship, and after a quick perusal of the Manual of Military Intelligence in the Field, he was bumping north in a 15-cwt truck with an African driver, three weeks rations and a 40-gallon drum of water to catch up with the 11th African Division. It had already crossed the Italian Somaliland border.
Since he was regularly switched between the forward brigades for the quick interrogation of prizoners and the examination of captured documents he saw all the major actions of the wide-ranging campaign; and when the towns of Mussolini’s Italian African Empire were occupied, he took over security duties, contact with the local police and carabinieri, rounding up leading Fascist officials and checking for possible stay-behind agents. Young reckoned that he owed his intelligence career to Major General Santini, captured outside Addis Ababa. He was warned by Division not breach any Geneva Conventions in his interrogation but he found the General only too happy to give as much detail of the Corpe di Armata facing Cunningham’s force, with such helpful suggestions as to where the RAF could find the Corp’s HQ. When he returned with the information he was greeted with, ‘Good God! How did you manage it?’ ‘Ha’, said Young who by then was up on the state of the game, ‘We in intelligence, we have our methods.’ He was promoted local (unpaid) captain.
After the surrender of the last Italian garrison at Gendar he spent 1942 running cross-frontier intelligence and propaganda against French Somaliland which was still in Vichy hands. By then he had probably more practical experience of all aspects of field work than any other officer in East Africa Command and was posted to Nairobi as GSO 2(I), and Chief Instructor at the Command Intelligence School. A training programme had been started for the staffs of the East African forces going to Burma. Lengthy reports and descriptions of Pacific actions, Japanese tactics and weaponry received weekly from New Delhi, Melbourne, the U.S. Mission and Eastern Fleet were quickly analysed and turned into training and recognition aides by a team of Japanese speakers and experts. Here Young’s peacetime experience as sub-editor on American and British papers, and as a cable editor with British United Press, stood him in good stead. Young often quoted the dictum of his C-in-C, Lieutenant General Sir William Platt, for whom he had a high regard: ‘The ideal intelligence report can be read by the light of a match on a restive horse on a windy night.’
But East Africa had become a backwater and Young dropped rank back to Captain to join one of the new Special Counter-Intelligence Units (SCI) in Italy. Their task was to play back captured enemy agents for both deception and counter-espionage. The first team, consisting of Malcolm Muggeridge and Aubrey Jones, had not exactly been a roaring success, and the units were restaffed with East African officers with practical security experience in Italian territory. As the Allied forces advanced up the peninsula the network of wireless agents left behind by the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst was steadily rolled up and turned, as part of the deception strategy essential to the campaign as Field Marshall Alexander repeatedly had divisions removed to other fronts.
The round-up of the concentration in Rome of such agents, known in great part from Ultra, was one of Young’s main achievements. From his experience he took his time in the days immediately following the Allied liberation, checked locations and identities, and at dawn a special plainclothes squad of carabinieri collected some dozen complete with transmitters and codes. As Young recalls, the Germans had issued each agent with his equipment in a little suitcase with a Royal Stewart tartan cover. Even after weeding out the less promising cases, there were more than the British could handle and they were shared out to the first OSS SCI Unit under Major Andrew Bording and a Free French team under Colonel Parizot. The one SD agent left behind in Rome was a Dutch girl, Helen ten Cate Brouwer, who, on interrogation by Young, mentioned his wife – under her maiden name – as having been a student friend at Leiden University. ‘What happened to her?’, he asked. ‘I think she married a German’, said Helen.
And in the same summer he was involved in the vain attempt by HMG to enlist the support, even covert and discreet, of the Vatican to halt the persecutions and exterminations in Nazi-occupied Europe. In his book Who Is My Liege? Young gives an authoritative account of this approach through Monsignor Montini, later Pope Paul VI, which is strangely ignored in recent lengthy and inaccurate publications on this controversial topic. For his work in Rome Young was awarded an MBE, the one decoration he said he really sweated for, as against the departmental handouts of his later career.
In October ‘C’ – then Major General Sir Stewart Menzies – summoned him to London to investigate the ramifications of the case of ‘the Dutchman in the Tower’, namely Christian Lindemans, also known as King Kong. As a lorry driver on the Atlantic coast fortifications, Lindemans had been pressurised by the Abwehr into penetrating the MI9 escape-and-evasion line from the Low Countries to the Spanish frontier. Thanks to his efforts, the Germans were able to identify most of the safe houses and passeurs, although they still allowed RAF escapees to reach the Pyrenees before picking them up. Lindemans, basically a simple soul caught up in the confused cross-pressures of occupation, was already under suspicion by the Dutch resistance. Despite this, after turning up in liberated Belgium, he was recruited by Prince Bernhard’s intelligence staff – without any proper vetting – to contact underground groups prior to the Arnhem landings.
To establish the extent of the damage, Young had patiently to unravel the whole unsavoury tale which revealed utter negligence by the Prince and his entourage. However it became clear King Kong’s treachery had in no way contributed to the Arnhem setback nor endangered still active resistance groups. Although he had contacted his Abwehr controller, the latter had paid no particular attention to his rather general statement that a major allied landing was pending. The Germans were already on the qui vivre from stepped-up Allied air reconnaissance and W/T traffic while the unfortunate King Kong was detained by a suspicious Eindhoven policeman before he could do any further harm. Although the circumstances of Lindeman’s death in prison after the war are obscure, a Dutch security officer told Young: ‘We’ll probably give him a pill’.
The final months of the war were spent in the Vosges liaising with the Americans and the French on the last playbacks – although by then it was doubtful whether the German High Command gave much credence to Abwehr reports. By the German surrender Young had been promoted Lieutenant- Colonel and was put in charge of supervising the liquidation of the Abwehr and the foreign espionage section of the Sicherheitsdienst and collecting any evidence of the success or otherwise of their operations against British targets. As he recalled, the OKH (Army High Command) pre-war files on the United Kingdom largely contained cuttings from The News of the World. However he once commented that corresponding Whitehall records would not have so different, relating how British United Press early in 1939 put out a series of stories ‘Secrets of Goering’s Air Force Revealed’, giving details of its production programme, organisation and deployment. An anxious Air Ministry was soon on the phone to be told by Young that the articles had been lifted from the previous week’s Essener National Zeitung. ‘Well actually, old chap’, asked the worried RAF man, ‘could you let us have the original newspapers?’
On demobilization Young went thankfully back to Fleet Street and was sent to Berlin as BUP correspondent. But he could never quite disengage from intelligence. Dropping into British Army HQ he told the GSO 1 Intelligence, Colonel ‘Bimbo’ Howard, that he was going on a tour of the Russian zone and was there anything they would particularly like to know. ‘Yes’, said Howard. ‘Although we have a good estimate of Soviet troop strength, we are not quite sure of the chain of command And there is a new trestle bridge at Frankfurt-en-Oder and we’d like to know how many JS tanks they can get across in an hour.’
In due course Young arrived at the Oder crossing and there was the new bridge with a Soviet engineer major standing by. ‘That’s a wonderful bridge built by the Red Army’, remarked Young. ‘How many J S tanks an hour can it take?’ ‘Oh’, beamed the major, ‘X number at normal speed but we could step it up to Y for a short period.’ When the press party met the Russian commander at Karlshorst, he skilfully evaded questions on army strength and deployment.
On the wall behind was a situation map with its corps, divisional and regimental signs which Young quietly studied. While at university he realised that he had a photographic memory which enabled him to recall complete pages of text. In fact he had once been accused of cribbing! Back in Berlin two days later he shot into headquarters: ‘Quick Bimbo! Have you got a map?’ However the post-war reduction of daily papers to four pages and the lack of interest in ‘serious’ foreign news was disillusioning, and after some weeks MI6 made him an offer, with very attractive terms, of commander of the Vienna station. Apart from Ultra and the SCI effort directed by Colonel Felix Cowgill, whom he much respected, he had not been greatly impressed by wartime SIS intelligence gathering operations. Too many British agents had been picked up by the Germans, and the most effective work was done by resistance groups, while overblown staffs, complete with FANY secretaries and pansy batmen, sat around in comfortable villas in Cairo, Algiers and Naples, writing minutes to each other. But Vienna was a challenge and an inspiration. His top priorities were Soviet troop deployment down the Danube and the Kremlin’s longer-term intentions, while keeping a eye on Tito. The first proved easier than expected. With such a largely unknown target the immediate course was to follow the wartime pattern in Occupied Europe and establish a network of railway observers as far East as possible and try and encourage desertions. This soon confirmed the steady rundown of Soviet forces and their replacement by static units of virtually untrained conscripts. Former Luftwaffe officers kept a regular check on Soviet airfields. At least this calmed down the frequently recurring flaps. It was not without risks for those involved. When a Hungarian general staff officer, who was a valuable source, came out of his flat one morning, four Russian military police advanced on him. He quickly leapt on a passing tram while the Russians pursued in their jeep, firing at him with their pistols. From the rear platform the major fired back, and, spotting what was happening, the tram driver stepped up the power and careered through Budapest streets. Luckily there were no other trams ahead on the same line before the major jumped off and rushed to where he knew he could find sanctuary while the Russians gave up the chase. Curled up on the floor of Young’s car with its diplomatic registration plates, the major was safely brought past the Soviet military check point east of Vienna.
Russian long-term intentions were a hard nut to crack and the KGB was a ruthless opponent. There was little doubt as to the immediate post-war Soviet aim of bringing Austria under Communist control. After the 1947 crackdown in Romania and Hungary, the main KGB staff were transferred to the Russian HQ at Baden-bei-Wien, the scene of Prince Orlovsky’s ball in Die Fledermaus, and there was an increase in arbitrary arrests and detentions by Soviet patrols. The Austrian Ministers who nowadays do not get much credit in the British media, showed themselves tough and resolute: some of them had suffered in both Dolfuss’ and Hitler’s concentration camps. They got rid of the Communists installed by the Red Army in 1945 and fortunately the Allied Agreement negotiated in the summer of 1946 specified that unanimity by all four occupying powers was necessary to veto the acts of the Austrian government.
But vagueness at Yalta and Potsdam had left certain questions open to varying interpretations – notably that of German property. The Russians took this to mean all enterprises in Eastern Austria which had been taken over by the Nazis, including confiscated Jewish property. They set up a giant holding company, USIA, which ignored Austrian laws and traded with similar combines in Romania and Hungary, while its premises were guarded by a werkschuetz of selected Communists. However by early 1948 Young established that USIA was bust: black marketeering and corruption by senior Soviet officials had left it without cash, so that it was dealt a mortal blow when the British Deputy High Commissioner, Major-General Winterton, declared that its transactions had no legal basis and its contracts were binding on no one. After this the Russians first hinted and then openly admitted that as part of a State Treaty they would give up their ‘German’ enterprises in return for compensation.
For the longer-term problem, one solution was to infiltrate agents into Central and Eastern European Communist parties who would be sent on activist courses and gradually rise up the hierarchy. This paid off at the end of 1948 when such sources reported that the Kremlin was calling off general revolutionary activity in Europe and the new Communist drive would be in the Far East. This was particularly interesting as the Berlin Blockade was still operating, the French and Italian communists were at their most obstreperous, and Molotov at his most obstructive. But the break with Tito, about which we had been warned by defectors in Autumn 1947, had made Stalin think again, and this was reflected in Austria by the Russians dropping support for Slovene separatists in Carinthia.
One wartime matter had to be cleared up. From forward airfields at their deepest penetration of the USSR, the Germans had carried out systematic photo reconnaissance of a major part of the country. At the end of hostilities the photographs had been buried in Lower Austria (unfortunately in what became the Soviet occupation zone) and – as it turned out – close to a Red Army checkpoint. Retrieval involved careful planning. It was arranged that a Klagenfurt newsagency and bookseller, whose business had in fact been set up by SOE, should send a delivery van regularly past the Russian post, giving the sentry a complimentary copy of a ‘girlie’ magazine. One day when the soldier was happily studying the pictures, the van halted along the road and the driver and mate – a former Luftwaffe officer who had helped bury the plates – dug furiously, retrieved the mass of material and stowed it in a specially constructed compartment. When the first results of U2 flights were produced, the full value of the survey was appreciated, as the comparisons showed up the new plants, installations and railway spurs of the Soviet nuclear weapons and missile effort.
Young left Vienna in 1949 with the sense of a job well done – not the least of which had been welding into a competent team the wartime MI6 and SOE personnel who had finished up in Austria with the 8th Army. They were later to spread out into overseas stations as star performers. In London he took over the economic requirements section which was a well-run group, largely because of the specific briefs from its customers, Treasury, Board of Trade and Bank of England. They were carrying out Ernest Bevin’s ruling that in Britain’s shaky post-war situation economic information should be given a high priority. It was indeed satisfying when a single report could pay for the annual Secret Vote several times over. This was the pattern which, in his later appointments, Young attempted to set for the whole service. One report, however, did not meet with Foreign Office approval. As part of its brief to identify leaks in Sterling Area exhange controls, the Tangier station reported that ‘a flaming pansy, one Guy Burgess who seems to be in the Foreign Office, has turned up with a boy friend, and has been telling all and sundry in the hotel bar how to get round exchange control regulations.’ The barman happened to be a station informer and an account was duly sent to the Foreign Office personnel department. It came back with the comment from the departmental head, George Middleton: ‘I am not prepared to listen to tittle-tattle about members of His Majesty’s Foreign Service.’ In 1951 Young was somewhat unexpectedly posted out to take charge of the Middle East area stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan and down to Ethiopia. It was a new area for him but Stewart Menzies had seen that the era of British ascendancy, with its garrisons at key points and police and security agencies largely run by British or British-trained officers, was over. A general complacency characterised much of the intelligence effort. Young had a foretaste of the change when the car in which he was being driven by Lt-Col Brian Montgomery from Cairo airport to the Canal Zone was stoned by mobs.
An immediate problem was that of Moussadeq. HMG came hesitatingly and reluctantly to the conclusion that his removal would have to be engineered from outside. The initial British plan for this, drawn up by C. M. Woodhouse, involved caching arms and explosives for use by the plotters. Permission to bring them in was turned down first by the Foreign Secretary and then by the Prime Minister. But Young and Woodhouse went ahead and when the operation was successfully completed, Young sent in his resignation and was summoned back to London. When Major-General Sir John Sinclair, who had taken over as ‘C’ started to reprimand him, Young replied: ‘I’ve resigned and come to say goodbye.’ ‘Wait a minute’, said ‘C’, and that was that! In the evening Young met Stewart Menzies at White’s and asked: ‘What would you have done, Chief?’ ‘Posted you to Kabul’, he laughed. There was a sequel several years later when a lorry coming down a winding road near Teheran got out of control and crashed into the wall of a house and out cascaded small arms, ammunition and explosives. The unfortunate owner, who had only recently bought the house, was hauled before the police and explanations had to be hurriedly sent out to the Shah, who, as always, suspected the worst.
In the meantime the Philby affair had blown up resulting in several resignations, and Young was recalled at the beginning of 1953 to take over the new post of Director of Requirements (D of R) to redirect the SIS effort more effectively on to priority targets. One of the first problems was to scrutinise the elaborate and expensive attempts to put agents into the Baltic States and Poland. Recruited among Latvian, Lithuanians and other exile groups in Britain, they were trained as W/T operators and codists, toughened up in cross-country treks over Scottish moors and landed clandestinely from a former German E-boat crewed by ex-Kreigsmarine personnel. These operations were regarded as the special pride and joy of SIS. But when Young put the whole operation under close and impartial scrutiny, studied the traffic and the somewhat meagre results, it stuck out a mile from his own wartime experience in double-agent and deception work that the whole affair was under Soviet control. At first Sinclair was reluctant to accept this, particularly as it would mean an embarrassing admission to the Foreign Office and the armed forces. Then he agreed with Young only to back down again and give way again to Harry Carr, the Controller in charge. All Young could do was to say that he would circulate reports as KGB deception material. Finally, the Russians themselves blew the operations: they had controlled them from the very beginning. Young got no apologies from Sinclair nor any expression of regret from Carr at having sent men to certain torture and death.
One of Young’s objections to such operations was that they would never produce high-grade intelligence on Russian intentions and policy-making. A completely new approach was required, and after a a series of informal supper parties with the brightest SIS officers, a systematic study was started of the top Soviet power structure, its various personalities and cliques, and their associates in the armed forces and the KGB. This had so far never been carried out in Whitehall, where the Foreign Office practice was to take each intelligence report in a separate docket, comment on it and file away. In fact, from both overt and covert sources there was a mass of information which had never been properly assessed and collated. The pioneering work was carried out by the late Professor Leonard Schapiro who enlisted leading Soviet studies experts from universities, and by Malcolm Macintosh. The results changed the whole emphasis in tackling Russian targets, produced expert briefing for potential sources and for the interrogation of deserters and defectors. CIA eagerly followed the British example. The success of the enterprise was underlined by Mackintosh taking over the Soviet desk in the Cabinet Office, a post he held until his retirement in 1987. But Young’s attempts to improve MI6 scientific intelligence reporting were effectively blocked. This was in the hands of a complete charlatan, Commander Eric Welch, who for a number of years had bluffed the different departments over his hush-hush work. Welch’s qualifications for his job were somewhat slender. He had been in the MI6 wartime Norweigan section at the time of the Commando raid on the heavy-water plant, but had no specialist knowledge of nuclear weaponry. However he did his best to impress the Atomic Energy Authority that his work for ‘C’ was too delicate to be revealed, while his MI6 colleagues were told that this applied to his AEA liaison: if need be his confidential exchanges with the Americans were invoked as a further excuse. In fact MI6 intelligence on Soviet nuclear development was practically nil. Professor R. V. Jones, the brilliant wartime Director of Scientific Intelligence, was brought back from Aberdeen University to try and improve matters, but he could make no progress in the face of Welch’s evasions and obstructiveness. Suspecting what was going on – or, rather, not going on – Young checked with one of his St. Andrew’s University friends who was a leading physicist at AEA, and who confirmed that Welch’s activity was useless and even dangerous. But neither Jones nor Young were able to persuade Sinclair to remove Welch from his job and Americans and British had an unpleasant surprise when the Russians conducted their first nuclear explosion test. Only after Welch’s death from a heart attack could a new scientific intelligence start be made after more than ten years had been lost.
Meanwhile Young concentrated on improving the quality of reporting and briefing of agents on specific questions rather than sending our rather general questionnaires to the field. This meant the continual education of the ‘customers’, not all of whom were able to produce the clear-cut requirements of the economic ministries. The Commonwealth Relations Office and the Colonial Office even disliked receiving information which clashed with their pre-conceived notions about Africa and Asia. ‘It’s too embarrassing to negotiate with anyone if I know that behind my back he is up to something quite different’, explained one Colonial Office Under-Secretary. On the other hand, key officials such as Anthony Montague Brown, Churchill’s Private Secretary, always looked forward to the yellow dispatch box in which Young put the cream of ‘C’s output.
As part of the effort to improve reporting, Young had each requirements section send him a weekly sample folder of ‘highlights and horrors’. The former received an encouraging comment for the field station, while the latter had a range of awards from ‘The Charles Adams’ Prize with Blood Drips’ to ‘Dracula Certificate of Merit’. It seemed to work.
One disappointment however was the lack of support for the SIS proposal for an unmanned high-flying photo-reconnaissance plane. Expert specifications, plans and costing had been worked out but without Air Ministry backing Sinclair would not procede with the scheme. Such a project would have at least avoided the embarassment faced by CIA when their U2 pilot Gary Power was shot down. It was all the more galling when Young was tipped off by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad that they had detected very high-flying planes taking off from Turkish airfields and disappearing into the blue. He guessed what they were but at the time preferred to say nothing. It was a year or two before the Americans came clean.
He got on well enough with American agencies: he had been awarded the Medal of Freedom with Bronze Palm for his war-time co-operation with OSS. Although he accepted that with their vastly superior resources the Americans would dominate in technical intelligence gathering, reducing GCHQ to an ancillary branch of the National Security Agency, he felt it was an essential that Britain should maintain an adequate independent intelligence effort given United States policies in the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa. When the Suez crisis broke, Young was put back in charge of the Middle East operations by Sir Dick White, who, to general relief, had taken over from Sinclair. His main task was to support any armed forces intervention with internal action against Nasser. This would obviously be easier if the Americans could be brought to co-operate as they eventually had over Mossadeq, and during the summer of 1956 Young went three times back and forward across the Atlantic in the vain attempt to persuade the Dulles brothers that Nasser was not a good progressive democrat but Kruschev’s door opener to the Middle East.
However Young went ahead with his planning which assumed a rapid descent on the Canal by a small crack British force while the main Egyptian forces in Sinai were otherwise engaged. Recalled suddenly in early October from the Bavarian Alps where his wife and he were on a mountain hut tour, Young was appalled to hear from Field-Marshall Templer what was the proposed military plan. ‘But surely this is a deception scheme’, he said. ‘I’m afraid not’, answered the CIGS. ‘It’s all been taken out of my hands.’ Young did his best to improvise but it all ended in a shambles. ‘I became an old man overnight’, he remarked. In fact Nasser temporalily lost his nerve and when the Egyptians with whom MI6 was in contact telephoned him that he had better resign before the Anglo-French forces reached Cairo, he announced his resignation. The American and Soviet ambassadors rushed round to persuade him to withdraw it; while, of course, no one had foreseen the farcical situation of the British and French governments declaring they would halt their action before their troops had even landed.
However Nasser did get his uppance. Young had already left MI6 for merchant banking when Mossad approached him to find an Englishman acceptable to the Saudis to run a guerrilla war against the left-wing Yemeni regime and its Egyptian backers. ‘I can find you a Scotsman’, replied Young, and over a lunch in the City introduced Colonel Neil (‘Billy’) Maclean to Brigadier Dan Hiram, the Israeli Defence Attache. The Israelis promised to supply weapons, funds and instructors who could pass themselves off as Arabs, and the Saudis eagerly grasped the idea. Maclean’s irregulars restored the Imam’s rule and Nasser pulled out his troops whose morale had been badly shaken by the Yemeni practice of sending back captured troops with their lips cut cut off in a ghastly grin.
After the Suez debacle Young carried out a fresh assessment of the MI6 role in the Middle East which he saw as countering the major Soviet effort to establish sympathetic regimes and subvert pro-Western rulers. This meant close cooperation with the Israeli intelligence and security services and helping the Shah of Iran to build up his SAVAK, while making use of MI6 Arabic-speaking officers to alert Gulf rulers to the danger of Soviet activities. Young developed a personal friendly relationship with the Shah, although however tactfully he tried, he could not persuade him to keep SAVAK’s intelligence role separate from that of a domestic police force – a factor, as it turned out, in the estrangement of the Monarch from his people.
Young held the then unfashionable but now increasingly accepted view that the Arab world had lost its basic balance and would be increasingly one of violence and anarchy. This opinion was part of his hypothesis that ever-heightening consciousness – the one still active element in human evolution – would lead to ever greater ethnic assertion and divergence, and not to convergence. Modern technology would only hasten this development. An Arab with a kalashnikov and a Mercedes will be even more aggressive than one with a ball musket and a camel. In his lectures to intelligence courses he would remind the students that Arab verbs decline in moods and not in tenses, commenting: ‘When the British Council premises go up in flames the odour of roasting pansy is incense in the nostrils of Allah.’
Because of this conviction he deplored the mass immigration of non-Europeans into Britain, forseeing the breakdown of traditional common assumptions of conduct on which our notions of law are based and the resultant need for ever more authoritarian measures to maintain basic order. He put this point of view very firmly in the MI6 contribution to the Cabinet paper The Next Decade called for by Macmillan in 1958. In recent years the media frequently referred to him as a ‘racist’, but his views were based on a life-long interest in anthropology and comparative philology. That independent Africa would revert to bush and savagery gave him no pleasure, recalling his friendly relations with the Askarai, the loyalties of his assorted Galla and Somali interpreters and auxiliaries, and the hospitality of Abyssinian chiefs.
After his appointment as Vice-Chief he set off at the beginning of 1959 on a ten-week tour of MI6 Far East stations. Here he was in full agreement with Maurice Oldfield, who was the on-the-spot controller, that not all the disturbances and intrigues in South East Asia were to be laid at the doors of Peking and Moscow, although they were ready enough to exploit them. They reflected indigenous self-assertion and a deep-seated xenophobia. The CIA station commanders whom he met shared the same view, and it is one of the tragedies of history that their assessments were overruled by the academic hawks in Washington who persuaded Kennedy to embark on his ill-fated intervention. That Britain was not pulled into this is due in no small measure to the balanced input of information from Oldfield and others.
The treachery of Philby and Blake was a shock, although by then he was experienced in picking up the bits and repairing the damage. The world of espionage had always had its downs as well as its ups. Although internal MI6 security was the responsibility of ‘C’ himself, Young often reflected whether he could not have done more at the time. In Vienna he had been puzzled as to why certain promising cases, one involving a Russian general, had never been followed up. It was only after Philby had been asked to resign that something clicked. Looking up the files he found that either Philby or his friend David Footman, who resigned at the same time, had pooh-poohed all the suggestions. Blake he had regarded as one of the more promising young officers and given him every encouragement. But there should have been strict adherence to the rule that any personnel who for any reason had been in Soviet custody or constraint – as with Blake’s internment in North Korea – should never again be employed in sensitive work. Young did not like interfering with those who were conscientiously doing their job, but in retrospect he felt he should have insisted on the active pursuit of counter-espionage leads and clues instead of the current MI5/MI6 practice of adding data to card indices and files and waiting rather passively until a cast-iron case had built up.
But after 20 years of intelligence work Young felt by 1961 that he had had enough. By then so much of the MI6 effort went into temporary propping up of overseas positions which at best gave HMG breathing space of a few years. While he liked White personally and respected his judgement in security matters, Young felt that he was too deferential to the Whitehall establishment over operations in New Commonwealth countries which Young rightly forsaw as the main trouble makers of the next decades. And Macmillan had become little more than a posturing clown, selling out what remained of British freedom of action to the Americans and conducting home affairs as an amusing game of playing off one minister against another. Just has he had experienced how the pre-war MI6 officers had been hopelessly out of their depth in the post-war world, he saw his own experience becoming less relevant as younger men faced new problems and new techniques. So he went off to the less stressful world of merchant banking as Kleinwort Benson’s European Representative. This also gave him freedom to return to his profession of writing, particularly on the issues of power and decision-making. His approach to the broader issue of the role of intelligence work and policy-making was very much that of the scholar.
At St. Andrew’s University he was the top arts scholar of his final year taking First Class Honours in Modern Languages and medals in both French and German. As a Commonwealth Fellow he went on to Yale to acquire a Research M.A. in Political Science. His lectures in latter years to such audiences as the War Studies Group at Sandhurst were meticulously researched and together add up to an authoritative history of post-World War Two British intelligence.
In the face of the continual smearing and discrediting of British intelligence by the media, he was given clearance by Maurice Oldfield who was by then ‘C’, to speak up in its defence. But latterly he confessed himself defeated by the left-wing clique who had a grip on BBC and independent television networks, and who deliberately and effectively distorted programmes on security matters. The exceptions were Robin Day and the ITN editors who always gave him a free run in live interviews. But Young was severely critical of Mrs Thatcher’s obsession over curbing former intelligence officers from expressing their views. So long as current operations were not endangered Young considered there was no reason why the achievements as well as the short-comings of British intelligence could not be published. But he nevertheless gave a wide berth to the self-publicising academics who were increasingly setting themselves up as pundits in a field where they had no practical experience.
Originally highly sceptical of the value of special operations, particularly of the ‘stinks and bangs’ tricks in which a number of wartime SOE operators had revelled, he had come to the conclusion that Western governments would increasingly have to deal with proxy wars, ethnic risings and organised terrorism of one kind or another, and that HMG should recreate a service to tackle this and supplement the role of SAS. The former Chindit leader and SAS founder, Brigadier Michael Calvert, and he produced detailed studies of this in the eighties and lobbied MP’s vigorously to bring pressure on the government to consider it. Mrs Thatcher was seriously looking at the questions when the botched French attempt against a Greenpeace ship in New Zealand caused a general loss of nerve. Young’s hope, however, was one day that necessity would call for the files. In any case he had set out his assessment of the whole subject in his last book, Subversion and the British Riposte (1984).
Although generally described as ‘right wing’, commentators were often puzzled by his membership of such groups as the South Place Ethical Society. There was no mystery or contradiction. Young remained very much a Scottish borderer of Covenanting stock on both sides of his family, with a strong tradition of dissent and independent thinking combined with a deep attachment to Dumfriesshire hills and dales and the Solway merseland. His family had known hard times in the twenties and thirties and he was well aware that illness, in the days before the National Health Service, meant major tragedy for the less well-off. As the product of an educational system established in 1695 by the Scottish Parliament, he felt no need to decry state schooling.
So up to the late fifties his sympathies were very much with Labour until it fell into hands of what he regarded as Wilson’s gang of spivs. His subsequent support for the Conservative Party was somewhat qualified and he had utter contempt for Heath after his economic U-turn in 1972, his surrender to the miners and his kow-towing to Idi Amin. So, on a pressing invitation from the local constituency association, he somewhat lightheartedly stood as a Tory candidate in the Labour stronghold of Brent East in the February 1974 General Election. It was also an opportunity to study a party machine from the inside – the one gap in his political education. He increased the Conservative vote and made a handsome profit from the exercise, collecting substantial damages from the Guardian for describing him as ‘the man who planted Philby on a gullible British intelligence service’. When Mrs Thatcher threw her hat into the ring against Heath at the end of 1974, Young and others, with the backing of the late Airey Neave, rapidly organised a network throughout the constituencies to support her, and which is still kept in being as the watchdog group Tory Action.
It was a full life but one of strain which at times could have been too much without the sympathetic support of his wife Geryke, the daughter of a Chief Justice of the Dutch East Indies, and, like him, an accomplished linguist. Their shared taste in classical music and Alpine walking provided an essential relief from the fate, as he used to warn new MI6 officers in his introductory lecture, which befell the villain Gashford in Barnaby Rudge: ‘He took service in the honourable corps of spies and informers employed by the Government. As one of these wretched underlings he served, now abroad now at home, and long endured the miseries of such a station.’