Murky record of the Secret Services

MI6 - FIFTY YEARS OF SPECIAL OPERATIONS: Stephen Dorril; Fourth Estate, London. Received from Ajay Parmar & Co., Post Box No. 7206, First Floor, Arun House, 2/26, Ansari Road, New Delhi- 110002. œ.16.50.

READERS OF this massive volume on MI (Military Intelligence) 6 which also partly covers MI5, the British Secret Services, are likely to put it down with a feeling of revulsion over the amoral ruthlessness which motivates them as well as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with which they have coordinated their operations. The total absence of scruples in whatever MI5 and MI6 have been up to just to project desperately Britain as a world power long after it had ceased to be so. Power led to their resorting to every kind of nefariousness against those whom they suspected.

Among the very large mass of factual information given by the author, one could pick out the overthrow of Dr. Mohammed Mossadeq, Prime Minister of Iran, brought about by MI6 and the CIA in 1950 soon after the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the perceived threat of Iran joining the Soviet bloc, as a classic illustration of how the Anglo-American espionage agencies would stick at nothing for safeguarding the hegemony of London and Washington. The brutal killing of Patrice Lumumba for installing their henchman, Joseph Mobutu, in Congo, is among the many wile deeds which no civilised power would have even dreamt of. But neither MI5 nor MI6 had the all-seeing eye as they might have imagined and they had no clue about the seizure of Falkland Islands in 1982 by Argentina which forced upon Britain an expensive naval reconquest by Margaret Thatcher's Government.

The author gives an exhaustive and a rather tiresome description of British and American espionage outfits. If the British had thought that their skills would remain unsurpassed, France, as an European power, was fast emerging as a rival. It must be said to the credit of Indian politicians and statesmen that the MI5 and MI6 could not seduce them, however much they could have tried, though the author does not see it this way in the few lines he has written about India.

The new reality which Britain had to live up to as a second rate power, after taking a bad beating during the Second World War, was its having to perfect its skills at espionage with its secret service outfits, MI5 and M16, as the major players to keep track of everything which the Soviet Union was up to. But along with the U.S., it could not realise that its comprehension of this new reality was very incomplete and partial. Despite its history of anti-colonialism, the U.S. could not realise that communism, as the New Order which was replacing the Old Order in Eastern Europe, and they would have to wait for nearly half-a-century before it would crumble and go the way of the old empires.

A recurring presence in the book under review is Kim Philby of MI5, who defected to the Soviet Union. Philby's record, right from the beginning when he joined the British Secret Service, should have left no one in any doubt where his inclinations and sympathies were and the British Foreign Office did have its suspicions. The record of Britain's MI5 and MI6 set up for stemming of communist take-over in Eastern Europe was one of mostly failures with every country from Romania, Albania, Hungary, Poland and East Germany being overrun by communists at the end of the Second World War.

Though the British MI5 and MI6 and the CIA of U.S. were operating like a thieves' kitchen, they were also very resentful of any invasion of their respective domains. The British Government could not ignore its having to be on the right side of the U.S. Britain's belief that the U.S. was very much in need of its expertise was not taken seriously by the U.S. Washington did not believe that the CIA had ``to bolster a fading British presence''.

The successive failures of the espionage activities of MI6 in Eastern Europe and the danger anticipated from hasty steps which could precipitate another war was widening the gulf between the two English-speaking countries on either side of the Atlantic. It should have galled the U.S. and Britain when they discovered that the only choice left for them for stemming communism in Europe was to align themselves with the neo-Nazis of Ukraine but the compulsions of realpolitik had hardened them sufficiently to make them very ``practical''. However, the post-war European scene which was becoming bleak for the U.S. and Britain unexpectedly brightened with Marshal Tito's break from the Soviet Union in 1948.

Advances in science and technology came as a big challenge to the MI6 and its response had to be an unflinching modernisation of its espionage operations which included the tapping of the Soviet military communications with the help of tape recorders fed by 800 reels of tape per day.

The Soviets responded by outwitting the MI6. The MI6 had also no inhibitions about paying ``baksheesh'' in Cairo, Teheran and elsewhere to politicians abroad for the dissemination of pro- British ideas with the ``secret'' annual payment ranging between 9,000 and 12,000 pounds per year during the Cold War and the recipients of the ``subventions'' included the Reuters. The author writes about an attempted assassination of Nasser by MI6 by presenting him with a razor filled with plastic explosives which could be detonated.

If the British espionage services had its Kilbys during the Cold War, the Soviets had their disloyal operatives too. Among them was Penkovsky who was a big catch for the U.S. and Britain. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, which has reduced the espionage agencies to irrelevance, also exposes the utter stupidity of their having come into being at all.

CVG

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