MI-6 – Fifty Years of Special Operations
Author: Stephen Dorril
Publisher: Fourth Estate, London
Price: British Pounds 16.50
One can easily recommend this book to anyone keen to know the murky world of British military intelligence (MI) services. It deals with MI-6 and partly covers MI5. And their coordinated campaigns with the Central Intelligence agency (CIA) of the U.S., of America. The collapse of the Soviet Union, end of the Cold war and above all the growth of electronics has made conventional espionage practices irrelevant. The author doesn’t get into that monologue. His gaze is fixed securely on hey days of cold war spy games when every kind of nefariousness was taken recourse to against those whom they suspected.
Kim Philby keeps popping up throughout the book. Who was at fault – the master or the agent for the egg on MI- 5? The author doesn’t want to apportion blame. On its part, the Foreign Office had had its reservations but these were not taken seriously. On his part, Philby did precious little to hide his sympathies and inclinations though he did not wear them on his forearm.
In a way, Kim Philby episode epitomises the MI-5 and MI-6 failures in stemming Communist takeover in Eastern Europe from Romania, Albania, Hungry, Poland and East Germany at the end of the Second World War. The Soviet bloc had its own Philby variants. Amongst them was Penkovsky and he was undoubtedly a big catch for the Americans and the British.
One feature that makes the book under review interesting is the desperate effort of the British secret services to touch up the image of London as though the sun had not set in on the empire. It clearly brings out that Washington did not believe that the CIA had, “to bolster a fading British presence”. The British believed passionately that the US was very much in need of their expertise and they were frustrated when ‘not taken seriously by the US’.
There were many episodes where in MI-6 and CIA were major ‘players’ each in its own right. Some of the incidents that are featured in the book relate to the Suez crisis, perceived threat of Iran joining the Soviet bloc, assassination of Patrice Lumumba, and the Falkland war (1982). The narrative illustrated how the Anglo-American sleuths would do their patriotic best for safeguarding the hegemony of London and Washington. In an attempted assassination of Nasser by MI6, he was presented with a razor filled with plastic explosive which could be detonated.
The British secret service has had ‘no inhibitions’ in paying (buying?) politicians, journalists, and other sources from Cairo to Tehran and beyond; these payments were 9,000 to 12,000 pounds per year during the Cold War. Significantly, the pay offs were under the ‘secret head’- dissemination of pro-British ideas. The practice appears to be very much in vogue on the other side of the Atlantic these days.
