bout de papier, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2001) — Spring 2001 // Printemps 2001, pp. 27–28
MI6: INSIDE THE COVERT WORLD
OF HER MAJESTY’S SECRET
INTELLIGENCE SERVICE, by Stephen
Dorril, New York: The Free Press, 2000, 907
pp. index. US $40.00, CDN $59.00
At 800 pages of text, this is a heavy tome. However, well-written, interesting and thought-provoking, this is a book which almost ’reads’ itself. Too informative and serious to be called a page-turner it, nevertheless, makes for an enjoyable, albeit long, read.
MI6 tells the story of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) after the Second World War. The book begins with background on SIS: its founding in 1909 and its rather dismal performance during World War II — except for the Ultra coup engineered by Stewart Menzies, the wartime ’C’ and the exceptional ability of Britain’s Government Code and Cipher School to decrypt messages from Germany’s Enigma code machines.
For SIS, the author sees the war as an unfortunate interlude which drew attention and resources away from the primary goal of battling Bolshevism. And this is the thrust of the book. Accordingly, the Cold War was largely a continuation of a struggle which had begun in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1917. In that sense, the battle with the Bolsheviks was traditional, having been the focus of most of the SIS efforts before and after the Second World War. This struggle with Communism was the paramount mandate of SIS
Dorril, the author of this well-constructed story, asserts that many of the MI6-linked personages were to be found in the British establishment’s appeasement circles on the eve of war. This, he believes, accounts for the poor efforts against Nazi Germany and the failings of SIS on the European continent during much of the war. The Nazis were not a target and may not have been perceived as a serious threat by some elements of the SIS establishment.
Except for the later colonial struggle, the efforts of SIS were directed against combating Communism; that effort was often personal, as many SIS officers had a Russian connection, possibly having lived in Russia as the children of expatriate British business parents or having been posted there during their careers. The author suggests that recruiting into SIS favoured those whose anti-communism “would sustain, not imperil, the old fabric” of the pre-war anti- Communist crusade.
Although immensely useful, and very well written, the book can be uneven at times. For example, it seems that there is an inordinate amount of material presented on Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist, his struggle against the Russians, and his links with Western intelligence organizations. Having drawn the ties between Bandera and Western intelligence, Dorril provides a great deal of extraneous material on Bandera’s struggle, much of which appears tangential to the main thrust of the book
Dorril captures the cynicism which made Western nations take advantage of Nazi resources at the end of the Second World War to use in a potential postwar struggle with the Soviet Union. A wide range of traitors, Nazis, and assorted war criminals were used by SIS in the early postwar confrontation with the Soviet Union. Their anti-communism, not their criminality, morals or support for democratic ideals, was the critical factor in making them acceptable to the SIS. But here, the author skirts too quickly over the very real fear (whether correct or not does not matter here) of war with the USSR during the late 1940s by the mandarins in power. Desperate times cause men to take desperate measures. More might have been made of this to capture the contextual environment rather than to leave it to some readers to conclude that some Western leaders had few scruples and some had no morals.
The author does a fine job of capturing the many failings of intelligence. None are more evident than the inability of the West to obtain credible intelligence on the Soviet Union and its satellites in the early postwar years. Effort after effort was made to send infiltrators to the East. Not all of these came from the extreme right-wing flotsam thrown up by lost causes of the Second World War; many were honourable nationalists seeking independence for their homelands. The details of these efforts as directed to Albania and the Baltic states illustrate well the seeming failings of the initiatives. Very few of the infiltrators lasted very long be tore capture. Few had any impact which materially contributed to an understanding by the West of developments in the East. Dorril paints a sad picture of idealists, adventurers, nationalists, and the incredibly naive who often went to their deaths uncertain of what their activities were all about.
The second theme which dominates the last half of the book is the protection of empire. Much of the focus is on the Middle East and unsuccessful efforts to halt the passage of time. Tremendous resources were directed at protecting the remnants of empire. SIS was not out of step with Britain, but Britain was out of step with the world. Most bizarre was the obsession which Harold Macmillan, the British Prime Minister, had with the removal of Egypt’s Nasser, who was the subject of several British assassination plots and was often seen as the villain behind all that vexed British aspirations in the Middle East. One by one, Britain was expelled from influence in the colonies or client states.
The last hundred pages of the book provide a snapshot of more recent events, with particular focus on the relationship with the United States, a relationship always in transition as Britain strove to retain its fading power. There is also a summation of how SIS viewed the KGB. Dorril contends that SIS always overestimated the KGB and its power. He quotes Oleg Gordievsky on how the SIS did not grasp the notion that the KGB was subservient to the Party in the Soviet Union and that SIS was obsessed with fighting the opposing intelligence service. In a sense, the goal was no longer to secure information; the struggle between the SIS and the KGB had become personal.
The failing of the book rests with what it does not say. The SIS-KGB struggle may have become personal, SIS may have focused on the Communist threat to the exclusion of all else, the early postwar infiltrations into the East Bloc may have mostly been failures. One does not really know. The difficulty in writing about intelligence matters, and this is not a criticism of the author, is that secret services do not advertise. Their most successful endeavours are not presented to the public through press releases.
It is a fact of life that many or most successful intelligence operations will never become known to the public. This can be frustrating for the persons involved and it happens that some of them make public their knowledge — albeit in drips and drabs and sometimes with an ulterior motive. But for the most part secret operations tend to remain secret unless they fail. This book recounts many of the failures but only some of the successes.
While this book is excellent for what it does do, which is to tell a good story, it should not be seen as the final word on the SIS during the period covered. Future disclosures or even opening of the archives may change details. But Dorril’s book will remain useful, full of details, insightful for the perspective he presents, and very entertaining for those who enjoy the genre.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2001) — Spring 2001 // Printemps 2001, pp. 27–28. Read the rest of this issue →
