M16: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service

MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service.

By Stephen Dorril. Free Press. 907 pp. $40

When MI6 was serialized in London’s Sunday Times on the eve of its publication this spring, British authorities raided the publisher to seize files and computers, and sought by a series of legal maneuvers to suppress the book.

They failed, thanks less to the robust state of civil liberties in Britain than to the fact that the author was able to show that he had used open and public sources. The fearsome Official Secrets Act has been largely outflanked by the  U.S. Freedom of Information Act and the opening of once secret files in Eastern Europe (and to a lesser degree in Moscow). Moreover, by carefully cross-referencing these open sources with the published memoirs and diaries of senior politicians and civil servants and then with the crudely sanitized British cabinet papers, the careful researcher can piece together far more than the spymasters ever thought possible. After 15 years of research, Dorril, a don at the University of Huddersfield, has produced a book that amounts to a genuine breakthrough.

Naturally, the headlines were grabbed by the sensational revelations that African leaders, including Nelson Mandela, Kenneth Kaunda, and Thomas Mboya, were "agents of influence," and that Mandela, on a recent trip to Britain, made a discreet trip to MI6 to thank the agency for its work in foiling two assassination attempts against him. (Mandela denies being an agent.) The claims of MI6 plots to kill Egyptian President Gamal Nasser, Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi, and Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic also won much more publicity than the manifest incompetence of the agency in failing (like the  U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) to foresee the invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982 or that of Kuwait in 1990. Again like the CIA, British intelligence in the mid-1980s underestimated both the weakness of the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev’s determination to reform it.

To the historian, however, the deeper interest in Dorril’s book (apart from his impressive research methods) lies in his well-documented argument that British intelligence helped bring about the Cold War by starting hostile operations against the Soviets in 1943, almost as soon as Stalingrad had shown that the Soviet Union would survive. "Now that the tide had turned, it was in our interest to let Germany and Russia bleed each other white," wrote Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Where possible, British intelligence and guerrilla assets recruited to fight Hitler were redirected against the Soviet threat. In Greece, MI6 even joined the Nazi occupiers in funding the right-wing gendarmerie to crush the procommunist guerrillas.

Not that MI6 can be held wholly to blame; Soviet intelligence had been running hostile operations against both Britain and the United States before and during the war. But it is ironic that British agents in the European communist parties were reporting by 1947 that Stalin had ordered them onto the defensive and that there was no expansionist Soviet threat. MI6 and the CIA responded with tragic attempts to roll back Soviet power, sending hundreds of brave emigrés (and a lot of old Nazi supporters) to their doom, betrayed by Soviet moles such as Kim Philby.

—Martin Walker