MI6: Fifty years of Special Operations
Stephen Dorril
Fourth Estate, London, 2000, £25 hb
Harold Smith
As I can testify from personal experience, having in 1960 been summoned to Government House in Lagos, Nigeria, to have my death sentence pronounced by the Governor General, MI6 is brutal, cruel, merciless and totally unforgiving. Dorril’s courage, or foolhardiness, depending on where you come from, is beyond question. He has earned his spurs and is superbly qualified to describe what Britain’s gentlemen spies have been up to abroad since World War Two. Dirty work by dirty bastards is my view, but I may be prejudiced. This new book is of the same high standard as Dorril’s other books, but I can safely say that MI6 will lose no sleep over this one. Lobster readers belong to the cognoscenti in their knowledge of spook filth and, whilst this is a very useful contribution to the literature – particularly for the general reader – there is nothing particularly new that has not been published elsewhere. Where are the British Government’s evil machinations, which brought on Africa’s black holocaust in Nigeria with up to three million deaths? Rightly, the slaughter of six million Jews and others in the 30s and 40s have filled whole libraries full of books but there is not a word of this half-sized holocaust slaughter of blacks in the 60s in this book, and that denial is real racism.
Everyone wants to work for the Guardian and be published by the Guardian’s book division. However, there is a price to be paid. Extremely serious revelations, still suppressed and unpublished by the Guardian, are out. Dorril does a Brer Rabbit and escapes the Wicked Wolf by promising a plumper rabbit is on its way. I simply do not believe Dorril. I hope he proves me wrong.
For a book largely based on the work of other authors, the lack of a bibliography is regrettable. The notes are not adequate compensation and a howler about Philip Toynbee (p. 818) is not reassuring. The index, too, is not up to Dorril’s usual meticulous standard either; but Guardian readers will not be surprised and perhaps we should make allowance for the mysterious debilitating illness, which Dorril tells us held up publication.
Hands up those who know what ‘Intermarium’ means? I sought the word in vain in my Reader’s Digest Dictionary, but had no need for, after this alarming chapter heading, Dorril does reveal that it was founded by a former Tsarist general (sic) and means ‘between the seas’. It was an alliance of militant émigré groups in mid-30s Paris. Maybe Dorril is showing off, but there is quite a lot of similar exotica, which I think Dorril’s editors might have spared us.
Dorril’s book has its very own ‘Deep Throat’ by the name of ‘The Rodent Catcher’, to whom the book is dedicated. If MI6’s rat catcher supplied Steve with the very large chunks of boring stuff, mainly Balkan bullshit, which pads out this already heavy book, I can only think that it was the Netherthong Spook Observatory which was taken into a trap. Some of Dorril’s sources are only authoritative because closely linked to MI6 fronts. When was Brian Lapping an expert on anything but TV soaps? However, there are excellent chapters of fascinating material, which more than compensate for these Sargasso Seas and Bermuda Triangles. In particular the concluding chapters in Part Seven, which I had the good sense to read first, are quite brilliant.
Dorril rightly indicts New Labour for its craven cowardice and refusal, not only not to rein MI5/6 in, but actively to encourage them! In particular Robin Cook has ratted not only on the Labour Movement and his former allies, but in the words of his former wife Margaret, has sold his soul to the devil. Never mind, that ghastly conservative creep Blair tells us we should be proud of our MI6 boys and girls for they give us a cutting edge over the rest of the world. Has Anthony Blair, former pop group performer, public school boy, and son of an extreme Thatcherite, any idea what the cutting edge of the British Government’s dirty work hit squads, allied with vast arms exports has done to the bodies of millions of innocent third world peoples?
‘Only connect’, said E. M. Forster. Sadly, Mr Blair and his fellow politicians do not connect the shells and bullets to the torn bodies in the bloody butcher’s-shop mounds in remote bush villages. In the British war against Nigerian nationalists, successfully passed off as a tribal civil war, the British Labour Government supplied more small arms to its Moslem Northern stooges than the British Army fired in the whole of World War Two. Search the memoirs of Lord Wilson, Lord Healey (directly responsible) and Lord Callaghan (deeply involved in planning the covert operations in Nigeria) and you will find black holocaust denial. Nor, sadly, will you find any of this great African evil in Dorril’s fine work. Steve was presumably too busy taking delivery of tons of ancient Balkan bullshit from his Whitehall ‘Deep Throat’.
e-mail:
http://www.libertas.demon.co.uk/
Corinne Souza(1)
Dorril can be recommended for several things. The reminder that the British trained the Shah of Iran’s evil torturers SAVAK is timely. Such heinousness is now a footnote to recent history but not, of course, if the tortured were your father, mother or little brother. What is the difference between training SAVAK and training the Gestapo? None – except in the case of SAVAK the tortured had brown skin.
Dorril also includes some brilliant walk-on parts including Professor Ann Lambton (known as Nancy) of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She was still teaching at SOAS into the late seventies, although her career started during the Second World War when she was at the British Embassy in Teheran. Although Dorril does not say so, her students included the late Alexis Forter (see below).
It is a pity that Dorril did not build up his ‘walk-ons’ to include, for example, the lawyers and accountants used by SIS to provide the administrative infrastructure for many of their businessmen assets. The late lawyer Hugh Sinclair, who had distinguished SIS family connections, comes to mind. Dorril does mention lawyer Michael Palmer who, and in a different context, hit the headlines eighteen months ago.
There are, of course, gaps. For example, Dorril writes copiously about Iran – allowing Norman Darbyshire his entrance into the history books – without touching on the rest of the Middle East from the mid-sixties through to the seventies. That is to say, he skips SIS involvement in the Baghdad Pact countries, and its successor, and in particular SIS involvement in Iraq, Turkey and Pakistan, which is a disappointment.
It is also noticeable that the career of key SIS Diplomat GH (whom the public is not allowed to know about, and we are not allowed to name, despite that fact that he is well known all over the Middle East) is not mentioned at all. He is today a businessman.
The late Alexis Forter, on the other hand, is mentioned and it rather sticks in the craw that Dorril refers to him as an ‘ace agent runner’. Tom Bower’s description of Forter – ‘renowned for sending agents across the border into Russia from which they never returned’ – is rather better, although not even he mentions Forter’s racism. Dorril also omits to mention that Forter was appointed to the British Embassy in Paris – where he was to become a key player in the Falklands War – ‘as a reward after so many years in some of the world’s most dangerous trouble spots’ (Nigel West). Forter’s longevity – 1950s through to the 1980s – explains why SIS thinking is so dated and why it is such an incompetent mess.
One trap that Dorril also inadvertently falls into is that he writes about SIS officers without mentioning that they were diplomats. This may be too obvious to note but is an important point stylistically: i.e. it is diplomats who caused mayhem however much the diplomatic service wishes to stand apart from SIS. For that reason, Anthony Parsons would not let them near his embassy when he was ambassador in Iran (a point Dorril does not make).
The use of the word ‘diplomat’ is important because most assets – particularly from the Commonwealth – would not have worked for SIS officers had they not been diplomats. Such assets believed that because they were recruited by diplomats, they too were working for the British Embassy or High Commission, as agents of The Crown. That is to say, they believed they were working for Queen and Country. Many, to their cost, did not find out until it was too late that in fact they were working for ruthless men operating outside the law. Not, of course that diplomats got their hands dirty. Instead they turned their assets over to the No Names who terrorised them.
It is very sad, incidentally, that Dorril follows the typically top-down line of contempt for such assets, many of whom were (and probably still are) non-white. What few SIS ‘success’ stories there have been, have been due largely to the heroism and patriotism of such assets. For SIS to admit this, however, would mean diminishing their own reputation further. Worse still, it means that they would have to admit the treatment of such assets once they had been passed to the No Names and this would hardly encourage others to work for them.
Regrettably, Dorril scarcely mentions SIS corruption – although his reticence is understandable.
He does come up with some brilliant throwaway lines at the end of the book: i.e. that there is an increasing trend to encourage ex-diplomats to ‘set up consultancies’ or join others (frequently American owned) when they retire. These consultancies presumably include any number of lobbyists and ‘risk assessment consultancies’ (whether owned by insurance companies or by private security companies which are themselves owned by foreign insurance companies). So much for patriotism!
One can only laugh at all of this, for otherwise one would weep. The ethics of SIS yesterday have proved so commercially viable that today, in their ‘consultancies’, their former officers perpetuate the self-serving evil of the dated at the expense of emerging democratic elites and Britain’s relations with them.
Notes
- Corinne Souza is the author of So You Want to be a Lobbyist and co-author of The Directory of Lobbying.