Tom Bower, Heinemann,
London
This is the biography of Dick White, the only man to have been head of both MI5 and MI6 (SIS) and it is a massive breach of the new Official Secrets Act. For Bower not only had access to White’s memoir of the period, with White to vouch for him, he spoke to ‘dozens’ of former officers, mostly SIS, all of whom have broken their ‘duty of confidentiality’, or whatever the exact form of words it was that the Thatcher government came up with against Peter Wright. In the last chapter Bower reveals – confirms what some had suspected, or heard whispered – that White had been among those former officers who had been leaking information through the Thatcher years. This is one of the central paradoxes of the Thatcher period: while the Tories tried to clamp down on information about the spooks, there was a massive explosion of leaking by the services themselves.
White is portrayed as a kind of agent for the overt Whitehall, put in charge of both services to re-orient them, make them face the realities of the post-war world – and be more responsive to the demands of the rest of Whitehall. MI5, in this version, needed kick-starting to take the Soviet threat seriously in the post-war years. SIS, on the other hand, needed to be tamed: the gung-ho, covert operator boys – with G. K. Young prominent – needed reigning in. They were too expensive and too embarrassing when things went wrong. White wanted SIS to be an intelligence service – yes, with clandestine sources – but also one which, he could assure his colleagues in Whitehall, would not embarrass them. No more coup plotting in the Middle East, for example.
One of the problems with the book is its lack of clarity about sources. Some of it simply is not sourced; and sometimes the source can be inferred from the context. For example, there is this paragraph on p. 76.
‘Clement Attlee, Britain’s new Labour prime minister, and particularly his more socialist colleagues, influenced by their wartime encounters with MI5 officers, suspected the service’s activities were uncontrolled. MI5, they complained, was a secret conservative group with a historic mission to destabilise the Left.(1) Their fear of surveillance by the secret police required that MI5’s new director should not be hostile to Labour’s cause. Recognising the threat Petrie had attempted to prevent MI5’s emasculation. On the eve of his retirement in autumn 1945, he had successfully resisted Whitehall’s attempts to weaken MI5’s powers, to place the service under either direct ministerial or SIS control, and had prevented encroachment on its activities by the police. But he could not persuade the government that his successor should be the internal candidate, Guy Liddell.’
This account of MI5 boss Petrie’s bureaucratic struggle is new, as far as I am aware. Although there is no source for that paragraph it follows this sentence: ‘White’s dissatisfaction was exacerbated by the appointment of Petrie’s successor.’ So, the source is probably White, but it would be much better to be sure.
One of Bower’s themes is the conflict between MI5 and MI6 (SIS) for control of the Empire. MI5, he tells us, was given the franchise for the Empire in 1945 by something called ‘the Attlee doctrine… an administrative decree issued in 1946, which reiterated the ban on SIS operating within Britain’s colonies, which were classed as domestic territories and therefore the exclusive responsibility of MI5.’ (pp. 219 and 220: emphasis added) This ‘Attlee doctrine’ also appears to be new.
Dozen of SIS officers, and their roles, are identified here for the first time: Bower describes a number of hitherto secret post-war operations, and names various SIS fronts in Eastern Europe (p. 203). (Now that the Soviet Union has collapsed is SIS seeking credit from the former satellites for taking on the Evil Empire?)
White, the SIS reformer, was opposed by certain officers in Broadway, supported outside by Tory MPs like Julian Amery.(2) At pp. 169 and 170 we get an account of these ‘robber barons’, the senior officers, section heads, portrayed as seedy, complacent, public school fantasists, who ‘believed themselves the guardians of the nation’s freedom and the best judges of morality’; and there are occasional glimpses of rackets and rip-offs being conducted in the farther reaches of the empire.
Other striking snippets: Maurice Oldfield’s homosexuality is stated as fact – but unsourced. White asked Oldfield about ‘allegations that he was a homosexual and had accepted his denial’. During the Rhodesian UDI crisis, we are told, Harold Wilson asked White to prepare a plan ‘for the overthrow of Smith’, but the officer to whom White gave the job sympathised with Rhodesia and reported ‘he could find no anti-Smith group to stage a counter-coup’. (p. 344) The late George Brown, we are told on p. 356, was a ‘CIA source’.
On the down side there is another endless account of Burgess and Maclean, Philby, Bunt et al, in whom I was never very interested. It might be bulging with new information; I just don’t know (or care).
There are some striking omissions. Not a word on nuclear weapons, for example, and only one reference to IRD, on page 145: ‘On the crazy edge of that effort [to recruit students and trade unionist ‘sleepers’] were F Branch’s dirty tricks. In co-operation with the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department, MI5’s agents were encouraged to disrupt subversive organisations, even impregnating lavatory paper with an itching substance at halls hired by communist organisations.’
This is the first time such operations have been acknowledged. Presumably they were not all so childish.
This is a very good, important book, certain to be of lasting value to those interested both in HMG’s spooks, and in British foreign policy in the 1950s. Nothing better has appeared on SIS since Verrier’s Through The Looking Glass.
Notes
- It certainly was true, historically anyway, that MI5 was exactly a conservative and Conservative secret group. See John Hope’s piece in Lobster 22.
- Bower refers to the “Suez Group of Ministers” in Macmillan’s Government. (p. 220) I thought the “Suez Group” was a group of imperialistic back-bench MPs.