Confronting the colonies, p.1
Confronting the Colonies, page 1
CONFRONTING THE COLONIES
Confronting the Colonies
British Intelligence and Counterinsurgency
RORY CORMAC
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cormac, Rory.
Confronting the colonies : British intelligence and counterinsurgency / Rory Cormac. — First edition.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-935443-6 (alk. paper)
1. Intelligence service—Great Britain—History—20th century. 2. Great Britain—Colonies—History—20th century. 3. Counterinsurgency—Great Britain—History—20th century. 4. Great Britain—Foreign relations—1945–I. Title.
UB251.G7C66 2013
327.12410171’24109045—dc23
2013025098
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in India on Acid-Free Paper
For Joanne (… an accidental expert)
CONTENTS
Acknowlegements
Abbreviations
1. Intelligence Assessment in an Age of Competing Threats
An Age of Competing Threats
Strategic Intelligence and the British Counterinsurgency Experience
The Joint Intelligence Committee and the Importance of Strategic Intelligence
2. Unfulfilled Potential: Malaya, 1948–1951
The JIC in 1948
Warning and Assessment
Broadening Assessments
Intelligence ‘Management’
Broader Reflections
3. Turf Wars and Tension: Cyprus, 1955–1959
The JIC, 1955—1959
Intelligence Advice
Assessing the Internal Threat
Internationalising Insurgencies
Broader Reflections
4. Into the Whitehall Minefield: Aden and the Federation of South Arabia, 1962–1967
The JIC, 1962–1967
Intelligence Reform
Threat Assessment
Covert Action
Broader Reflections
5. After Pax Britannica: Oman, 1968–1975
The JIC in 1968
Managing Intelligence Overseas
Assessments
Policy Input
Broader Reflections
6. Defining Threats, Understanding Security
JIC Evolution and the Quest for Inclusivity
Strategic intelligence and counterinsurgency: roles and lessons
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This is my first book. I am indebted to the generous support, advice and input from a number of people who have helped me develop from PhD student to published academic. Firstly I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the doctoral thesis from which this book has evolved. I would also like to acknowledge the help and support of various archivists from around the country, including at the National Archives, the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies, the Churchill Archives Centre and the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives. Permission to quote from private papers was kindly given by the Liddell Hart centre and the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies. Secondly, I would like to thank those retired practitioners who have spoken to me about the workings of the JIC. They have helped me place flesh on the archival skeleton and better understand the human side of committee life. Thirdly, I am grateful to the comments from academic colleagues around the country. Their comments have kept me aware that there was more to the years between 1948 and 1975 than the JIC.
I am particularly grateful to those who have read and provided feedback on sections or earlier versions of this work. Their comments have proved invaluable, although any mistakes are mine alone. Special thanks must go to Michael Goodman and Huw Bennett for supervising the PhD upon which this work is based. As official historian of the JIC, Michael Goodman was the ideal academic to oversee the project. His knowledge of the committee and the archives has proved invaluable. Moreover, Huw Bennett interpreted the role of second supervisor in an incredibly generous manner and his insights have certainly strengthened the quality of the work no-end. Combined with Richard Aldrich at the University of Warwick, they have provided the best training for which a young academic could hope.
Finally, I must thank my wife. She has put up with my incessant and excitable ramblings about government committees and cheered me up after long days buried in files and acronyms. She has (without meaning to) acquired a detailed, if somewhat random, knowledge of the British Joint Intelligence Organisation and must be the only musicologist who can list successive JIC chairmen! Thank you.
Rory Cormac, Northampton, Spring 2013
ABBREVIATIONS
AKEL
People’s Working Reform Party (Cypriot Communist Party)
AIC
Aden Intelligence Centre
BATTs
British Army Training Teams
BDCC(FE)
British Defence Coordination Committee (Far East)
C-in-C(ME)
Commander-in-Chief (Middle East)
CENTO
Central Treaty Organisation
CIC
Cyprus Intelligence Committee
CIGs
Current Intelligence Groups
CIGS
Chief of the Imperial General Staff
CCP
Chinese Communist Party
CoS
Chiefs of Staff
CSAF
Commander of the Sultan’s Armed Forces
DIS
Defence Intelligence Staff
DLF
Dhofar Liberation Front
EOKA
National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters
FCO
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
FIC
Federal Intelligence Committee (Aden and South Arabia)
FSA
Federation of South Arabia
HoS
Heads of Sections
IOR
India Office Records, held at the British Library
JAC
Joint Action Committee
JIB
Joint Intelligence Bureau
JIC
Joint Intelligence Committee
JIC(A)
Joint Intelligence Committee (A)
JIC(B)
Joint Intelligence Committee (B)
JIC(FE)
Joint Intelligence Committee (Far East)
JIC(ME)
Joint Intelligence Committee (Middle East)
JIG(Gulf)
Joint Intelligence Group (Gulf)
JIS
Joint Intelligence Staff
JPS
Joint Planning Staff
LIC
Local Intelligence Committee
MCP
Malayan Communist Party
MSS
Malayan Security Service
NLF
National Liberation Front (Aden and South Arabia)
NSC
National Security Council
PDRY
People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen
PFLOAG
Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf
PRSY
People’s Republic of South Yemen
PSP
People’s Socialist Party (Aden)
SAAG
South Arabia Action Group
SAF
Sultan’s Armed Forces
SAS
Special Air Service
SEATO
South East Asia Treaty Organisation
SIFE
Security Intelligence Far East
SIS
Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)
SLO
Security Liaison Officer
TMT
Turkish Resistance Organisation
WRCI
Weekly Review of Current Intelligence
WSCI
Weekly Summary of Current Intelligence
WSI
Weekly Survey of Intelligence
1
INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENT IN AN AGE OF COMPETING THREATS
The controversial invasion of Iraq in 2003 has become synonymous with intelligence. Widespread criticism has long stalked the so-called ‘dodgy dossier’ and the notorious claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction capable of being fired within 45 minutes of an order being given. Serious questions were asked about political pressure on the intelligence agencies and whether intelligence had been ‘sexed up’. A fierce debate ensued and potentially threatened the position of the prime minister himself.
A decade after the initial invasion, discourse about the role of intelligence is now widening. Probing questions are being put to practitioners by the likes of Sir John Chilcot and his inquiry. Not limited simply to the presence (or otherwise) of weapons of mass destruction, senior intelligence officials are now being asked about whether the intelligence agencies or the relevant political and military actors in Whitehall had adequately considered the aftermath of the invasion. What would happen after Saddam Hussein was overthrown? How likely was an insurgency? Was Britain prepared for a protracted and bloody counterinsurgency campaign?
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.1
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.
An Age of Competing Threats
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’.2
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’.3 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’.4 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’.5 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’.6
