Douglas Macleod
Edinburgh: Birlinn; £9.99, p/b
<www.birlinn.co.uk>
Twenty years ago, before the current torrent of information about ‘the secret world of intelligence’, we were scratching about looking for clues to our secret history. One was given in the John Loftus book The Belarus Secret (Penguin 1983) which contained a single reference to the Scottish League for European Freedom (SLEF). Later, personnel from the SLEF and its partner organisation the British League for European Freedom turned out to overlap with the anti-communist group Common Cause.([19]) The SLEF was a group which formally campaigned on behalf of the Eastern European peoples who found themselves under Soviet rule at the end of WW2. Informally it was used by MI6 in the early years of the Cold War. The core of this book is a history of the SLEF, its campaigns and activities. That core has two rings around it. The inner ring is the extremely complex politics of Eastern European émigrés in Britain many of whom supported the Nazis; some of whom were war criminals in the chaos of post-war Europe. The outer ring is the pre-WW2 politics of Central and Eastern Europe, the world of the Promethean League, Intermarium and other, now obscure groupings, nourished and subsidised by MI6 in the anti-Bolshevist Great Game.([20])
Through these byzantine manoeuvrings the author threads accounts of the Duchess of Atholl and Elma Dangerfield (mostly the former), two very striking Tory political activists and leading figures in the SLEF. This is thus the same theme as that of the Hugh Wilford book discussed in the Wilford review below: the relationship between the intelligence services and anti-communist political activists.
Dangerfield had worked for MI9 and was pretty clearly an MI6 asset, if not an officer. But was the Duchess of Atholl witting? The author thinks she must have known that MI6 were involved in the SLEF but was not aware of the unsavoury nature of the people for whom she was campaigning. What an irony! The Duchess had been a Scottish Tory MP, a former minister, who supported the Republicans in Spain, resigned the Tory whip over it and lost her seat in the House of Commons. She opposed Stalinism and fascism, and saw with absolute clarity the nature of the totalitarian right and left in the mid 1930s; and was vilified by right and left for it. Yet she got conned into providing political support for the movement into Britain of thousands of pro-Nazi soldiers and war criminals from Eastern Europe, groups which eventually were formed into the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, funded by MI6 and then the CIA.
Why did the British state import these people? First, they were regarded as potential sources of information and agents in the anti-Soviet struggle which had been interrupted by WW2. In pursuit of absolute ends, such as ‘the national interest’, intelligence agencies care nothing for the history of those they are trying to use (This may be part of the the appeal of being in ‘the secret world’. All those irritating difficulties associated with right and wrong are irrelevant.) Second, in some cases, most notably that of the 8,000-strong Galician Division of Ukrainians, they were surrendered Axis troops who had been kept on standby by the Allies at the end of WW2 in case a war with the Soviet Union broke out; and were thus a disposal problem. A labour shortage in the UK in the immediate post-war years enabled MI6 to bring them into the UK as ‘workers’.
I enjoyed this book but I knew the story in outline to begin with. How intelligible it would be to someone who didn’t I cannot imagine. It has an index but no documentation. However there are no obvious errors that I can see; the author knows the material and presents it clearly and simply.
As for ‘Morningside Mata Haris’, Morningside is an upper-crust area in Edinburgh famous in Scotland, any way for having a distinctive accent, posh Edinburgh. Malcolm Rifkind, erstwhile Conservative Foreign Minister, is an example of it. Elma Dangerfield and the Duchess of Atholl don’t seem to have had much to do with Morningside and were about as far from being Mata Haris as one could imagine. But when did reality get in the way of a publisher’s idea of a catchy title?
Notes
[19] My first attempt at assembling these fragments was ‘The British Right – scratching the surface’ in Lobster 12.
[20] A description of these groups is in Stephen Dorril’s MI6 (London, 2000) which was reviewed in Lobster 39.