Confronting the Colonies (2 page)

Fascinatingly, British intelligence got it right. On 19 February 2003, the British Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), the highest intelligence body in the land, offered the prime minister, Tony Blair, their view of the
impact of invading Iraq in both the north and the south of the country. Their survey included the dusty and dangerous streets of Basra and the surrounding area in which British forces ultimately spent half a decade embroiled in vicious battles against Shia insurgents. They warned of the risk of serious disorder and tribal violence, and made the point that a post-Saddam regime would not necessarily enjoy popular support.

However, coming just four short weeks before the Americans began their assault on Baghdad, the British intelligence community's warning was too little too late. Tony Blair's government lacked not only a sufficiently thorough assessment on this subject but also an evolving or longer-term appreciation maintained throughout the planning stages prior to 2003. British intelligence had started with an assumption that Al Qaeda would not be a particular problem in Iraq, and it was not until March 2003, the month the war actually started, that intelligence warned the group may have established sleeper cells to be activated after the coalition operations. In the aftermath of the invasion, questions about the scope, nature and implications of the insurgency featured heavily in the intelligence agenda.
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Owing to the simultaneous attacks on America in September 2001, the first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed a prolonged debate about terrorism. It has seen British armed forces embroiled in gruelling counterinsurgency operations not only in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan—whilst military operations in Northern Ireland ended as recently as July 2007. Moreover, British intelligence personnel and special forces have been involved in capacity-building operations against terrorism and insurgency in more than a dozen countries around the world. Meanwhile, the second decade of the century opened with a series of popular uprisings erupting across the Arab world, from Tunisia to Yemen. The so-called Arab Spring has resulted in a bloody civil war in Syria and the overthrow of a number of autocratic regimes across the region. Asymmetric warfare, irregular threats and non-state actors have therefore featured heavily in twenty-first century intelligence assessments as well as in the broader security discourse.

Irregular threats to British interests are by no means new. In the decades following the Second World War, British forces faced a series of insurgencies.
Owing to the overarching contexts of the Cold War and the management of British decline, these insurgencies took on a heightened significance centrally within Whitehall. This book explores the responses of British intelligence to insurgencies in the period from 1948 to 1975. It examines how intelligence impacted upon wider foreign, defence and colonial policy, and how assessments were shaped by competing understandings of broader international forces and threat frameworks.

This period was characterised by the dual contexts of the Cold War and decolonisation. The former played heavily on the minds of both the intelligence community and policy practitioners alike, providing a cognitive prism which dominated much official thinking, particularly in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. In May 1946, Labour's bullish foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, warned his cabinet colleagues of the severe dangers posed by the Soviet Union. Shortly afterwards however, Clement Attlee, the new prime minister, voiced scepticism about the threat of Soviet expansionism and attempted to argue that the eastern Mediterranean was no longer defendable. In a highly instructive episode in contemporary British history, the prime minister was overridden by Bevin, who was backed by the chiefs of staff threatening to resign
en masse
if Attlee got his way. This was an important altercation. As the leading historian Anne Deighton has argued, from then on a Cold War mindset dominated Whitehall—‘even if some politicians were slower to grasp this'.
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By 1948 the Cold War was well and truly underway and increasingly dictated the intelligence agenda. It must not be forgotten that serious incidents relating to colonial security occurred at the same time as various important events relating to international communism. In the same week in June 1948 as the declaration of emergency in Malaya, the start of the Berlin Blockade understandably devoured Whitehall attention. Meanwhile, the early years of the Malayan violence temporarily overlapped with the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War, in which Mao's communist forces created the People's Republic of China in 1949. Similarly, the Yemeni coup, which had dramatic implications for British interests in Aden, occurred in October 1962—the same month as the Cuban Missile Crisis threatened nuclear war. It is understandable that developments across the Atlantic took priority over those in the Gulf during those tense days. By dominating the agenda, it is unsurprising that the Cold War provided a framework in which other events were
interpreted—yet this can (and did) have damaging ramifications for accurate intelligence assessment.

The Cold War context had important implications for assessments of colonial security and insurgency. As a former head of Defence Intelligence, Kenneth Strong, informed his American counterparts in the mid-1950s: the Cold War threat to colonial possessions ‘has brought a mass of attendant problems in the intelligence field'.
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British intelligence lacked the resources to monitor the entire globe. The JIC accordingly neglected colonial security at first, focusing instead on conventional defence matters relating to the communist threat, such as monitoring Soviet nuclear capability. Yet at the same time, the Cold War also raised the stakes of colonial security—albeit from a perspective which emphasised the external communist threat over internal issues. Colonial territories were increasingly perceived as a front line in the ideological conflict and thus susceptible to both externally-directed communist subversion and a Sino/Soviet military attack in the event of global war. Moreover, the Cold War presented an opportunity for nationalists to exploit the prevailing international system and, as Odd Arne Westad has explained, gain ‘support from their enemies' enemies'.
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This led to an intriguing and intricate interplay between external Cold War and internal nationalist factors with which intelligence assessments had to grapple. As a result of external Cold War pressures, the JIC gradually interpreted its (admittedly vague) charter with a greater scope for examining irregular threats outside of Central and Eastern Europe. This extended to Britain's shrinking empire—for which the committee held no explicitly enshrined mandate at the start of 1948.

It is vital not to view contemporary history solely through the Cold War lens. Doing so obscures what Matthew Connelly has described as ‘subtler but no less significant changes in the nature of international relations'.
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Of equal, if not of more, importance for Britain was the contextual framework of decolonisation, the strategic management of imperial decline and the projection of British power within this new context. Whether one looks to the fall of Singapore in 1942, the loss of India in 1947 or the Suez debacle of 1956 for a precise date, it is abundantly clear that Britain ceased to be a global power. Yet throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, policymakers remained in denial and ‘British defence policy, like her foreign policy, was designed to preserve as much as possible of Britain's world power in increasingly adverse circumstances'.
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That said, the landslide election of Clement Attlee's Labour Government in 1945 saw attention turned to various independence campaigns: most notably that of India which gained independence in 1947. A troublesome insurgency in Palestine also devoured much of the new prime minister's attention before the state of Israel was created in 1948. Other colonies also achieved independence in the late 1940s, including Burma and Ceylon. Regardless of the subsequent Conservative Government's views on the retention of empire, the limitations of Britain's declining power and influence in the Middle East were exposed in 1956 as a result of the Suez Canal debacle—although Britain did maintain a regional presence until the ignominious scuttle from Aden in 1967 and military withdrawal from the Persian Gulf in 1971. By the end of the 1950s, however, decolonisation was creeping into Africa with Sudan and the Gold Coast gaining independence. At the start of the following decade, Harold Macmillan made his famous ‘Wind of Change' speech in South Africa, and this was followed by a wave of decolonisation across the continent, including in Kenya (1963) and Northern Rhodesia (1964). By the early 1970s, much of Britain's formal empire had been lost and successive governments faced the new challenge of how best to project influence and ensure British interests in the post-imperial world.
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A growing trend of global political hostility to traditional forms of imperialism emerged as the forces of decolonisation ate away at the British Empire. Within this context, a series of nationalist uprisings erupted across the empire including in Palestine, Kenya, Cyprus and Aden. Just like the Cold War, this violence also heightened the importance of colonial security in the eyes of Whitehall. Such widespread unrest forced British responses to each insurgency to be considered within a context of maintaining national interests against a trend of imperial decline. Combined with the ongoing Cold War threat, this led towards greater centralisation of the management of colonial security and intelligence. To clarify, the British system still utilised a decentralised approach in so far as a number of different departments and agencies were involved—but centralisation in terms of action taken in London as opposed to that taken locally increased dramatically. A symptomatic example of this was, as leading intelligence historian Richard Aldrich notes, that ‘the Colonial Office was reluctantly persuaded to join the higher-level intelligence and security committees in Whitehall'.
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In the post-1945 world, intelligence sought to aid policymakers navigate
the difficult international climate, to promote British interests wherever possible and to project prestige. Understanding insurgencies was vital in order to achieve this.

This book examines insurgencies in the colonies of Malaya, Cyprus and Aden, and British involvement in the Dhofar region of Oman. It uses them as case studies to trace the evolution of the role and impact of strategic intelligence from 1948, when colonial matters were beginning to increase in Whitehall priority, to 1975—by which time Britain was adapting to life in a post-imperial world. Of course the British experience is far broader than the four case studies examined here and a state of near continuous counterinsurgency or internal security operations existed somewhere in the world from 1945. This book has been limited to four particularly important and instructive case studies owing to issues of both theme and space. Each is not merely a brief overview of the JIC's role but is a detailed examination of the intelligence processes going on within Whitehall. Each chapter seeks to investigate beneath the surface of the central intelligence machinery and find out what made it tick. Indeed, the case studies serve as vehicles to explore broader themes and issues relating to intelligence assessment and threat conceptualisation.

As the United Kingdom emerged from the devastation of the Second World War, its forces became embroiled in countering violent and radical Zionism in Palestine until Britain withdrew in 1948. The JIC swiftly assessed the possibility of major Arab disturbances in Palestine along with the reactions of other Middle Eastern states to the violence. The second of these is particularly interesting in so far as it demonstrates the JIC beginning to internationalise local conflicts. This was to become a core aspect of strategic intelligence in counterinsurgency. By 1947, the JIC was pessimistically (but accurately) predicting that any settlement would be unacceptable to either the Jewish or the Arab community. Intelligence assessments also related to threats to the British mainland. Indeed, the Zionists undoubtedly posed a serious terrorist threat on the streets of London. The Security Service (MI5) warned Attlee in 1946 that he was a target for assassination, whilst a letter bomb campaign targeted other members of the cabinet. The following year, a powerful bomb was planted inside the Colonial Office but failed to explode.
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This book, however, opens with Malaya. It was not until 1948, in the aftermath of the declaration of emergency in Malaya, that the JIC gained Colonial Office representation. This formed a crucial moment in the context of the committee's evolving role. Strategic intelligence was beginning to become interested in colonial threats overseas and their impact upon British global interests. Despite this, slow progress was made and the committee's input into counterinsurgency initially remained negligible. 1948 and the outbreak of the Malayan campaign, therefore, forms a suitable starting point. Moreover, Malaya is a fascinating case study when thinking about the role of intelligence in Whitehall. It intersected Colonial Office, Foreign Office and military interests. Internal factors behind the uprising had to be considered against potential external factors, not least the Cold War and the emergence of Communist China. The situation on the ground provided a complex challenge for intelligence in London. Could the JIC, tentatively settling into its new peacetime role, rise to meet it?

Between 1952 and 1956, as the Malayan campaign was being brought under control, British forces faced a vicious insurgency in Kenya. This is an important and interesting event in its own right and raised some increasingly familiar challenges to British intelligence assessment. Who were the insurgents? What were their motivations? As Huw Bennett has recently written, ‘the rebellion was devolved and complex in organisation and motivation'. It involved a large number of grievances, from anti-colonialism to dissatisfaction with imposed agricultural techniques.
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Mau Mau was, however, an isolated insurgent group. It was alienated from widespread external support given its tribal appeal and the fact that Kenya was bordered by other countries controlled by colonial powers. The colonial authorities knew very well that there was no Soviet support for this particular uprising.
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There was therefore less of a need for the JIC's interdepartmental approach. Moreover, the JIC's structure, function and role had not much evolved from the outbreak of the Malayan Emergency. The next big year in the committee's history was 1955 when it gained extra power over colonial matters. Two years later, the JIC moved to the Cabinet Office, where it still resides today.