BOOK REVIEW Tracing her majesty's secret service Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5by Christopher
Andrew
Reviewed by Mahan Abedin
Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew's Defend the Realm: The Authorized
History of MI5 marks the centenary of that intelligence agency's
founding in 1909. By Andrew's own admission it is not an official history,
though it is an authorized version of the British Security Service's first 100
years.
The fact that Andrew relies on authorized Security Service files and was
handpicked by MI5 to produce this work inevitably calls his academic
objectivity into question. Nonetheless, Andrew proves himself an impressive
historian by poring over a feast of
400,000 paper files to weave a coherent history of arguably the most important
institution in the United Kingdom.
Clearly sympathetic to the Security Service - and to British intelligence as a
whole - Andrew is nonetheless careful not to violate the bounds of academic
inquiry in too brazen a fashion. While his enthusiasm for the operational
brilliance of MI5 is often tempered by a desire to impart an individual
analysis on matters of strategic import, Andrew does not go nearly far enough
in underlining the transgressions and failings of the Security Service.
A secret history
In the past three decades, the British Security Service (MI5) has undergone
relentless demystification to the extent that it is widely talked about and
even ridiculed in the British media.
This is in stark contrast to its sister organization, the Secret Intelligence
Service (or MI6 as it is better known), the main United Kingdom foreign
intelligence agency, whose very existence the British government continues to
deny, to the amazement of much of the rest of the world.
Andrew's main contribution has been to weave together a narrative that captures
the reality of MI5's work and achievements. Above all, Andrew clearly
establishes the credentials of MI5 as probably the best counter-espionage and
counter-terrorist organization in the world. Doubtless the chiefs and
historians of the world's best and most ambitious intelligence agencies would
concur with Andrew's conclusions, being all too aware of MI5's fearsome
reputation for detecting and disrupting hostile foreign intelligence activity
on UK soil.
Like most grand British institutions, MI5 has remarkably humble origins; its
founder, Captain Vernon Kell, did not acquire a clerk until March 1910, while
according to Andrew's research even at the outbreak of World War I in 1914 MI5
was being run on a shoestring budget with a staff of 17 (including Kell), six
of whom were clerical staff and one a caretaker.
Despite the lack of resources, MI5 managed to round up the entire German
espionage network in the UK during that war. This stunning success against
German intelligence was followed up in even more spectacular fashion during
World War II, when MI5 practically controlled the entire German espionage
network in Britain through the "double-cross" system, whereby German spies were
systematically turned by MI5 and deployed as double agents.
Andrew's detailed description of the double-cross system makes for a riveting
read, especially the antics of the system's most accomplished practitioners,
agent GARBO (Juan Pujol) and his MI5 handler Tomas Harris, both of whom appear
to have had the time of their lives comically deceiving the breathtakingly
naive and incompetent German intelligence service.
Andrew also sheds light on other intriguing aspects of World War II
intelligence, in particular the exploits of Angel Alcazar de Velasco, the
war-time Spanish diplomat in London. A larger than life character, this
one-time bootblack of gypsy origin had - according to MI5 files - defied his
lot in life through sheer force of personality.
Of greatest interest to MI5 were Velasco's skills in the art of fabricating
intelligence. At the height of the war, he was making 4,000 pounds sterling a
month (a fortune at today's rates) selling bogus intelligence to the Germans
and the Japanese.
While providing riveting details, Andrew gets carried away with his enthusiasm
for MI5's analysis and operations before and during wartime. This is most
evident in his description of the events just prior to the outbreak of war in
September 1939, when, he assiduously claims, MI5 was practically the only
governmental department warning of the inevitability of conflict with Germany.
Andrew's only source for this serious claim is the mostly oral reports of a
London-based aristocratic German diplomat, Wolfgang zu Putlitz, who was
recruited by MI5 in the mid-1930s, via the London-based German journalist (and
MI5 agent) Jona Ustinov.
Generally speaking, Andrew does a good job in explaining with as much detail as
he can get away with, MI5's bread and butter work of detecting and disrupting
hostile foreign intelligence activity in Britain. Not every foreign
intelligence service was as useless as the Germans, and Andrew provides unique
insights into the Security Service's intense battle with the far more
formidable Soviet KGB and its allied intelligence services from the former
Eastern Bloc.
He also provides unique insights into MI5's secret war with lesser-known
services, particularly with Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security
(MOIS), which according to MI5 files posed the greatest intelligence and
terrorism threat to the UK in the 1990s on account of its relentless pursuit of
UK-based Iranian dissidents and the British-Indian author Salman Rushdie, who
was condemned to death by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in February 1989
for allegedly committing blasphemy in this book The Satanic Verses.
But in five important cases, Andrew's work falls short of the exacting and
forensic scrutiny required to establish the full facts. Andrew appears too
enthusiastic to either exonerate MI5 of any major blame or to deflect blame
onto a third party. First is the uneasy relationship between the Security
Service and the British Labour Party.
For reasons to do with ideology and social class, MI5's leadership (and much of
the rank and file) has had a natural (albeit unstated) preference for the
Conservative Party. Relations between Labour and MI5 were particularly bad in
the 1960s and 1970s, when the service suspected the Labour Party of hiding not
a few subversives and secret communists in its ranks.
Andrew constructs a narrative whereby it is the leadership of the Labour Party
(as opposed to MI5) which is keen to weed out "crypto-communists" from its
ranks. In this respect, Andrew makes far too much of a hand-written piece of
paper in 1961 (on House of Commons - ie British parliament - notepaper) from
the leadership of the Labour Party to the then director-general of MI5, Sir
Roger Hollis, identifying 16 Labour MPs which the leadership suspected of being
secret communists.
Second, in the hunt for the so-called "Magnificent Five", namely Kim Philby,
Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, all of whom
were Cambridge-educated spies who penetrated the heart of the British
establishment at the behest of the KGB, Andrew is more focussed on MI5's
preoccupation with the case well into the 1970s (even though the case had been
effectively resolved by 1964) than critiquing the Security Service for its
shoddy protective security.
Third, in the related case of the forlorn hunt for moles at the very top of
MI5, Andrew appears overly keen to dismiss any notion that Hollis and his
deputy, Graham Mitchell, could have been KGB agents. Although the case against
Hollis has long been discredited, Andrew strays from academic objectivity in
his unfavorable treatment of Hollis' main accusers, namely the disaffected
former MI5 officer Peter Wright (author of the best-selling Spy Catcher),
the KGB defector Anatoli Golitsyn and the then head of CIA
counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton.
Fourth, Andrew's treatment of MI5's possible role in plots against Labour prime
minister Harold Wilson is distinctly unsympathetic to the former premier. This
saga remains the most potent symbol of the uneasy (and at times hostile)
relationship between MI5 and the Labour Party, which prevailed until well into
the 1980s. Wilson was convinced that MI5 was out to get him, so much so that in
February 1974 (a day after being elected as prime minister for the second time)
he told his close friend Harry Kissin (whom Andrew presents in an unfavorable
light) that "there are only three people listening - you, me and MI5".
While Andrew readily admits that MI5 kept a file on the former prime minister,
he falls back on the Security Service's own investigation of a possible plot to
destabilize the Wilson government by "rogue" MI5 officers, to discredit this
plausible scenario. Not surprisingly the internal MI5 inquiry absolved the
Security Service of any blame.
Finally, Andrew's description of the most potent contemporary security threat
to the UK, namely terrorism in the name of global jihad, is too loaded with
historical analysis, to the extent that he can't help but inflate the threat.
While Andrew is astute enough to underline the peripheral position of global
jihadis in the contemporary international system (whereas previous "fanatics"
in Andrew's own words, ie the likes of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, were at
the center of that system), he doesn't go nearly far enough to stress just how
peripheral the jihadis are; thus he is forced into the ridiculous position of
placing a mediocre player like Osama bin Laden next to giants like Hitler and
Stalin.
More broadly, Andrew does not take the Security Service to task for its
excesses. Whilst admitting that even MI5 regards the term "subversive" as
basically undefinable, Andrew prefers to err on the side of caution and allows
the Security Service to get away with it once again, this time claiming that
the Security Service's view of subversion is (unlike that of the incumbent
government of the day) not shaped by political outlook. Given MI5's status and
role as arguably the most important and indispensable British institution,
Andrew's (and by extension MI5's) assertions appear less than truthful.
Nor does Andrew expend any effort in outlining the constitutional and political
consequences of MI5's operational methods, most of which are immoral and
illegal and some downright criminal. The upshot is that whilst the Authorised
History of MI5 is a promising start in the academic study of the
British Security Service, it falls far short of a comprehensive and
authoritative account of the first 100 years of this intensely consequential
and controversial institution.
Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 by Christopher Andrew.
Knopf (November 3, 2009). ISBN-10: 0307263630. Price US$40, 1,056 pages.
Mahan Abedin is a senior researcher in terrorism studies and a consultant
to independent media in Iran.
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Andrew's main contribution has been to weave together a narrative that captures
the reality of MI5's work and achievements. Above all, Andrew clearly
establishes the credentials of MI5 as probably the best counter-espionage and
counter-terrorist organization in the world. Doubtless the chiefs and
historians of the world's best and most ambitious intelligence agencies would
concur with Andrew's conclusions, being all too aware of MI5's fearsome
reputation for detecting and disrupting hostile foreign intelligence activity
on UK soil.
