| INDEX | September 27, 2022 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| From The second oldest profession: The spy as bureaucrat, 1986 Phillip Knightley. Hardcover : 436 pages ISBN-10 : 0233979689 ISBN-13 : 978-0233979687 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Intelligence agencies use accountancy methods that would, if employed by public companies, lead to criminal prosecution | Page 4 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Agencies justify their peacetime existence by promising to provide timely warning of a threat to national security. It does not matter to them whether the threat is real or imaginary. | Page 6 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| In November 1911 Max Schultz, a journalist living on a house boat near Exeter-- where he made no secret of the fact that he was German even to the extent of flying the German flag-- was charged with having tried to obtain information about the readiness of the British fleet for war. Schultz believed he had a cast iron defence; he showed that the information was so far from being secret that it could be read in local newspapers. The jury took only four minutes to find him guilty. | Page 25 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Even when the occasional grain of wheat found its way into the chaff it was of no value because the consumers of the intelligence usually dismissed it as false. For example, a report that German naval gunner accuracy at long ranges was startlingly good was dismissed by the Admiralty, which said such results were impossible and that the agent must have been deceived. The Admiralty was to learn at Jutland just how good German gunnery was. | Page 26 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The head of M1-1c, as SIS was called until the 1930, was Captain Mansfield Smith-Cumming, a genuine eccentric, even by the standards of the Royal Navy. It is difficult to write seriously about Cumming, the first 'C' as the head of the service is called to this day. He wore a gold rimmed-monocle, wrote only in green ink, and, after he lost a leg in an accident, used to get around the corridors by putting his wooden leg on a child's scooter and propelling himself vigorously with the other. Visitors were intimidated by his habit of stabbing this wooden leg with his paper knife in order to drive home the point of an argument. His journal, a battered naval log book, contains entries such as, "To Clarksons today to buy a new disguise." | Page 30 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| In the first sphere, American intelligence had some notable successes. It predicted Ludendorff's 1918 offensive, and the use of Big Bertha, the famous German artillery piece that could hit Paris from 75 miles away. But the French were in charge of intelligence co-ordination at that time and when reports from its own service disagreed with the American information, the French took no notice of it. | Page 36 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| There were thousands of arrests and convictions in the United States under the ESpionage and Seditions Acts, most were for dissent and there was not one for active spying. In the event, deprived of one enemy the APL (American Protective League) simply switched its attention to another, its paranoia was unleashed on labour unions, the International Workers of the World and other opponents of APL's main sponsor-- American business. | Page 37 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Mata Hari said that the payments from the military attache himself were gifts-- she was his mistress-- and that if he had claimed them back from the German government's espionage fund then he was not the gentlemen she had taken him to be. | Page 47 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Captain Payne Best recalled that he had reported firm evidence for a German counter attack after a British success at Cambrai, the first real tank battle, in November 1917. Charteris never showed the report to Haig and the allies lost 50,000 men | Page 53 I think my grandfather was there and was captured by the Germans. The Post Office Rifles were certainly at Cambrai. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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the notorious Zinoviev letter, the greatest 'communist scare' in British political history.
The letter, purportedly written on 15 September 1924, by Zinoviev, president of the Communist International,to the British Communist Party, instructed British party members to prepare for the British revolution by ingtensifing their work in the armed forces and by using their sympathisers in the Labour Party. The letter was published in British newspapers four days before the general election of 29 October 1924 and was generally held to have swung the voters away from Britain's first Labour government and to have brought the Conservatives back to power. It also eclipsed any prospect of the proposed Anglo-Russian trade treaties being ratified by the British Parliament and soured relations between the two countries for more than 25 years. | Page 62 The book makes it clear SIS (MI6) was deeply involved in this. "What had alarmed SIS was the fact that the Labour Party was considering the suspension of SIS and the opening of its files" (page 63) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| It is, for example, arguable that the activities of SIS helped to create the Red Terror, poisoned a possible Anglo-Soviet detente and were instrumental in leading to the formation and determining the subsequent direction of the KGB | Page 75 in the early days of the (Russian) Revolution the Bolsheviks were surprisingly tolerant | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Empire The effect of the Indian faction on the British services was to reinforce the assumption that Reds were under every bed and to exacerbate the obsession with secrecy that had marked SIS since its founding. The IB men brought with them the habit of never discussing certain subjects in front of the natives, and althouugh there were no natives around any more to listen-- if they had ever bothered to do so-- old habits are not discarded easily and in Britain they continued to distruct anyone they did not know personally. | Page 81 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Malcolm Muggeridge, a wartime SIS officer, points out: "Diplomats and intelligence agents, in my experience, are even bigger liars than journalists, and the historians who try to reconstruct the past out of their records are, for the most part, dealing in fantasy. | Page 111 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bomber Harris's view of SOE was typically strident. "Amateurish, ignorant, irresponsible and mendacious." | Page 119 Bomber Harris | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| A damning indictment of SOE, in fact damning is far too mild a word. The point is seemingly due to Churchill, the original idea of Dalton (Minister of Economic Warfare) that you needed a Sinn Fein to take on the Nazis didn't work because when they tried to recruit working class agents, their French wasn't good enough. Churchill got pissed off with Dalton and sacked him so SOE reverted to type and got the toffs in (the university graduates) who caused utter mayhem. On the credit side they may have stopped the development of Hilter's A bomb. A pretty big credit. But on the debit side the cock ups were phenomenal. For a while the Germans controlled the SOE operation throughout Netherlands, France and Belgium thanks to a bloody radio operator (Bletchley Park?) who failed to pick up on a coded warning message.
350,000 Czechs went to work for the Germans after a botched operation to assasinate Reinhard Heydrich. The Germans killed the entire population of Lidice, a savagery which crippled Czech resistance. | Pages 120-129 How SOE made a major contribution to the war, for the Germans! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| If you remember Patrick MacGoohan's The Prisoner (it's hard to forget) apparently it was based on truth. A lot of useless SOE agents sat out the war in relative luxury at Inverlair Lodge, Inverness-shire, because they were hopeless as agents but they knew too much to be allowed freedom. The Home Secretary told anyone who asked about them that there was no trace of those names in the registry. There is now a tv programme called Slow Horses about useless MI5 agents sent to a place where they can do no harm. I wonder if that was based on Inverlair? I haven't watched it but I may do if it is available for free. | Page 123 Inverlair Lodge in Inverness-shire guarded by Cameron Highlanders. It was the inspiration for a novel The Cooler by George Markstein
| Hoover suckeredA German agent called Johann Jebsen discovered that the Japanese navy was seeking information about a British navy torpedo bomber attack on the Italian fleet in Taranto in 1940. Jebsen told Dusko Popov about this and he also supplied Popov with the latest German technical development, a microdot communication system. Popov was told to find everything he could about the defences at the American base in Pearl Harbour.
| Popov put two and two together and came to the conclusion that the Japanese were planning to attack Pearl Harbour. He also had a timetable since the Germans had calculated that the Japanese would need to hold at least 12 months supply of oil to start a war, and the American oil embargo meant that threshold would be crossed in early December. The actual attack happened on December 7, 1941. Popov sent by the Germans to spy in Britain gave himself up to the British intelligence service. The British sent him to meet Edgar J Hoover in America, to tell what he knew about the Pearl Harbour attack. Hoover was completely disgusted by Popov, who was a Slav, didn't believe him and wanted to arrest him. When the attack actually happened Hoover shrugged off any blame. Pages 149-51 | One of the problems with "intelligence" is that it is often wrong, perhaps because it has been invented by an agent who is desperate to get paid for information, or possibly because it has been provided by the enemy as a deception. The recipients of intelligence know this only too well so they tend to be extremely sceptical.This extreme example that may have helped determine the outcome of the Second World and the shape of the world after that war, was the dismissal by J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI at the time, of the intelligence that the Japanese were planning to bomb Pearl Harbour. He was even given an approximate guide to when it was going to happen.An interesting aspect is that Popov's case officer was Guy Liddell. Had Liddell reported to the British Security Co-Ordination, whose job was to liaise between British and American intelligence, Popov's story would almost certainly have gone to the president. Liddell, has sometimes been identified as a Russian double agent, probably because he was related to Blunt, but if there is a case against him, it has yet to be proved. See also 20220819D.html
One of the best bits was "Macmillan's secretary, Lord Egremont, considered all intelligence agencies a waste of time and money: 'Much better if the Russians saw the Cabinet minutes twice a week. Prevent all that fucking dangerous guesswork." | Page 285 |
There is the Buster Crabb story told in a very desultory manner
| Page 287 | I have seen more interesting versions elsewhere.
There's quite a lot of stuff about Nasser but the most interesting is "SIS ignored an order from Eden to examine ways of murdering Nasser". | Page 288 |
Best bit was about Dick White, one time head of MI5 who became head of MI6. White once told a French spook that MI5 was constantly getting offers from British businessmen going abroad who wanted to do a little bit of spying on the side. His French colleague said this showed the difference between the British and the French. "When a French businessman goes abroad it's not a bit of spying he wants on the side." | Page 289 |
"Conspiratorial neurosis, clandestine mentality, dream world spookology and the crude, but explicit, 'sick think'. The point is that those who practise secret intelligence work are always likely to fall prey to destructive fantasies and a conspiratorial view of the world.
"The very nature of intelligence work makes for an elitist attitude, one of easy superiority, in which membership of the elite is felt to be a privilege. The new member is taught to trust no outsider and soon finds that he can relax only with his own kind. Intelligence officers tend to eat together, drink together and socialise exclusively with one another." | Page 341 |
Who runs the spooks:
"It was only when Lord Denning issued his report on the Profumo Affair in 1963 that the public learnt that SIS (MI6) was responsible to the Foreign Secretary and MI5 to the Home Secretary.
"According to Harold Wilson, then leader of the Labour Opposition, this came as a complete surprise, both to his party and to most of the government. 'It is quite clear to me that no one knew of the existence of this brief except the security services themselves. The Home Office doesn't seem to have know about it, the Home Secretary doesn't seem very clear avbout it, and I'm sure that the Prime Minister didn't know very much about it.' This was all in keeping with the original aim of distancing the government from SIS, so that if any intelligence operation went badly wrong the government could convincingly deny all knowledge of any such service and any such operation. But it also gave the services great autonomy and a degree of power that could easily get out of hand, especially when a faction within the services developed conspiratorial neurosis.
MI5 exists to catch and prosecute spies but it has rarely if ever done this apart from its own employees or people whose names were handed to it on a plate by defectors. (That's my take not the books). | Page 343/344 |
"It is virtually impossible in espionage cases to prove guilt without a confession. Even if you have a confession, taking the man to court will expose your weaknesses to the enemy and shake public confidence in your service."¦
My take: Blunt one of the wartime and 1930s group of five, the Cambridge Spies, was allowed to have a very lucrative career in the art world after leaving the intelligence services. He was not exposed until Thatcher got up in the House of Commons and named him. | Page 346 | Golitsyn (a defector) certainly believed that Wilson was, if not a Soviet agent, then certainly a Soviet asset (and that the KGB had poisoned the previous head of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, so that Wilson would get his job!)
| Page 351 |
plans for a military coup to overthrow the Labour government which had been discussed in 1968 by Lord Mountbatten and others.... Wilson believed that MI5 had known about the plans to oust his government and had failed to warn him. (MI5 did tell the then Home Secretary James Callaghan but Callaghan apparently decided against informing either Wilson or the Cabinet
| Page 352 | Blunt had done a deal with the British authorities. He would not be prosecuted and both his treachery and the deal would remain secret forever. In return, he would do all he could to help the authorities by answering their questions frankly and honestly.
| Page 354 | I think Peter Wright was the inquisitor and he moaned because Blunt wouldn't tell him anything. There has been some press about Blunt obtaining secret documents (from Marburg) about links between the Nazis and the king who abdicated, Edward VIII during the war and using these to cut a deal. Secrecy corrupts individuals and institutions; it invites the concealment of negligence and malpractice; it nearly always spreads unnecessarily; it damages international relations, and it can become pathological. (Galen Strawson, reviewing Secrets by Sissela Bok, in Sunday Times 29 April 1984).
| Page 364 | Expansion of secret intelligence services always seems to be accompanied by a reduction in civil liberties
| Page 366 | These chiefs deal with the work of some 14,000 'Indians' in the intelligence and security services. This all seems a far cry from the days when SIS had sufficient money to send spies only to Germany and MI5 worked out of one room in the War Office on a budget of £7,000 a year.
| Page 370 |
until 1983 ... the government refused to reveal what GCHQ's true role was-- no doubt because its operations in peacetime were without a legal basis. Its secrecy had been maintained by massive and deliberately intimidating security. Newspapers were discouraged from mentioning it; a book by a former GCHQ employeed, Jock Kane, was seized by Special Branch police officers in 1984; and a still photograph of GCHQ headquarters at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, was banned by the Independent Broadcasting Authority in 1973, leaving a blank screen in the middle of a World in Action programme.
| Page 373 |
If GCHQ eavesdrops on telephone calls made by American citizens and NSA monitors calls made by British citizens, each government can plausibly deny that it is tapping its own citizens' calls-- as indeed they have. Yet the NSA station at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire intercepts all international telephone calls made from Britain and GCHQ has a list of American citizens whose telephone conversations are of interest to NSA.
| Page 373 | Lyman Kirkpatrick: 'If the Soviets ever decided to go for broke, they wouldn't put anything on electronic communications or do anything visible by satellite. All the orders would go by officer couriers, which was what Hitler did at the Battle of the Bulge and caught us totally unprepared. We were relying too hevily on communications intelligence.'
| Page 376 | Edward J Epstein, who as chairman of one of the panels at the (US Air Force Academy conference in 1984 at Colorado Springs)... was struck by the attitude of the intelligence officers. They are not interested in espionage. They are not interested in the Soviet Union. They are not interested in communism. They are not Cold War warriors. They are systems analysts. They are technocrats. They are bureaucrats. They are good at putting together and working for a bureaucratically efficient organisation.
| Page 381 | whilst this might be true in America, in Britain I think MI5 is bitterly anti-Communist and sees itself as a McCarthyite organisation. when French intelligence blew up the Greenpeace ship The Rainbow Warrior, in New Zealand in 1985, the carefully planned operation included an attempt to plant the blame on Britain's SIS
| Page 382 | I have included this but I believe this was a far from carefully planned operation and at least one of the bombers was honoured by the French state when returning after a short spell in prison. Normal people develop, alter their views in the light of new information, change to new circumstances. An intelligence officer must remain absolutely fixed in the attitudes that made him decide on his career in the first place. The tiniest crack in his ideological motivation and he risks collapse.
| Page 388 |
Donald Maclean said that spying was as necessary and as disagreeable as cleaning out lavatories.
| Page 388 |
"Finally there remains the ultimate moral and ethical question," says Roger Hilsman of Columbia University, "whether the means we use will eventually corrupt our values so as to change the nature of our society just as fundamentally as if we were conquered."
| Page 388/9 | As David Kahn has pointed out, in only one of Creasy's Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World From Marathon to Waterloo does the author ascribe the victory to an intelligence coup and the very many decisive battles fought since Creasy's book came out in 1851 yield few additional examples.
| Page 389 | Governments no longer know the real cost of their intelligence agencies, or how many people they employ. The agencies defy government control.
| Page 389 | One wonders what the agencies did before the Red Threat existed. The answer is they invented one... (John) Buchan
quickly saw the trend. His Huntingtower, published in 1922, was the first anti-Bolshevik thriller. Ever since fictional KGB agents have continued to meet their match at the hands of Her Majesty's Secret Service or the CIA-- except, that is, in Soviet fiction where it is the other way around. | Page 390/1 | They have become a focus of power in our society, secret clubs for the elite and privileged, which demand -- and are too often granted-- the right to define reality for their fellow citizens.
| Page 391 | Intelligence agencies are skilled at using the media to advance their cause when an outbreak of peace has threatened their funding.
| Page 392 | In the United States its influence on presidential deicisons is such that it is sometimes difficult to decide whether the president is running the CIA or the CIA is running the president.
| Page 392 | It is able to do all this because of the secrecy with which it surrounds itself, a secrecy which corrodes a democratic society; it is no accident that as intelligence agencies have expanded our civil liberties have contracted.
| Page 392 | the intelligence community knows that open published information and that obtained through traditional diplomatic and other overt contacts, have proved this century (20th) by far the most useful source of military, political and economic intelligence for both sides.
| Page 392 | INDEX |
Jonathan Brind September 27, 2022 | | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||