The Defence of the Realm (85 page)

The main issue for the Security Service in the months leading up to independence was whether Nkrumah would set an example to other future leaders of Anglophone Black Africa by keeping on the current SLO, R. J. S. (John) Thomson. In September 1956 Thomson identified himself to Nkrumah as a Security Service officer and quickly persuaded him of the advantages of maintaining a link with the Service to keep him informed of subversion sponsored by Colonel Nasser's regime in Egypt (of which Nkrumah was then increasingly suspicious) and by the Soviet Bloc countries, which were Nasser's main foreign backers. Referring to Egypt and its Soviet backers (though not by name), Nkrumah declared: ‘Colonialism and imperialism may come to us yet in a different guise.'
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When Thomson's tour of duty came to an end in November 1959, it was extended until June 1960 at the request of Nkrumah, who sent a personal letter of thanks to the DG. Nkrumah's Interior Minister, Asford Emmanuel Inksumah, said that, ideally, they would have liked Thomson to stay ‘for ever'.
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Thomson shared the optimism of a senior Colonial Office official who said proudly of Nkrumah, ‘We have turned an LSE Communist into a progressive Socialist.'
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The remainder of Britain's former African colonies followed Ghana's example after independence in keeping a Security Service SLO, usually until the late 1960s.

The Kenyan leader, Jomo Kenyatta, aroused greater fears among the colonial administration than Nkrumah. Like its counterpart in Malaya at the beginning of the Emergency, the Special Branch in Kenya was unprepared for the outbreak in 1952 of the Mau Mau rebellion, which its head described as a ‘most dangerous subversive organisation'.
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As Oliver Lyttelton, the Colonial Secretary, read reports from Kenya of ‘bestial, filthy' Mau Mau atrocities, he felt that he saw ‘the horned shadow of the Devil himself'.
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Some officials in Nairobi, the Colonial Office and other parts of Whitehall believed from the outset that the Mau Mau rebellion was a Communist plot. Kenyatta, whom they wrongly regarded as ‘leader' of Mau Mau, was, they had no doubt, a ‘Communist'.
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The Governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, was convinced that, ‘With his Communist and anthropological training,
[Kenyatta] knew his people
and was directly responsible [for Mau Mau]. Here was the African leader to darkness and death.'
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The Security Service strongly disagreed. Sillitoe wrote in January 1953: ‘Our sources have produced nothing to indicate that Kenyatta, or his associates in the UK, are directly implicated in Mau Mau activities, or that Kenyatta is essential to Mau Mau as a leader, or that he is in a position to direct its activities.'
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Some Colonial Office officials as well as Baring were unconvinced.
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Suspicions of Kenyatta's Communist connections went back to the moment when he first arrived in Britain to study at the London School of Economics in 1929 as the leader of the Kikuyu Central Association. His activities had been monitored by the Special Branch, which compiled a ‘large file' on him.
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In April 1930 it reported that he was believed to have joined the CPGB and that a leading British Communist, Robin Page Arnot, had called him ‘the future revolutionary leader of Kenya'.
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The Security Service opened its own file on Kenyatta three months later after receiving a report from SIS that he was off to Hamburg to attend a ‘negro conference'.
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Unknown to British intelligence, he went on from Germany to Moscow to study at the secret Comintern-run Lenin School and Communist University of the Toilers of the East under the alias ‘James Joken'.
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MI5 first learned of Kenyatta's time in Moscow soon after his return to Britain late in 1933 from a Special Branch informer, who reported that, while studying at the Lenin School, he had received ‘instructions' to become a Comintern agent.
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(Training in underground work, espionage and guerrilla warfare were indeed on the secret Lenin School curriculum.)
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Sir Vernon Kell personally informed both the Colonial Office and the Commissioner of Police in Nairobi.
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MI5 simultaneously obtained an HOW on Kenyatta, who was then living in London. So prompt was postal delivery in pre-war London that, on two occasions over the next few months, Kenyatta complained to the Post Office that he believed his mail was being opened because of the delay in receiving it. To calm his suspicions, the HOW was suspended in July 1934.
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MI5 did not discover for almost twenty years that Kenyatta had been disillusioned by his period in Moscow. While at the University of the Toilers of the East he had joined in a written protest at the ‘derogatory portrayal of Negroes in the cultural institutions of the Soviet Union' as ‘real monkeys', and had complained to his lecturers that ‘in all respects' their teaching was inferior to that in ‘bourgeois schools', which encouraged pupils to think for themselves. When an earnest South African Communist in Moscow accused him of being a ‘petty-bourgeois', Kenyatta was said to have replied: ‘I don't like this “petty” thing. Why don't you say I'm a big bourgeois?'
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In the course of the Second World War, the monitoring of CPGB headquarters and intermittent surveillance of Kenyatta, who in 1940 moved to West Sussex, gave the Security Service other evidence of his declining links with Communist politics. O. J. Mason, soon to become the first SLO in East Africa, reported to the Colonial Office after Kenyatta spoke at the Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945: ‘During the last few years, Kenyatta appears to have led a fairly quiet and non-political
life, but previously he had been known as something of an anti-British agitator. It is believed that he was at one time a Communist, but is thought to have quarrelled with that Party . . .'
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After Kenyatta's return to Kenya in 1946, the intelligence available to the Security Service, much of it from intercepted communications passing between Britain and Kenya, continued to be reassuring. In July 1951 a report from the SLO in Salisbury, Bob de Quehen, belatedly disclosed the disillusion experienced by Kenyatta during his period in Moscow almost twenty years earlier. Kenyatta had revealed to a South African police source how he had witnessed the first black secretary general of the Communist Party of South Africa, Albert Nzula, being dragged out of a meeting in Moscow by two OGPU officers. He was never seen alive again.
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Kenyatta must have reflected that he had been fortunate to leave Moscow in 1933. Had he still been there a few years later during the Great Terror, his political incorrectness and unconcealed preference for ‘bourgeois' education would probably have led him to share the fate of Nzula. Sillitoe, however, believed that ill-informed accounts of Kenyatta's period at the Lenin School in Moscow twenty years before continued to be mainly responsible for claims in Nairobi and Whitehall of ‘Communist influence behind Mau Mau'.
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Shortly after the declaration of a State of Emergency in Kenya by the Governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, on 20 October 1952, Sillitoe wrote to the Colonial Office to offer the Service's assistance. The PUS, Sir Thomas Lloyd, declined the offer, saying that what was needed instead was ‘a good man from some Special Branch'. The head of OS, Sir John Shaw, had no doubt that Lloyd's proposal would prove ‘futile': ‘Sooner or later, too late, we shall be asked for help.' The request for help came earlier than Shaw expected. On 20 November, at the request of the Governor, Sillitoe and A. M. MacDonald flew to Nairobi, where they were joined by Alex Kellar, who arrived from the Middle East. ‘So', remarked Shaw to Lloyd, ‘the first XI of MI5 is to play the Mau Mau.' The Service delegation arrived on a Friday, their recommendations were drafted by the following Tuesday and accepted by Baring the same morning. MacDonald stayed on as security adviser ‘to concert all measures to secure the intelligence Government requires' and to ‘co-ordinate the activities of all intelligence agencies operating in the Colony and to promote collaboration with Special Branches in adjacent territories'. His first task was to reorganize the Special Branch, which he found ‘grossly overworked, bogged down in paper, housed in offices which were alike impossible from the standpoint of security or normal working conditions. The officers were largely untrained, equipment was lacking and intelligence funds were meagre.' Reform proceeded
so rapidly that in August 1953 MacDonald recommended that his post as security adviser be abolished. He wrote to Head Office in October, ‘Special Branch goes from strength to strength and we now have some excellent sources operating. I have no qualms at leaving this lusty infant to look after itself.'
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Like Whitehall and the colonial administration, however, the Security Service did not grasp the complexities of the rebellion. Mau Mau grew out of internal factionalism and dissent among the Kikuyu people as well as opposition to British rule. What the British called Mau Mau was not a single movement born of primeval savagery (an image created by the obscene oath-taking ceremonies for new recruits and a series of horrific murders) but a diverse and fragmented collection of individuals, organizations and ideas.
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Given the Security Service's slender East African resources, it is unreasonable to expect it to have understood Kenyan complexities which eluded the experienced and far more numerous colonial administration. But, unlike Government House in Nairobi, MI5 did not make the mistake of lumping together all those campaigning for independence. Kenyatta told a mass meeting of the Kenya African Union (KAU) in July 1952: ‘KAU is not a fighting union that uses fists and weapons. If any of you here think that force is good, I do not agree with you . . . I pray to you that we join hands for freedom and freedom means abolishing criminality . . .' The prevailing opinion in Government House, however, was that Kenyatta and all senior figures in the KAU must somehow be responsible for Mau Mau.
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The SLO in East Africa, C. R. Major, wrongly believed that Kenyatta had indeed helped to organize some Mau Mau incidents before October 1952, but that thereafter ‘they had a snowball effect' which Kenyatta was powerless to prevent.
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He opposed the decision by Government House to put Kenyatta on trial, which, he reported, was motivated by political expediency and the need to find a culprit to placate the settlers.
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As Major had feared, Kenyatta was given what amounted to a show trial. Crown witnesses, it was later claimed, were carefully coached before giving evidence and effectively bribed with substantial ‘rewards'. Kenyatta was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment.
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During the Emergency all Security Service staff in Kenya, female secretaries included, were issued with hand-guns and given target practice. The secretaries were also warned to be careful whom they slept with. As SLO in Nairobi, Robert Broadbent slept with a revolver under his pillow,
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unaware, however, that a Mau Mau arms dump was hidden in his kitchen. The dump was discovered during a reception at Broadbent's house after a
waiter dropped a tray of drinks and, in the ensuing commotion, Mau Mau guerrillas who had come to retrieve some of their arms were discovered in the kitchen threatening staff.
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Despite the fact that the British media gave most publicity to Mau Mau atrocities against Europeans, only thirty-two white settlers were killed during the Emergency – fewer than died in traffic accidents in Nairobi during the same period. Over 90 per cent of those killed were Kikuyu, in what turned into a civil war between the loyalist Kikuyu Guard and Mau Mau guerrillas. Though the Emergency lasted until 1959, Mau Mau was effectively defeated by the end of 1956. In the view of a number of Service officers, a key step in its defeat was the appointment as director of security and intelligence from 1955 to 1958 of John Prendergast (later knighted), a Kenya police officer who had previously served in Palestine, the Gold Coast and the Canal Zone.
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Black Kenyans, however, paid a terrible price for both the rebellion and the brutality with which it was crushed. During the Emergency Kenya became a police state which imprisoned a higher proportion of its population than any other colony in the history of the British Empire. On a conservative estimate, one in four adult Kikuyu males were held in often brutal camps and prisons at some point during the Emergency.
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During the mid-1950s, in the wake of the Security Service's role in the Malayan and Kenyan emergencies, Eric Holt-Wilson's pre-war vision of a great imperial security network dominated by the Service began to become a reality. Other African colonies facing nationalist unrest became used to seeking the Security Service's usually reassuring advice. In September 1953, for example, Sir Geoffrey Colby, Governor of Nyasaland (the future Malawi), became concerned that local political agitators ‘might be merely the tool of some dangerous anti-British organisation inspired from outside Africa':

After most careful thought I feel sure it is imperative that all available material should be examined by a high level expert from M.I.5 as soon as possible . . . The Special Branch have no knowledge of this situation. They have neither the capacity nor the time to investigate it properly. They are flat out in coping with day-to-day security intelligence.
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Sir John Shaw reassured the Colonial Office of the improbability of a ‘dangerous anti-British organisation' inspiring unrest from abroad and recommended that Bob de Quehen, the SLO for Central Africa, be called in from Salisbury to advise the Nyasaland administration.
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While serving in Kenya in 1953, A. M. MacDonald too was asked for advice by neighbouring colonies. That experience prompted him to write a paper on the
imperial role of the Service which concluded, ‘The Security Service, with the full support of the Colonial Office, must now undertake the task of surveying the entire field of intelligence organisation.'
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In June 1954 MacDonald was seconded to the Colonial Office to serve as full-time security intelligence adviser to the Secretary of State with the additional task of setting up or reorganizing Special Branches in every colony which would prevent further imperial intelligence surprises such as that in Malaya in 1948 and provide advance warning of any threatened insurgencies.
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On his return from Malaya in 1954, Templer was instructed to investigate the state of colonial security around the globe. By April 1955, in consultation with the Security Service, he had completed a mammoth investigation for the cabinet, visiting potential trouble spots from Cyprus to Uganda. His lengthy report placed heavy emphasis on the importance of improving imperial intelligence: