The Defence of the Realm (86 page)

It is possible that, had our intelligence system been better, we might have been spared the emergency in Kenya, and perhaps that in Malaya. It must be our objective so to improve the present system that we are, so far as is humanly possible, insured against similar catastrophes in future.
¹²⁴

Templer insisted that in the Empire as a whole Communism was not the principal problem:

Our enemy in the cold war is of course Communism. But in the Colonies this threat is for the most part indirect and intangible; it operates, if at all, through the medium of other anti-British manifestations which would be present even if the Communist Party had never been invented. Such manifestations are created by a wide variety of irritants, of which some of the most obvious are nationalism, racialism, religion, frustration, corruption and poverty. In Malaya, it is true, the fight is to keep a frontier against Communism. But in the other colonies its immediate impact is small or non-existent.
¹²⁵

The one colony in which Whitehall saw a serious prospect of a Communist takeover was British Guiana, where, Templer reported, ‘The root of the problem, and consequently the way to deal with it, is a political matter outside my competence.'
¹²⁶
In April 1953, following the victory at the first elections held under universal suffrage of the People's Progressive Party (PPP), led by Cheddi Jagan, an American-educated dentist descended from ethnic Indian sugar-plantation workers, British Guiana had become the first British colony with a Marxist prime minister. Jagan and his wife, Janet (née Rosenberg), a Chicago Marxist, had first attracted the attention of the Security Service in 1947 when he made contact with the Soviets in
Washington. From 1948 onwards he was in touch with British Communist Party headquarters.
¹²⁷
In 1950 the SLO in Trinidad, whose responsibilities also included British Guiana, described Jagan as an ‘astute politician', who ‘wields great influence over a large number of people who have never been, and in all probability never will be, communists or have the slightest sympathy with communist aims and ideals'. Jagan's support was based on popular opposition to the ‘selfish and high-handed' sugar-plantation owners (most of them British agribusinesses) and other big employers.
¹²⁸
There was, the Security Service reported in 1951, ‘no evidence that the PPP is controlled or directed by any Communist organisation outside the Colony'.
¹²⁹
The Jagans, however, remained in touch with CPGB headquarters, which Janet Jagan visited soon after the 1953 PPP election victory.
¹³⁰

Immediately following the formation of the PPP government, Winston Churchill began to consider seeking US assistance in ousting Jagan from power. He wrote to Lyttelton, the Colonial Secretary, on 2 May: ‘We ought surely to get American support in doing all that we can to break the Communist teeth in British Guiana.' He added satirically, ‘Perhaps they would even send Senator McCarthy down there.'
¹³¹
At the same time Churchill was enthusiastically supporting preparations for British – American covert action (‘Special Political Action' in British parlance) to overthrow the supposedly pro-Communist Iranian Prime Minister, Muhammad Mussadeq.
¹³²
Though Mussadeq was duly overthrown, Churchill decided it would not, after all, be necessary to seek CIA assistance in British Guiana (CIA involvement was, however, later approved by the Macmillan government).
¹³³
In late September 1953 Lyttelton informed the cabinet that Jagan's government ‘have no intention of working the present constitution in a democratic manner nor have any real interest in the good of the people of British Guiana. They have taken every opportunity to undermine the constitution and to further the communist cause.'
¹³⁴
On 27 September Churchill approved Operation WINDSOR: the unheralded landing of British troops in British Guiana on 9 October, accompanied by the dismissal of the Jagan government and the suspension of the constitution. (The SLO in Trinidad later paid tribute to his wife and the wife of the Commissioner of Police in Trinidad for preparing 600 sandwiches for the troops embarking on a British warship en route to Georgetown.)
¹³⁵
News of Operation WINDSOR, however, leaked out ahead of time and on 7 October, before the British Governor in Georgetown had been informed,
The Times
carried the dramatic headline: ‘Danger of Communist Coup in British Guiana: Troops Sent to Avert Risk of Bloodshed'.
¹³⁶

After only 133 days as chief minister, Cheddi Jagan was ousted from office and the Governor given emergency powers which continued for the next three years. Churchill's government justified Jagan's overthrow by claiming that ‘the intrigues of Communists and their associates' in the PPP government had threatened to turn British Guiana into ‘a Communistdominated state'. Despite some support for Jagan on the Labour backbenches, the Leader of the Opposition, Clement Attlee, also dismissed Jagan and his PPP colleagues as ‘either Communists or Communist stooges'.
¹³⁷
In 1955 Jagan's former ally, the black lawyer Forbes Burnham, split the PPP into two factions and two years later formed the People's National Congress. Thereafter British Guianan politics increasingly divided along ethnic lines with the PPP deriving most of its support from ethnic Indians and the PNC from urban blacks.
¹³⁸
Though the Security Service had told the Colonial Office some years earlier that Burnham was not of the same calibre as Cheddi and Janet Jagan,
¹³⁹
both the colonial administration and the CIA increasingly saw support for Burnham as one of the keys to defeating the Jagans.
¹⁴⁰
In most of the Empire, the Security Service contributed to a relatively smooth transfer of power. British Guiana, however, was to be a notable exception. The dominant intelligence agency there in the fraught years leading up to independence in 1966 was to be not the Service but the CIA.
¹⁴¹

8

The End of Empire: Part 2

As DG in the later 1950s, Roger Hollis found security in colonies and British-administered territories overseas of greater concern than security in Britain itself. On the eve of one of his many imperial tours in May 1958, he told the Home Secretary, R. A. ‘Rab' Butler, that colonial ‘Special Branches undoubtedly needed all the help they could have, and we were getting a number of requests for assistance.' Rab agreed that, as colonies approached independence, ‘it was right to devote considerable time to this aspect of our work.'
¹
The total number of colonial and Commonwealth police and administrative officers trained in Britain by the Security Service jumped from an average of 250 a year in the period from 1954 to 1958 to 367 in 1959.
²
The Service felt it necessary to remind the JIC in 1960 that:

The task of the Security Service at home differs markedly from its role overseas. In this country it is both producer of intelligence and consumer of its own product; overseas its representatives are not primarily intelligence producers. They are trainers and advisers of those who are purveyors of intelligence to them . . .
³

The most serious imperial intelligence challenge after the Malayan Emergency came in Cyprus. As in Malaya in 1948, there had been little advance warning before open warfare erupted in April 1955 between the EOKA guerrillas led by Colonel George Grivas, fighting for union with Greece, and British forces. The lack of intelligence available to the British authorities was due chiefly to the disorganization of the under-resourced Cyprus Special Branch, which had earlier been described by a head of Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME) as a ‘right royal muddle'.
⁴
The EOKA ‘Death to Traitors' campaign targeted the Special Branch and CID, as well as their agents and informers, in an attempt to break their morale.
⁵
In May 1955 Donald Stephens of the Security Service was seconded to the Cyprus government to take up the new post of director of intelligence. The appointment in September as governor and commander in chief of Cyprus of Field
Marshal Sir John Harding, a Malayan veteran who – like Templer – bridged the political–military divide, greatly strengthened Stephens's authority. Philip Kirby Greene, who had become head of SIME earlier in the year, reported that Stephens was at the ‘very centre' of the struggle against EOKA ‘and enjoying every minute of it'.
⁶
Masked informers, unflatteringly known as ‘hooded toads', were used to identify EOKA guerrillas when suspects were rounded up.

In December 1955 Operation FOXHUNTER uncovered a cache of EOKA documents including part of Grivas's remarkably verbose diaries and almost succeeded in capturing Grivas himself, who at one point was hiding behind a tree within arm's length of a British soldier. Operation LUCKY ALPHONSE in June 1956 captured seven members of Grivas's entourage, his favourite Sam Browne belt and a further 250,000 words (two-thirds as long as this book) of his diaries. Once again Grivas had the closest of shaves, escaping just in time after being alerted to the arrival of British forces by a barking patrol dog. Sections of the diaries, which were read out at a London press conference and then published, provided damning evidence of the links between Archbishop Makarios III, the leader of the Greek Orthodox Church in Cyprus, and EOKA (though Grivas personally distrusted him), and helped to justify the decision taken in March to deport the Archbishop to Mahe, the most remote island in the Seychelles.
⁷

In November 1956 Harding declared for the first time a formal State of Emergency, and began a new intelligence-led offensive against EOKA which achieved a series of successes. Among the tactics employed were ‘Q patrols' (so named after the disguised British armed merchant ships which had lured some German U-boats to their destruction during the First World War) composed of turned EOKA guerrillas and anti-EOKA Greek Cypriots who arrived in villages pretending to be guerrillas fleeing from British forces and asked to be put in touch with those who could shelter them.
⁸
In his role as security intelligence adviser, A. M. MacDonald wrote to the Security Service after an operation which had, he believed, ended in ‘the complete destruction of the terrorist organisation in Nicosia and the disruption of the [EOKA] Central Courier System' to say that both Stephens and the head of the Special Branch, W. D. ‘Bill' Robinson, ‘both deserve the highest praise'.
⁹
In March 1957 alone thirty EOKA bases were uncovered and twenty-two senior guerrillas killed or captured – among them Grivas's second in command, Gregory Afxentiou, who was killed after an eight-hour firefight. Grivas agreed to a ceasefire in return for the release of Makarios, who was flown back from the Seychelles to begin tortuous negotiations for a political settlement.
¹⁰
Stephens returned to
London in July 1957 and was succeeded as director of intelligence by Bill Robinson, who, in the Service view, proved unequal to his job, particularly in coping with the emergence of a terrorist organization in the minority Turkish community and the growth of intercommunal violence.
¹¹

Because of the need to reconcile the conflicting interests of Greek and Turkish Cypriots, the search for a political solution proved much more complex than in Malaya. Macmillan later called the ‘Cyprus Tangle' ‘one of the most baffling problems I can ever remember'.
¹²
Though the ceasefire lasted until October 1957, the first attempts to negotiate with Grivas and Makarios ran into the ground. The new governor appointed in December, Sir Hugh Foot, brother of the left-wing Labour MP Michael Foot and reputedly a left-winger himself, seemed better fitted than his predecessor to seek a political solution. He also sought to reform the intelligence system, which the former head of SIME, Philip Kirby Greene, who became SLO in Cyprus when SIME was wound up in 1958, told him in July was in ‘an appalling state of affairs'. In October Foot sent a personal request to the DG for a ‘high grade research officer' to collate and assess all available intelligence with the aim of capturing Grivas and the entire EOKA leadership. To the delight of Foot and the Colonial Office, Hollis approved the appointment of Director E, Brigadier Bill Magan, for a six-month secondment. As soon as Magan arrived in Cyprus, Foot asked him to take over ‘the full intelligence task', including heading the Special Branch; Magan declined but agreed to act as temporary special adviser to the Branch.
¹³

Hollis wrote to Magan shortly after his arrival, ‘If we could seize Grivas this would surely knock the stuffing out of Eoka.'
¹⁴
Magan set up a research team to go through the large accumulation of reports and captured documents on Grivas. Kirby Greene reported to the DG on 25 November: ‘Already he has found a considerable amount of intelligence, some of it of importance, which, it seems, passed unnoticed and certainly was not properly recorded or filed and to all intents and purposes was lost.'
¹⁵
Magan acknowledged Grivas's ‘exceptional singlemindedness' and the way in which he had imposed his own austere lifestyle and passion for order on the EOKA guerrillas, but believed that he had serious limitations as a commander. As a result, his guerrillas had killed surprisingly few British soldiers:

Had the spirit of EOKA been more offensive, had there been more courage in their hearts, they could, shielded as they were by nearly the whole Greek Cypriot population, have on any day of the week carried out as many murders as they did
in a month, and forced the British, as was the case a decade ago in Palestine, into a life of barbed wire cages, enormously increasing the static guarding commitment of the army.

Magan produced a lengthy personality profile of Grivas which, he acknowledged, might ‘in parts be thought a trifle colourful for an official paper. But I am writing about a man – an unusual man, and not, shall we say, about a gasworks.'
¹⁶