The Green Ribbon Books

The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence

2008-01-19T00:46:45+00:00

Richard J. Aldrich
John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.
2001

The crucial role of intelligence to the Anglo-American special relationship has long been recognised. In this book, historian Richard Aldrich provides a profound new insight into the nature of that relationship in the first two decades of the cold war.

Intelligence liaison has often been portrayed as a polite variation of espionage, and Aldrich shows the extent this was true even between these closest of allies.

At the start of the cold war both states considered covert action to undermine the Eastern bloc. However, their interests diverged after the first Soviet atom bomb tests in 1949.

Britain was immediately vulnerable to nuclear annihilation, while America still had a few years grace, which created a strong temptation for a pre-emptive strike. For the Foreign Office and MI6 in the early 1950s, a key problem was containment, not so much of the Soviet Union, as of their own more hawkish Chiefs of Staff and of the Americans.

Aldrich also sheds light on many other matters, not least the CIA's covert political activities in Western Europe, much of which was farmed out to private sector think tanks, and which included sponsorship of the European Movement.

He attempts to 'tell the story through documents' but offers a salutory warning about how effectively official archives are weeded. The best example is the concealment of the successful British codebreaking effort against Nazi Germany for thirty years after the war.

As Aldrich notes, beyond the exoteric truth contained in even the most highly classified documents there is an esoteric truth known only to the key players themselves.

Nevertheless, the Hidden Hand represents a remarkable insight into internal debates and divisions in the western intelligence community that may still be relevant today.

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Bloodsong: An Account of Executive Outcomes in Angola

2007-12-17T00:39:50+00:00

Jim Hooper
HarperCollins
2002

Executive Outcomes' intervention in Angola was a decisive moment in the emergence of the modern 'private military company'. Hooper's account is very much the official version, consisting primarily of the reminiscences of EO officers.

The opening sections feature anecdotes from South Africa's border wars, which are portrayed as a heroic struggle against communism.

The end of the Cold War paved the way EO's personnel to turn on their former UNITA allies by signing up to fight for the Angolan Government, an about-turn which, according to Hooper, caused more tensions with old SADF colleagues than with the new ANC Government.

An initial operation to seize the Soyo oil refinery in 1993, was followed a year later by EO's participation in a decisive campaign to oust UNITA from Angola's main diamond fields.

Hooper's account will prove satisfying to military buffs, but has little to say about the wider issues raised by EO's intervention. There's seems little doubt that the company was an effective force in Angola and Sierra Leone, (which is covered in an appendix), but Hooper glosses over the quid pro quo exacted by the company's backers in the oil and mining industry, an issue covered more fully by Margaret Drohan's Making a Killing.

Bloodsong is an important source for the events it covers, but one which should be approached with caution.

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Defending the Realm: MI5 and the Shayler Affair

2007-11-03T23:52:19+00:00

Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding
Andre Deutsch
1999

In 1997, MI5 officer David Shayler went public with a series of damning criticisms of the Security Service. With this book, Hollingsworth and Fielding took Shayler's story as the starting point for a survey of the organisation as a whole.

At the time, Shayler's primary grievance was with what he saw as MI5 incompetence, and the two journalists were particularly impressed by his refusal to indulge in wild conspiracy theories, or to reveal details of ongoing operations' or agents' identities.

His more recent bizarre behaviour is obvious ammunition for his critics, but arguably only enhances the importance of this book as an exposition of his original views.

The opening chapter provides a useful potted history of MI5 up to the end of the Cold War. The picture of the service that emerges is of a hidebound bureaucracy, little changed from the Spycatcher era, obseesed with supposed left-wing subversion and struggling to cope with the demise of its familiar targets.

Stella Rimington, Director-General from 1992, found a new role by wresting responsibility for countering IRA activity in Britain from the Metropolitan Police. Shayler, who worked in this area from 1992 to 1994, was one of a number of officers recruited as a result of Rimington's attempts to bring new blood into the service.

He regarded MI5 as more successful than the Met against the IRA but nevertheless felt that execessive bureaucracy had allowed bombings that might have been prevented.

If Rimington is presented as a moderniser, her successors Stephen Lander and Eliza Manningham-Buller come across as the old guard. Between them, they outmanouevred Rimington to block her deputy, Julian Hansen from reaching the top job.

In 1994, Shayler moved on to G Branch covering Middle Eastern terrorism. He would later reveal that MI5 had received prior intelligence of the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in London that year, but failed to pass on the warning.

By 1995, he was on the Libyan Desk which brought him into regular contact with MI6.From his opposite number he learned that MI6 sponsored a plot by the Militant Islamic Group to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi, a story that was later confirmed by Mark Urban. likened the difference in ethos between the two organisations to that between a grammar school (MI5) and a public school (MI6). He regarded MI6 as too enamoured of its own James Bond image.

It was his frustrations in this position that eventually led Shayler to go public. Ironically perhaps, the immediate cause was the refusal of MI5 lawyers to grant him a warrant to intercept Libyan communications.

Shayler's story appeared in the Mail on Sunday in August 1997. He fled to the continent with his partner Annie Machon, also a former MI5 officer, but did not escape the official backlash. He spent four months in a Paris jail before the French courts ruled against his extradition. He ultimately returned to England where he served a short prison sentence for breaches of the official secrets act.

Shayler's story is very much an example of the Robin Ramsay's dictum that the British secret state would have far fewer whistleblowers if it was a better employer. Many of his criticisms concerned fairly arcane management issues. Others however, raised political and moral issues of much wider public interest.

Hollingsworth and Fielding effectively combine Shayler's story with other evidence to produce a valuable overview of the methods and structure of MI5 in the 1990s. It should, however, be noted that a draft of the manuscript was submited to the D-Notice Committee, a decision which the authors defend as 'legal prudence that should not be construed as approval of a 'repressive and undemocratic' system.

In their final chapter Who Watches the Watchers, they raise fundamental questions about MI5's accountability and its value as a separate institution. The War on Terror may have allowed MI5 to evade those issues in the years since, but if anything, it has only made them more urgent.

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Defending the Realm: Inside MI5 and the War on Terrorism

Updated edition including materal on 9/11, the Bali bombing and former MI5 head, Eliza Manningham-Buller.

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Public Servant, Secret Agent: The Elusive Life and Violent Death of Airey Neave

2007-09-28T00:29:29+01:00

Paul Routledge
2002
Fourth Estate

As the title of this biography implies, Airey Neave's spent much of his life at the interface between two worlds, those of politics and intelligence. His career went through several intriguing phases. each of which sheds light on the history of Britain's secret state.

A visit to Germany as a 17-year-old Etonian in 1933 gave Neave an early hatred for fascism. In the 1930s, when many of his colleagues at Oxford were turning to socialism and even communism, he began a lifelong interest in the Territorial Army.

By 1940, he was a young army lieutenant, fighting in the bloody, and ultimately doomed, defence of Calais. His capture by the German paved the way for the defining period of his life.

Routledge provides a compelling account of Neave's experiences in Nazi-dominated Europe. In 1941, he escaped from a prison camp in western Poland, making for the Soviet occupied zone. He was recaptured and sent to the infamous Colditz Castle, where the Germans unwisely collected the most incorrigible escapers from across Europe, making it into a veritable university of jailbreaking.

Neave got away at the second attempt in January 1942, making his way across Germany to Switzerland, the beginning of a 'ratline' of helpers which shepherded him across Vichy France and Franco's Spain to Gibraltar.

Neave would soon play a key role in managing the ratlines as an agent for MI9, an offshoot of MI6 charged with helping escapers. The allied invasion of Europe would see him scouring France with the SAS for fugitive allied servicemen.

After the war Neave was involved in tracking down German war criminals. He served the indictments at the Nuremburg trials, and Routledge provides a memorable account of his impressions of the top Nazis.

At the same time, the British-sponsored wartime resistance networks were evolving into NATO's anti-communist stay-behind network Gladio. Although he says little concrete about this mysterious organisation, Routledge is clear that Neave was involved in this work and retained links to MI6 and the SAS throughout his life.

Neave's subsequent career as a Tory MP in the 1950s and 60s, was to all appearances unremarkable, notable chiefly for his successful books about his wartime experiences. In 1959, a heart attack cut short his ministerial career in a manner that led to a fateful falling out with the Conservative chief whip Edward Heath.

As a backbencher, Neave's main interest lay in defence-related technology, often in areas that overlapped with his business interests, such as the development of the Blue Streak rocket.

Neave's intelligence background would com to the fore again in the mid-1970s, when he managed Margaret Thatcher's campaign to become leader of the Conservative Party. In an acute piece of disinformation, Neave underplayed her support, forcing Heath's opponents to unite behind her in the first ballot, establishing unstoppable momentum.

There was also a more sinister side to Neave's political manouvres during this period. He was closely associated with the right-wing circles that were plotting to bring down Harold Wilson, through his associations with men like George Kennedy Young, David Stirling and Peter Wright.

Neave's most direct connection to the plot was through his 1976 approach to Colin Wallace, the sacked former army press officer. Wallace had worked on the Clockwork Orange disinformation campaign,which had originally been directed at the IRA, but which had come to include British politicians among its targets. Wallace, who provided Neave with material for articles and speeches, later concluded that he had been used by the intelligence services as a deniable source for the black propaganda.

The Clockwork Orange episode illustrates the way in which the Irish Troubles were becoming increasingly bound-up with Westminster political intrigue at this time.

Neave had little experience of Ireland up this point. It was his intelligence contacts that prompted Thatcher to make him shadow Northern Ireland Secretary.

A hardline Tory Northern Ireland spokesman was an obvious target for republicans, who may also have feared that Neave was uniquely placed to understand the role of prisoners in the republican struggle.

He was killed by an INLA car-bomb at the Palace of Westminster on 30 March 1979, only two days after the collapse of the Callaghan government.

After cultivating contacts with the IRSP, Routledge was able to speak to one of the INLA volunteers involved in 2001. He was told that Neave had been put under surveillance by an English sympathiser, and that the bomb had been placed outside his flat by a team of one-off volunteers without penetrating Westminster security, in contrast to previous INLA accounts.

Naturally, the INLA's version has no place for the various alternative conspiracy theories about the killing, which Routledge nevertheless discusses fully.

Enoch Powell believed that MI6 and the CIA murdered Neave to pave the way for a united Ireland within NATO. Irish journalist Kevin Cahill claims that Neave told him that he was going to clean up corruption in the security services, and that this intention led to his murder, that of Sir Richard Sykes and an attempt on the life of Christopher Tugendhat. Gerald James, the former head of arms firm Astra, holds to a similar theory.

Powell's claim is intriguing in the light of later events, but as Routledge points out, the most obvious rogue elements in the security services were those closest to Neave himself. There are also indications that Neave was on good terms with the CIA. Routledge quotes an anonymous Tory source who points to Thatcher's visit to the US in September 1976, accompanied by Neave, as the point at which rumours emerged linking Harold Wilson to the KGB.

This source may well be one of the interviewees from the BBC's 2006 Wilson Plot documentary, which revealed that Thatcher had contacts with the CIA's former counter-intelligence chief James Angleton. Neave was surely involved.

While the theories are intriguing, there is no real evidence that Neave was killed by anyone other than the INLA. In the years that followed, the INLA and its political wing the IRSP was the target of a series of assassinations more devastating than anything inflicted on any other paramilitary group of the Troubles. If this was the secret state avenging one of its own, the chosen method avoided a public trial.

What seems certain is that the Irish Troubles and British covert politics came together in an explosive way in the mid-1970s. The old war hero Airey Neave was a central figure in that alignment, which would cost him his life, but not before he had exercised a decisive influence on politics in these islands for decades to come.

Paul Routledge provides some fascinating insights into this many-sided figure. His account will be of interest to readers across the political spectrum.

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The Day Britain Died

2007-09-16T19:44:42+01:00

Andrew Marr
Profile
1999

This study of the state of Britain in the immediate aftermath of devolution betrays its origins in an accompanying TV series. One can almost hear the author delivering his piece to camera as one reads it.

That Marr's engaging style conceals an awful lot of information packed into quite a short book is something one might expect from a journalist who would shortly become BBC political editor. That it also conceals some pretty radical conclusions might come as more of a surprise.

Marr presents himself as an expatriate Scot from a background steeped in traditional Britishness, and a comfortable citizen of the UK.

Nevertheless, he detects in Scotland a widespread conviction that the country is firmly set on the path to independence. In England, he finds a mood reminiscent of the early stirrings of Scottish nationalism.

There is a particularly interesting encounter with Cyning Meadowcroft, an English nationalist who changed his first name from the French Rex to its Anglo-Saxon equivalent. This might seem eccentic, but as Marr points out, it is an exact parallel to the way Celtic cultural nationalists have behaved over the years.

In capturing such grassroots developments, Marr demonstrates that he is much more than a Westminster village reporter. Inevitably, some aspects of the book have dated somewhat. The showdown over the euro that Marr anticipates has not come to pass. Instead, 9/11 paved the way for a resurgence of the kind of top-down Britishness that he warns against here.

Nevertheless, the evidence for his central conclusion, that an English parliament in a federal Britain is now the only alternative to the complete break-up of the UK, has only grown stronger with time.

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The Squad and the Intelligence Operations of Michael Collins

2007-08-25T19:11:24+01:00

T Ryle Dwyer
Mercier Press
2005

Historian T. Ryle Dwyer has written several studies of Michael Collins and the War of Independence. In this book, he re-examines the subject in the light of new material from the Bureau of Military History.

Dwyer stitches together these first-hand acccounts from members of 'the squad' into a coherent narrative of Collins' activities as the IRA's director of intelligence.

One thing this reader found striking was how closely Collins methods conformed to the theories of US military strategist John Boyd, which emphasise cutting an opponent off from their environment, and paralysing their ability to make effective decisions.

According to Dwyer, "Collins set out with a plan to to eliminate the most effective British detectives and thus knock out the eyes and ears of the Dublin Castle regime in order to provoke the British to retaliate blindly."

The high-point of this strategy came on November 21, 1920, Bloody Sunday, when the IRA assassinated British agents across Dublin. Collins' men succeeded in killing only 14 of 35 targets, but the effect was immediate. Spies and informers fled to the Castle in droves, and British troops lashed out at Croke Park, killing 15 people.

Such reprisals created a dilemma for the British cabinet, which approved of them in many cases, but did not want to endorse them publicly, a situation which undermined army discipline. Perhaps a later generation of British strategists solved this problem with Frank Kitson's countergangs and collusion.

Collins, by contrast, was able to be relatively discriminating because of his extensive infiltration of the police, and other arms of the British state. He was able to move around Dublin in the knowledge that prudent policemen would leave him alone. The main prerequisite for this state of affairs was the huge support which Sinn Fein enjoyed by this stage.

He was also very effective at infiltrating the main British communication network, the postal service. On a parochial note, I would suggest this had a lot to do with his background and contacts in the London IRB.

Dwyer concludes that the Squad made a vital contribution to the War of Independence, but did not win it. He rightly emphasises that this was not a conventional war, but that surely only intensifies the importance of the Squad's contribution to the intelligence and psychological conflict.

He suggests that Collins would not have made an easy transition to civilian politics. Partly this is based on the role of his associates in the Civil War, the Army Mutiny of 1924, and later episodes of political instability. Collins' own role in kidnapping unionist hostages and in the shooting of Sir Henry Wilson, are also cited as evidence of someone 'not committed to a democratic constitutional process.'

Certainly, Collins never became the 'reformed' figure he has sometimes been portrayed as. While mystery still surrounds many of his actions, he was throughout his short life, remarkably consistent in his aims.

This book is powerful testimony to the fact that he pursued those aims with an effectiveness unequalled in Irish history.

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The Politics of Englishness

2007-08-16T19:25:25+01:00

Arthur Aughey
Manchester University Press
2007

University of Ulster Professor Arthur Aughey turns his attention to the English question in this new study inspired by the ubiquity of the flag of St George across England during the 2002 and 2006 World Cups .

As in his 2001 study of the impact of devolution on the UK, Aughey's approach is to conduct an exhaustive survey of the literature on the subject.

Much of this literature is preoccupied with the 'peculiar lack' of any politically significant sense of English nationality, The most important examples being the work of Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson.

Aughey criticises the 'Nairn Anderson thesis' for attempting to force English identity into conformity with an ideal type of classical nationalism. He nevertheless engages with Anderson's analysis of English exceptionalism, a worldview made up of two related but contradictory parts: England as the exemplary nation that should be emulated by others, and England as the exceptional nation that cannot be emulated.

For Nairn, he argues, England is exceptional only in its political backwardness. He rightly suggests that Nairn's thesis of the break-up of Britain is as much a prescripion as a prediction.

He is on weaker ground when he suggests that 'the English did not fit neatly enough into the political destiny devised for them' by Nairn in the 1970s. If Nairn's thesis might have appeared irrelevant in the Thatcher era, the project of a new democratic English nationalism appears rather more timely in the new millenium, as Aughey acknowledges. If that were not true, it is hard to believe this book would have been written.

The author himself provides plenty of evidence of the growing willingness to embrace a distinct English political identity. On the left, long-standing suspicion of English identity has been challenged by a radical nationalism, drawing on the religious radical tradition of the Seventeenth Century and on the English roots of the American revolution.

Aughey cites 'a widespread assumption that within the United Kingdom one is witnessing a movement of the people against the state' with national groups as the vehicle. On this view, the present moment provides an opportunity to replace 'Britishness (still monarchical, imperialistic, hierarchical, unequal) with a recovered Englishness (already become republican, meritocratic, egalitarian, inclusive, internationalist.)'

For Aughey, this vision is flawed because the left's instinct for inclusiveness means it must impose unrealistic conditions on its embrace of nationalist populism.

Aughey finds a similar suspicion of populism mirrored on the right, but argues that the re-emergence of identity politics is inherently favourable to conservative concerns. He considers a range of conservative thinkers who have embraced versions of English nationalism, including Simon Heffer, David Starkey and Roger Scruton.

The final third of the book considers the various institutional 'locations of Englishness': the English regions, Europe and the UK.

The chapter on the regions provides a particularly searching analysis of why regional government has failed as a solution to the West Lothian question, while noting that unaccountable regional devolution is still very much underway.

The West Lothian question, why Scottish MPs can vote on English matters when English MPs cannot vote on Scottish matters, is a key aspect of the English question. Aughey notes that it was originally formulated by opponents of Scottish devolution precisely because it didn't have an answer.

He quotes with approval, Robert Hazell's dictum that 'The English Question is not an exam question that the English are required to answer,' and can remain unresolved 'for as long as the English want.' If Aughey recognises the fluidity of the situation, he is nevertheless somewhat bemused by the resentment expressed by groups like the Campaign for an English Parliament.

This could be seen as a retreat into traditional British constitutional obfuscation. It is certainly not an attempt to present a alternative positive vision to the Nairn-Anderson thesis.

This is ultimately a conservative book, not only in its conclusion but also in its cultural and political focus. In those areas, it provides a very valuable and stimulating study of the English question.

It perhaps merits a radical response, with a social and economic focus, that would show why that question merits an answer.

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Unfinished Business: State Killings and the Quest for Truth

2007-08-08T22:16:33+01:00

Bill Rolston
Beyond the Pale
2000

One in ten of those killed during the Troubles in Northern Ireland was killed by the state.This book tells some of the stories behind that statistic.

22 chapters are each devoted to a single incident, beginning with Bloody Sunday in 1972, and ending with the case of Robert Hamill, who was murdered by loyalists in 1997 while nearby RUC officers refused to intervene.

Each chapter contains a substantial account of the case, alongside interviews with relatives of the victims and campaigners. Three further chapters include extended interviews with human rights campaigners Fr Raymond Murray, Clara Reilly of Relatives for Justice, and Fr Denis Faul.

Unfinished Business is an extremely valuable record of the cases it documents, but above all it is powerful testimony to the often untold story of how ordinary familes have fought for the truth about the deaths of their loved ones.

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Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards: US Covert Action & Counterintelligence

2007-08-08T01:13:36+01:00

Roy Godson
National Strategy Information Center 1995
Transaction Publishers 2001

Roy Godson may be a Georgetown University Professor, but his knowledge of the intelligence world is clearly more than academic.He was himself implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal, an episode that informs the analysis in this book.

Godson divides intelligence into four main elements, collection, analysis, covert action and counter-intelligence. The latter two areas, arguably the murkiest of all, form his subject matter. Each has two sections devoted to it, one considering the history of the discipline since 1945, and another setting out its basic principles.

Covert action is essentially the art of clandestine political intervention in the affairs of other states. (It's worth noting that the author's father, Joe Godson, has been accused of covert intevention in British politics during his time as Labour attache in London in the 1950s.)

Godson considers methods ranging from covert funding, propaganda and disinformation, to terrorism, guerrilla warfare and coups d'etat.

He argues that the moral test for covert action is whether the domestic public would accept it if it knew about it.He acknowledges US support for authoritarian regimes, but claims that the US has been a democratising influence on them.

His examples of the most nefarious covert action practises are usually drawn from the actions of non-American agencies. His discussion of terrorism, for example, never considers whether that term could be applied to any US-sponsored activities.

Godson's verdict on Iran-Contra is that it failed because the President was not prepared to defend support for the Contras in Congress. (Other Iran-Contra veterans associated with the neo-conservative movement have reportedly drawn a different lesson, that covert action can successfully be prosecuted without Congressional knowledge.)

Iran-Contra is also cited as an example of the dangers of using covert action as a half-measure when more overt alternatives are unpalatable. This judgement may well be relevant to current US debates about covert action in the Middle East.

In his discussion of counter-intelligence, Godson argues for 'offensive counter-intelligence' that does not merely catch spies, but turns them in order to manipulate the perceptions of their masters. This emphasis clearly overlaps with the propaganda/disinformation aspects of covert action.

Godson warns of the dangers of disinformation finding its way back into the US public sphere. Again, this is interesting given the authors closeness to neo-conservative circles that have been at best courting this danger over Iraq, and at worst running covert actions against the American people.

Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards is not a balanced portrait of US activities, but it is a remarkable insight, from an intelligence practitioner, into the range of political interventions of which intelligence agencies are capable.

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The Irish: A Photohistory: 1840-1940

2007-08-04T22:57:57+01:00

Sean Sexton and Christine Kinealy
Thames & Hudson
2002

Sean Sexton has spent a lifetime collecting old Irish photographs, and it shows in this collection of 271 images documenting every aspect of Irish life from 1840 to 1940.

Insightful captions provide the context to each of the pictures, which are presented alongside an extended narrative by historian Christine Kinealy in four chapters.

Land, Landlords and The Big House, looks at the life of the aristocracy, a subject which was heavily represented in early photography.

Poverty, Famine, Evictions, examines the daily life of the rural majority, and includes some remarkably powerful pictures from the Land War of the 1880s.

From Union to Partition features some interesting pictures of Irish troops in the First World War, as well as an extensive record of the struggle for independence. The final chapter, Towards a Modern Ireland looks at the diverse impact of economic change on Ireland over the period, bringing new forms of public entertainment as well as commercial and industrial development.

The whole is beautifully presented. As a coffee table book, it would be an ornament to any home, but much more than this, as a work of history it provides the reader with a unique sense of immediacy.

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