The Defence of the Realm (88 page)

The relationship between the SLO in Accra and the Nkrumah regime was also under threat. When the first SLO in independent Ghana, John Thomson, had left Accra in June 1960, he had regarded Nkrumah as ‘a bastion against communism'. On his return for a second posting in June 1962, he discovered what the British high commissioner dramatically called ‘a lurch to the left'.
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Nkrumah was deceived by forged KGB documents which purported to reveal that the CIA had assassinated the Prime Minister of Burundi and attempted a coup in Tanganyika. After an assassination attempt against him in 1962 Nkrumah became obsessed by the belief that the Agency was plotting his overthrow, gave visitors copies of a book denouncing CIA conspiracies,
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and accepted a Soviet offer to send a KGB officer to give advice on his personal security.
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Other officers from the KGB and the East German Stasi followed to train a new National Security Service which ran a large network of informers (a particular speciality of the Stasi).
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In November 1963 Thomson reported that the head of the Special Branch, J. W. K. Harlley, and his deputy, A. K. Deku, had told him they were convinced that Nkrumah was turning Ghana into a Soviet satellite. In January 1964 a Ghanaian policeman fired at Nkrumah, causing him only minor injury but killing a security guard. A bogus letter from a supposedly disillusioned US military intelligence officer, rapidly fabricated by the KGB, persuaded Nkrumah that the CIA was, once again, plotting
his overthrow. He wrote an angry personal letter of protest to President Lyndon Johnson, accusing the CIA of devoting all its energies to ‘clandestine and subversive activities among our people'.
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The high commissioner in Accra, Hugh Smedley, tried unsuccessfully to persuade Hollis to extend Thomson's tour of duty beyond the planned departure date of May 1964. The Commonwealth Relations Office wrote to Hollis:

Our High Commission in Accra view Thomson's departure with some dismay because they regard him as a key man in the Mission, with excellent knowledge and judgment of Ghanaian affairs and having contacts, especially with Special Branch, which are of crucial importance . . . It looks as if we may be entering one of those phases in our relations with Ghana when Thomson's advice would be particularly helpful.
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In 1965, a year after Thomson's departure, the post of SLO in Accra was abolished on the grounds that, because of the worsening of relations with the Nkrumah regime, it no longer served any significant purpose.
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Over farewell drinks in the house of a Ghanaian general, Harlley invited Thomson's successor as SLO to ask London to send him telephone interception and eavesdropping equipment. London did not respond.
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On 24 February 1966 Harlley succeeded in organizing a combined military and police coup which overthrew the Nkrumah regime. Next day Sir Arthur Snelling of the Commonwealth Relations Office rang the DG, Furnival Jones, to ask him to despatch Thomson urgently to Ghana. Snelling believed that ‘through his knowledge of personalities in Ghana [Thomson] would be able to find out what was going on and in particular what the prospects were for a resumption of diplomatic relations'.
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Arriving in Accra on the 28th, Thomson was welcomed with open arms by Harlley, who was now deputy chairman of the National Liberation Council (NLC). After a brief tirade from Harlley upbraiding Her Majesty's Government for having abandoned him in 1963 and put his life in danger, as well as failing to supply the equipment he had asked for in 1965, the two men settled their differences and renewed their friendship over a bottle of brandy. Thomson went on to be welcomed by, and deliver unofficial congratulations to, the NLC chairman, General Ankrah, and the other NLC members. On 2 March, following a favourable report from Thomson, Britain formally recognized the new Ghanaian regime, establishing full diplomatic relations three days later. This was the only occasion on which a Security Service officer was charged by HMG with making the first contact with a new government which had seized power in a
coup d'état
.
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In some other African Commonwealth countries, the SLO remained an
influential figure throughout the 1960s. By 1966 the SLO in Lagos had been given one of the twenty secret government telephones allocated to senior Nigerian figures. After the coup which brought General Gowon to power in July 1966, he was asked, with the approval of the new regime, to arrange the escape of the number two in the previous government, which he successfully effected during ‘an amusing few hours reminiscent of wartime . . . with launch trips after dark and ladders over the seaward side of the mailboat'.
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The SLO also reported that his small office, ‘through our liaison contacts, were virtually the only source of real intelligence throughout the coup and that [the] huge official edifice, with its forty-four British diplomats and over one hundred non-diplomats, relied on us for almost all of their factual information'.
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The high commissioner, Sir Francis Cumming-Bruce, told the DG in November that the SLO was ‘the High Commission's lifeline for information on day-to-day developments in the internal security situation, through his contacts with the Nigerian police'.
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A new SLO, who was appointed in 1967 at the beginning of the Nigerian Civil War which followed the attempted secession of Biafra, was taken aback by the amount of inside information on the Gowon regime which he acquired from his contacts in the Nigerian Special Branch,
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including its head whom he had first met on a colonial administrator's course in Oxford in the 1950s. When he accompanied the high commissioner to see the President, General Gowon made a point of asking the SLO to stay behind so that he could thank him for his help.
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The former African colony in which the Security Service's role remained of greatest significance was Kenya. The intelligence in which Kenyatta took most interest concerned the activities of the pro-Communist deputy president of his ruling KANU party, Oginga Odinga. With assistance from former senior members of the colonial Special Branch, whom Kenyatta had asked to stay on after the end of British rule, at least one of Odinga's houses was bugged.
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On the first anniversary of Kenyan independence in 1964, Kenyatta asked the former Commonwealth Secretary, Duncan Sandys, ‘if we, the British, could produce any documentary proof of Odinga receiving money from the Chinese. Kenyatta said that he was perfectly well aware of these subventions but he could not effectively deal with Odinga unless he could confront him with specific evidence.'
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Though no usable evidence seems to have been forthcoming, the Special Branch successfully identified the main conduit by which Odinga received funds from China.
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In April 1965 the Kenyan Attorney General, Charles Njonjo, informed the British high commissioner, Malcolm MacDonald, of reports that Odinga and his associates were planning a coup, and requested the intervention,
if necessary, of British troops. The coup, however, never materialized. Odinga's offices were searched, and several crates of machine guns, grenades and other arms were seized. Soon afterwards Kenyatta gave the Soviet ambassador a furious dressing down after the arrival of a Soviet arms shipment apparently arranged by Odinga. The arms were sent back to Russia. Odinga was replaced as deputy president in 1966 and lost a trial of strength with Kenyatta over the following year.
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Soon after Odinga's sacking, the Head of Training in the Security Service
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was asked to carry out a review of Kenyan intelligence. He recommended the secondment of a British intelligence officer to head a ‘research' desk which would co-ordinate intelligence assessment and produce reports for Kenyatta and other members of his administration, and the creation of a National Security Executive to oversee the intelligence community. His report was accepted in its entirety and an MI5 officer was appointed in January 1967 as both head of the research desk and secretary of the new National Security Executive. The Ministry of Overseas Development paid the officer's salary on the possibly dubious grounds that he was providing ‘technical assistance'.
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He later recalled that Kenyatta had asked him ‘to keep an eye on Oginga Odinga'.
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The Nairobi SLO reported in July 1968 that the MI5 officer had acquired an access to the Kenyan Special Branch and its files ‘which is almost unique in Africa in this day and age'.
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The two most fraught transfers of British imperial power in the 1960s were in Aden and British Guiana. In both areas the Security Service had only a limited influence. The aim of the Macmillan government in the late 1950s and early 1960s was to consolidate British influence in the Arab world by maintaining the British base in its Aden colony and setting up a federation of British protectorates in South Arabia ruled by traditional tribal chiefs. Though Macmillan sensed what he called ‘the wind of change' leading Africa to independence, he greatly underestimated the force of Arab nationalism in the Middle East, inspired by the charismatic Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was widely believed to have humiliated both British and French imperialists during the Suez crisis of 1956. So far as South Arabia was concerned, Macmillan believed: ‘We must get rid of this horrible word “independence”. What we want is a word like “home rule”. The thing to do is to think of the Arabic for “home rule” and then work backwards from it.'
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In 1959 six states in the Western Arab Protectorate were persuaded to form a Federation of Arab Emirates of the South and sign a treaty of friendship and mutual co-operation with Britain accepting the continuation of the British military base in Aden. By the end of 1962 the total number
of states in the Federation had grown to eleven. Aden Colony joined as the State of Aden in January 1963 and the Federation was renamed Federation of South Arabia.
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There was never any realistic chance, however, of stemming the rising tide of Arab nationalism. In June 1962 Nasser sponsored the foundation in Aden of the People's Socialist Party (PSP), an offshoot of the Aden Trade Unions Congress, led by Abdullah al-Asnag, whose aim was to cause labour unrest, provoke a government crackdown and radicalize Adeni opinion. A year later Nasser provided support for the newly founded and more radical National Liberation Front (NLF), which from its base in Yemen began to plan a nationalist rebellion in Aden through a network of secret operational cells. By late 1963 Nasser was beginning to tire of al-Asnag and the PSP, whom he condemned as ‘too moderate', and to place greater confidence in the NLF. On 10 December, however, al-Asnag sought to demonstrate his revolutionary credentials by leading an assassination attempt at Aden Airport against Sir Kennedy Trevaskis, the high commissioner. Trevaskis survived but his aide, George Henderson, was killed, attempting to shield him from the attack.
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As the PSP and NLF had doubtless hoped, the Federation Government declared a State of Emergency and arrested over fifty PSP members, prompting protests at the United Nations, from the Soviet Bloc and from a wide range of anti-imperialist groups. During a visit to neighbouring Yemen in April 1964, Nasser declared: ‘We swear by Allah to expel the British from all parts of the Arabian Peninsula.'
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The British authorities in Aden failed to learn the lessons of the Malayan insurgency more than a decade earlier. Intelligence organization was confused and no overall director of intelligence was appointed until 1965. The Security Service was not asked to play a role which approached the significance of its participation in previous counter-insurgencies in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus. Trevaskis favoured extensive use of Special Political Action (SPA) against Arab nationalists. The Aden high commission, he claimed, ‘would be able to bring about a clash between the PSP and SAL [the rival South Arabian League] which will encourage them to slit each other's throats'. Trevaskis was authorized by the Secretary of State, Duncan Sandys, to spend £15,000 ‘penetrating their organizations, suborning their key figures, stimulating rivalries and jealousies between them, encouraging dissension and the emergence of splinter groups and harassing them generally, for example by breaking up public meetings'.
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In July 1965 the high commission reported to the Colonial Office that ‘the casually aimed grenade and the incompetently assembled explosive device are giving place to planned and selective assassination. Presumption
is that new cadre of skilled and carefully trained operatives are now on the job.'
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Trevaskis was thought to be in favour of retaliating against the NLF murder campaign by a covert assassination campaign against known terrorists. At a meeting at the Colonial Office, Director E, Bill Magan, argued that, as ‘in the Malayan jungle' and against ‘Mau Mau in the Kenyan forests', the correct strategy in Aden was not to kill terrorists but to capture and interrogate them.
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When asked by the Colonial Office to clarify his proposals for targeting terrorists, Trevaskis dropped the subject. Magan believed that the original proposal had come from the armed services and MoD, which had pressed it on the high commission.
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The SLO in Aden reported that he too was inclined to favour the selective targeting of known terrorists.
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Magan did not. ‘For myself,' he replied, ‘I think that experience shows that to counter terrorism with terrorism is for the authority administering the law a two-edged and dangerous weapon, and the temptation to use it is best avoided.'
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The SLO continued to argue his case: ‘I am not advising anything drastic: all I would suggest at present is that [Trevaskis] be advised to inform Head of Special Branch that if a very few NLF suspects were shot whilst resisting arrest there would be nothing more than a formal inquest.' Magan noted his (probably exasperated) dissent on the SLO's letter.
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