Confronting the Colonies (15 page)

Strategic intelligence paid closer attention to the potential unrest than it had done prior to the Malayan Emergency. The JIC was once more expected to provide the chiefs of staff with warnings of threats to British interests, particularly those which might require military action or the
movement of forces: the ‘Service Directors of Intelligence are responsible for providing their respective Chief of Staff with world-wide intelligence and particularly so far as the Colonies are concerned, for warning them of anticipated outbreaks of trouble which may necessitate troop movements'.
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Cyprus was on the agenda. This is unsurprising given that it was considered strategically vital by the military. The chiefs of staff recognised that ‘stable conditions in Cyprus were essential in order to avoid our forces there being committed to internal security tasks',
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as opposed to seemingly more important tasks involving external Cold War operations. Given the perceived threat of the Soviet army marching across Central Europe, British forces could not afford to get bogged down in colonial policing operations.

Accordingly, the JIC attempted to appreciate the threat to Cyprus during the period of relocation from Suez. Hugh Stephenson, the outgoing chair of the JIC (Middle East), met with the committee in May 1954 and warned that the situation in Cyprus ‘would be very different [from that in the Canal Zone base] and […] there would have to be a considerable tightening up of our security once we moved there, and probably also of the Cyprus Criminal Investigation Department'.
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Stephenson's warnings did not go unheeded. Coordination between the Colonial Office and MI5 resulted in recommendations to establish the Cyprus Intelligence Committee (CIC), District Intelligence Committees and a Special Branch in 1954. It may, therefore, be reasonably assumed that as reform was underway from mid-1954, authorities in London initially deemed Cyprus to be within the local command's capabilities.

Cyprus remained on the JIC's radar throughout the remainder of 1954. Intelligence was broadly aware of the potential for some unrest, but this was expected to be low-level.
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The JIC was certainly aware of a potential threat from the end of January 1955 (just over two months before the outbreak of violence). Local intelligence had successfully led to the interception of an arms cache being smuggled into Cyprus, and Charles Carstairs, the JIC's Colonial Office representative, used a committee meeting to ‘place on record the thanks of the Colonial Office for the information […] which led to the interception and capture of the caique and smuggling party'.
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Moreover, at the end of March 1955 the committee listed Cyprus as one of five colonial territories in which ‘trouble liable to involve the commitment of Imperial forces is likely to occur in the next few years'.
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Yet despite the intelligence success and the
broader long-term warning, the committee issued no further assessments in the immediate weeks prior to April. The success in January may well have led to false complacency that the Cypriot revolt had been swiftly quashed.

It was not until a week after violence began that the JIC next discussed the colony. Carstairs vaguely updated the committee that the identity of the attackers was not certain, but that incidents were certainly an extreme right-wing manifestation thought to be known as EOKA. Carstairs added that the violence was unlikely to render the base at Cyprus untenable.
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Before then, however, the local Special Branch had known nothing of the threat, other than that an organisation they blankly called ‘X' was planning attacks. Intelligence did not know who or what ‘X' was, or later whether the mysterious Digenis was a man, a group or a committee.
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Although broadly aware of some sort of brewing threat, the JIC was unable to translate this information into a specific warning. Echoing problems experienced in 1948, a combination of three factors explains this: structural, cognitive and local. In structural and organisational terms, little progress had been made since the outbreak of the Malayan Emergency. The informal nature of the JIC system continued to rely on initiative in order to provide warning. This proved difficult in the absence of fully integrated relations with the Colonial Office, as the outbreak of violence came too early for Templer's reforms to have yet made any tangible difference. As an interdepartmental committee, the JIC relied on input from its member departments. The fact that there was no mention of Cyprus in the JIC's weekly output in either March or April 1955 indicates a lack of intelligence reaching the joint assessment machinery from the Colonial Office. This is surprising given that on 16 March alone (before the campaign had even begun in earnest) sixteen bombs exploded on Cyprus targeting pubs, power plants and police stations.
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Cognitive weaknesses compounded those of a structural nature. They impacted upon the ability to set requirements and provide warning. The Cold War thinking that dominated Whitehall diverted attention away from the real threat of violent right-wing nationalism. Exactly as had happened regarding Malaya, intelligence producers and consumers, in the face of global complexities and lacking a counterinsurgency model to aid deductive analysis, sought to reduce ambiguity by conceptualising
events within a stable, ordered and existing narrative. History was repeating itself. This problem was also linked to the setting of agendas in the first place. As Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow have written, ‘problem identification is crucial in setting agendas. The chances of a proposal's appearing on an agenda are dramatically increased if it is persuasively linked to a problem already considered important'.
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Therefore, although the JIC recognised the growing right-wing nationalist threat, the committee was guided by the prevailing political climate. The JIC remained geared towards the activities of Cypriot communists and the extent to which they were externally directed. Moreover, given that since 1949 Cypriot authorities, unable to fight on two fronts, felt that AKEL (the Cypriot communists) were better mobilised and organised than the right and thus chose to ‘confront AKEL, and not engage the nationalists'.
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By 1954, a year before the violence in Cyprus, the JIC Perimeter Review (the forerunner to the Weekly Review of Current Intelligence) warned that AKEL had ‘reconciled Communism with Enosis'.
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Intelligence feared an exploitation of nationalism by communism. Placing nationalism firmly within the communist context also potentially signifies an imperial arrogance that nationalism was mere agitation and that local actors lacked agency. Crucially, it suggests that nationalism and local grievances would not become a serious threat to Britain unless exploited by the real danger: the communists.

According to Allison and Zelikow, ‘definition of the agenda […] can be pivotal' as individuals may define a problem in radically divergent ways.
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Being part of the chiefs of staff structure, the military often defined the JIC agenda with a communist focus, thus influencing the committee's output prior to the insurgency. For example, Gerald Templer, soon to become chief of the Imperial General Staff, commissioned a report specifically asking for intelligence on the communist problem in colonial territories where it may get beyond the control of local resources. The JIC dutifully complied and warned that the communists aimed to ‘turn all colonies and dependent territories into “People's Democracies” wholly subservient to Soviet and Chinese interests'. This was to be achieved via exploitation of local grievances (particularly nationalism and racial discrimination) and use of international front organisations such as the World Federation of Trade Unions.
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To its credit however, the JIC did note that the report referred only to communist aims: It ‘should not be inferred either that Communism
is everywhere the chief, or even the major danger'.
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This was a wise caveat but its impact was negated by the fact that it was briefly inserted at the end of a lengthy discussion of communist intentions. Consequently, the overall tone of the assessment overwhelmingly emphasised the communist threat. This laid open the possibilities of politicisation through self-inflicted consumer delusion: consumers interpreted such intelligence that had been influenced by their own perceptions as confirmation of those very same perceptions. As former CIA analyst Paul Pillar insightfully argues, ‘it is easy for a policymaker to react to the flow of intelligence he receives on a particular topic by thinking “there must really be something there”, while forgetting that it was his own interest in the topic that stimulated the flow'.
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The JIC asked the wrong questions and looked the wrong way.

Finally, it must also be remembered that JIC output depended to an extent on the information it received from local intelligence sources. The poverty of Cypriot intelligence has been discussed in the previous section, but it is worth reiterating that deficiencies left authorities lacking detailed and specific information. Indeed, the local Special Branch initially thought that the mysterious ‘Organisation X' was communist rather than right-wing nationalist.
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It is therefore hardly surprising that JIC assessments followed suit. Moreover, weaknesses in local intelligence created complacency on the island. For example, Governor Robert Armitage at one point protested to Lennox-Boyd that although it was known that arms had been smuggled into Cyprus, ‘there was no indication from any source that they were about to be used'.
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Such comments, driven by a paucity of intelligence, created the impression that the brewing trouble remained within the capabilities of the local command until it was too late. Local intelligence failures were however very much compounded by the aforementioned weaknesses at the Whitehall level. Consequently, the outbreak and intensity of the campaign as it unfolded throughout 1955 took authorities by surprise.

After the violence had broken out, it was important for intelligence assessments to ascertain the perpetrators and the source of the threat. This was true not only at the tactical and operational level, but also at the strategic level. Senior policymakers and ministers needed this information
in order to guide broader responses and regional policy. In contrast to the focus on communism prior to the violence, the JIC, informed of internal developments by the Colonial Office, recognised that the main threat was from the right-wing and EOKA relatively quickly (even if the severity was not initially grasped). Shortly after the first attacks, Carstairs informed his JIC colleagues that AKEL was not to blame and pointed his finger instead towards EOKA.
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However, the JIC remained wary of possible communist agitation. They worried, for example about links between Makarios and communism despite local intelligence reporting a widening rift between the nationalists and AKEL.
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Yet overall, JIC weekly output recognised the right-wing threat and regularly reported EOKA violence patterns.

The JIC's intelligence assessments of the internal situation throughout the remainder of 1955 reflected those of the Colonial Office and local intelligence authorities, both of which downplayed communism. The JIC therefore did in fact successfully recognise local agency to a far greater extent than had happened in Malaya. The main exception seems to have been Governor Harding who, on proscribing AKEL in December 1955, assessed that even though ‘AKEL have so far watched their step fairly carefully and we cannot produce solid evidence connecting them with acts of violence other than promotion […] of strikes which ended in rioting, the Communists are our real enemies and that we must tackle them sooner or later'.
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Harding was not willing to let the communists off the hook. Similarly, certain elements within the Foreign Office, such as the secretive Information Research Department, dealing with propaganda, also emphasised a communist threat to Cyprus. These political warriors in the Foreign Office were ‘disappointed' by the lack of use of propaganda material on the island and criticised the Colonial Office's attitude towards communism as ‘dilatory and complacent'.
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The Cypriot violence became a regular fixture on the JIC's agenda following the declaration of emergency in November 1955. As the fighting intensified, the JIC began to inform and update consumers of trends in the patterns and scale of violence via the Weekly Review of Current Intelligence. Throughout 1956, the committee linked fluctuations in violence to internal political developments, particularly including constitutional negotiations, counter-terrorist measures and intercommunal relations on a near-weekly basis. For example, in October 1956, the JIC linked a rise in the intensity of the terrorist campaign to
a visit to Cyprus by Lord Radcliffe, Britain's constitutional commissioner for the island, to discuss constitutional proposals. A ‘lower level of violence' subsequently followed in order to allow EOKA to reorganise ‘for the next major effort, which may be timed to coincide with the publication of constitutional proposals'.
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The JIC also distributed appreciations of EOKA's capabilities and intentions via its weekly output. In terms of capabilities, the JIC made regular but brief assertions such as that most of the violence was conducted by ‘a small group of skilled gunmen'. Likewise regarding intentions, the committee again issued regular summaries, including that ‘EOKA is making a determined bid to show itself as a factor still to be reckoned with', and that ‘EOKA is expected to seek and exploit its recent gains in men'.
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Although vague, JIC weekly intelligence reviews indirectly aided departmental thinking. The cumulative influence of regular assessments and updates should not be overlooked and formed an important part of the committee's peacetime role.