In From The Cold
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
Keith Jeffery’s MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949 (Bloomsbury) is the first authorized history of the organization best known for being James Bond’s employer—and at times it reads like the script for a Bond film. For example, MI6 really did have a research department that created clandestine weaponry and gadgets, a section of which was called Q Branch and was run by a former army quartermaster colonel designated ‘Q’. According to a memo extracted in the book, in 1947 MI6’s boffins were busy trying to perfect gun silencers, knock-out tablets, methods to open safes, instantaneous ways to burn paper and a ‘device which will increase the security of operators on burglarious enterprises’.
The book is packed with this sort of wonderfully euphemistic jargon, which will no doubt provide fodder for spy novelists for years to come. Professor Jeffery is the first independent historian to have been given the combination to MI6’s safe—although the National Archives regularly declassifies files from its sister service MI5 and its wartime rival the Special Operations Executive, MI6 has never released any of its files, claiming that might jeopardize current operations. As a result, this book reveals little substantial new information, but instead offers a comprehensive and authoritative summary of MI6’s early years.
Although the book is a doorstopper, I wished Jeffery had lingered a little longer on some of the more intriguing operations. For instance, in 1941 MI6 landed two Dutch agents onto the coast of occupied Holland by motor gunboat. One of them, Peter Tazelaar, was dressed in a watertight drysuit, under which he wore formal black tie. When he got ashore his colleague, Eric Hazelhoff, helped him strip off the drysuit and splashed brandy over his evening clothes, and Tazelaar then wove his way past German sentries pretending to be a drunken partygoer in the area, after which he managed to make contact with the Dutch Resistance. This extraordinary operation is about as James Bond-ish as one can imagine, and is in fact strikingly similar to the opening of Goldfinger. But although the operation has been mentioned in several books over the years, including MRD Foot’s official history of the Special Operations Executive and Eric Hazelhoff’s autobiography, Jeffery only quotes a handful of phrases from the MI6 file, leaving us none the wiser about it other than that it happened.
It seems a missed opportunity, but is no doubt less to do with compromising current operations and more to do with space. Jeffery had a lot of material to choose from. He dedicates a few pages to a fascinating double-cross operation in the war conducted by a glamorous but unnamed 22-year-old Central European woman living in Lisbon who took up with a senior Abwehr officer and volunteered to help the British. She was given the codename Ecclesiastic and handled by ‘Klop’ Ustinov, father of the actor Peter Ustinov who, judging by the excerpts of his reports, felt she was enjoying the deception too much without any concrete results. But despite his initial scepticism, Ecclesiastic went on to pass her lover reams of disinformation that had been specially manufactured by MI6 to look as though it had been fished out of wastepaper baskets, which he obligingly sent back to Berlin for the rest of the war.
Other operations were not as successful, and one of the strengths of the book is that even when relaying the events through snippets of reports—MI6 destroyed many of its files as it went along, reasoning that none of it would ever be published anyway—the human stories shine through. We learn that Sidney Reilly, the famous ‘ace of spies’ who was MI6’s man in Russia from 1918 on, was regarded from the offset as ‘entirely unscrupulous’ by some in the intelligence world, and as he was pursuing his own personal mission to bring down the Bolsheviks some of his material was inevitably slanted—proof, if needed, that the idea of sexed up dossiers is nothing new.
Reilly is one of many agents whose motivations proved problematic for MI6. It is often said that spies work for money, ideology, coercion, ego or a combination of these. A steady salary seems to have been the motivation for many agents in the field, and led to a lot of confusion. Sources who initially appeared to be rock solid turned out to be serving several masters at once, sometimes offering all of them forged material—a problem fictionalized in the novel Our Man In Havana by Graham Greene, whose service with MI6 in Sierra Leone is also detailed.
More alarming than greed was deception for the sake of ideology: from the 1930s onward, the Soviet double agents Kim Philby and George Blake were making their way up the ranks of MI6 undetected. For the four decades it covers, Jeffery has provided a comprehensive look at MI6’s successes, failures—perhaps missing Philby being the greatest—administrative struggles within Whitehall and its liveliest characters. Unfortunately, the organization has said that its archives will remain closed to the public and that it has no plans for a history of any later years. On the evidence of this landmark account, it would seem a shame if the agency didn’t one day offer its side of the story on the Cold War.