With Friends Like These

There has long been a tradition at Oxford--it was certainly going strong in my day in the late ‘60s--in which certain tutors would discreetly suggest to select students that they “might care to have a word with a few fellows from the Foreign Office.” Thus were Britain’s future spooks recruited for the fabled MI6. Sebastian, a friend of mine tapped in this manner, was an obvious choice: brilliant, fluent in several languages, socially well-connected and, or rather but, flamboyantly gay. On the appointed day, he found himself in a room with three middle-aged gentlemen of military demeanor. The interview went well, with Sebastian’s audience visibly dazzled by his linguistic qualifications, obvious intelligence and acceptable (conservative) politics. After 90 minutes, one of the trio genially asked if there was anything else my friend wanted to tell them about himself. “Well,” answered Sebastian, “I am obviously homosexual, but since I am quite open about it, there would be no possibility of blackmail, so it really shouldn’t matter.”

The temperature in the room dropped like a stone. “Good god, you are?” spluttered one of the spooks. “I think you had better forget that this interview ever took place.”

Many people I know in Britain who have had contact with MI6 or, as it is variously known, SIS, “the Service” or “the friends,” can report similarly bizarre experiences--in the late ‘80s, a candidate was asked to list various titles of the British nobility in order of precedence. Yet at home and abroad, the myth of James Bond continues to transcend a more realistic parallel: Monty Python with a vicious tinge. In the Middle East, for example, there lingers a curious respect for the guile and omniscience of British intelligence that is rarely borne out by results. One can only conclude that, unlike the CIA, whose tawdry secrets have been sufficiently exposed over the years to excite a healthily derisive attitude among the citizenry, MI6 continues to profit from its carefully cultivated air of mystery, enforced when necessary by the draconian Official Secrets Act. In 1963, my late father published the actual name of C, as the head of MI6 was always called, in Private Eye magazine. This was the first time the identity of the spy chief--Dick White at the time--had been printed in Britain, and I was recently gratified to learn from declassified archives that this revelation prompted an emergency meeting of a high-level cabinet subcommittee to consider whether to send my father to jail. They wisely decided against the idea. Such objective reporting was, however, exceedingly rare, which is not surprising given the large number of Fleet Street journalists who have served as MI6 assets, happy to publish a planted story when required.

Stephen Dorril, a British academic without any direct personal connection to the world of intelligence, has set out to shed light on the postwar history of this “strange and secretive society,” relying on the fact that, as he explains, “there is far more in the public domain than anyone has realised.” Unfortunately, his delight at finding information in the public record sometimes outweighs his judgment. I really do not believe that the travel writer Freya Stark, as he confidently asserts, founded the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood on orders from British intelligence. Nelson Mandela convincingly rebutted Dorril’s credulous assertion that he was a British “asset” soon after the book’s release in the United Kingdom.

Nevertheless, after burrowing through an immense amount of material, the author has emerged with a picture of an organization highly skilled in bureaucratic maneuvering and self-protection but rather less effective at the stated object of the exercise: finding out what the other fellows are up to. Thus, among other lapses, MI6 was totally surprised by the split between Tito and Stalin, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the fall of Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran, the end of the Cold War, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and so on. The verdict of an official inquiry into its utter failure to anticipate the fascist Argentine junta’s attack on the Falkland Islands in 1982 could be applied to the work of MI6 (and most other intelligence agencies) in general: “Changes in the Argentine position were, we believe, more evident on the diplomatic front and in the . . . press than in the intelligence reports.”

Of course, collecting enemy secrets was only part of the job. Dorril convincingly demonstrates that MI6 always considered itself first and foremost an anti-Bolshevik organization and regarded the wartime struggle against Nazi Germany as a tiresome distraction. Even before the end of hostilities, the service had returned to the primary task at hand, recruiting Nazis (shielding them from war crimes investigators when necessary) to assist in rolling back the Red menace. Despite persistent failures, the spooks regarded their mission as sacred, not to be discommoded by interference from democratically elected politicians. Dorril quotes one senior MI6 officer, George Young, who proclaimed: “The nuclear stalemate is matched by a moral stalemate. It is the spy who has been called upon to remedy the situation. We do not have to develop, like parliamentarians conditioned by a lifetime, the ability to produce the ready phrase, the smart reply and the flashing smile. And so it is not surprising these days that the spy finds himself the main guardian of intellectual integrity.” In retirement, this guardian of intellectual integrity devoted himself to promoting far-right racist and anti-Semitic organizations.

Dorril devotes many pages to the service’s futile efforts to destabilize the Soviet empire. One really impressive triumph, however, he passes over in a paragraph. Sen. Arthur Vandenberg (R-Mich.) has long been lauded by historians for his principled change of position from isolationism to interventionism, lending crucial support to President Harry Truman in 1947, when it was not altogether clear that the American people were ready to throw themselves into a Cold War. Dorril reports that the statesman’s principles had a bit of a nudge between the sheets from a trio of British Mata Haris: Mitzi Sims, Elizabeth Thorpe and Eveline Patterson. “Using this unique access, the service helped impel the senator to put his considerable influence behind Truman and an internationalist stance that was more sympathetic toward British policies.”

Now that’s an intelligence coup, enough to make one believe that the service may have had the James Bond touch after all. (As it so happens, I heard the same story some years ago from Walter Trohan, Washington correspondent of the fervently isolationist Chicago Tribune in the then-relevant years. He related the saga rather more amusingly, adding the detail that Vandenberg was known in the Senate cloakroom as “the senator from Mitzigan.”)

In the same vein, Dorril later refers casually to Hugh Montgomery, an MI6 officer in Rome, whom he calls “a devout Catholic and homosexual lover of [Cardinal Giovanni] Montini, the future Pope [Paul VI]. . . . It would not have been surprising if MI6 had not had some sort of ‘handle’ on Montini.” Another astounding coup, if true. Presumably, by the time my friend Sebastian had his interview, the service had forgotten the value of such assets.

Relishing any source on his subject matter, however oblique, Dorril observes that “however fantastic the story, there is always an element of truth in [James] Bond,” citing Bond creator Ian Fleming’s own connections with British intelligence. This seems a bit of a stretch, especially when compared with an account by CIA official Wilbur Eveland, in his classic memoir “Ropes of Sand,” of a visit to MI6 headquarters in 1956: “. . . [A]n ancient elevator carried us to the top floor. Seated at a long conference table in a small room whose plaster walls showed evidence of rain damage were our six hosts, wearing the drab English suits with ample wrinkles and stains to which I’d now become accustomed. There wasn’t a James Bond type in the bunch, and most looked like ordinary clerks in spite of the SIS’s reputation for recruiting only Oxbridge graduates.”

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss MI6 schemes for dealing with Egyptian nationalist leader Gamal Abdul Nasser, a saga that Dorril retails with engrossing detail. Though British diplomats took the sensible view that it would be perfectly possible to negotiate with Nasser, extreme-right fantasists in MI6 concluded otherwise. Unfortunately they had the ear of Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who was paranoid to the point of insanity about Nasser, “the Muslim Mussolini,” and prone to bellowing “I want him murdered” to subordinates on open phone lines. Eden, his condition exacerbated by escalating doses of Benzedrine and other drugs, gave MI6 a free hand. The consequence was Suez, Britain’s Bay of Pigs and Vietnam rolled into one.

In an atmosphere of secretive and self-deluding intrigue, the service plotted to murder the Egyptian leader, with one scheme requiring the preparation of a box of poisoned chocolates, another involving the gassing of everyone in Nasser’s headquarters. Relying on reports from an alleged agent in Nasser’s entourage that the Egyptian leader was facing serious internal unrest--reports that turned out to be wholly fraudulent--the spooks played a vital part in fomenting a disastrous invasion of Egypt that abruptly ended when President Eisenhower cracked the whip and told his allies to knock it off. Suez put an end to British dreams of world power, but MI6 survived. A few years later, the service announced an imminent invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. They were nearly 30 years early.

Despite contradictory and accurate diplomatic reports that no such invasion was contemplated, British troops were accordingly rushed to the emirate, where most of them rapidly collapsed from heat exhaustion. Unfazed, British agents were soon playing an active role in the Yemeni civil war, aiding the doomed cause of the medieval monarchy. In the 1970s, the service was embroiled in the Irish troubles, sponsoring agents to establish their credentials with Irish Republican organizations by robbing banks and, more sinister, playing a hand in car bomb explosions in Ireland that killed 40 people in an afternoon.

*

Once upon a time, MI6 lurked in a “secret” central London headquarters complex known as Broadway Buildings, although any London taxi driver would furnish the address if asked. In 1994, however, the spooks moved into garishly prominent new headquarters on the south bank of the Thames River. Irreverent inmates quickly dubbed the building “Ceausescu Towers.” Inside, not much seems to have changed. David Shayler, a whistle-blower from the MI5 internal security service, has revealed details, with supporting documentary evidence, of an MI6 plot in the mid-’90s to kill Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi.

These were widely reported in the press, which is admittedly slightly less quiescent these days. When queried, the service lied to its political master, Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who accordingly issued stringent denials of the story.

Following the end of the Cold War, there has been much soul-searching by pundits on both sides of the Atlantic about the future role of intelligence services now that the traditional enemy has called it a day. Dorril’s book suggests that the discussion is irrelevant. MI6, like its peers in the global intelligence community, will survive and prosper regardless of its utility and whatever the rest of us think.