He is also well-regarded and well-connected with Other Government Departments and extremely good at ferretting out interesting snippets from the National Archives. He has developed a specialist strand of historical writing, concentrating on British intelligence operations, but also including excursions into the Byzantine world of US intelligence and provides interesting, accurate and human accounts of some of the stranger things which have gone on inside the agencies and operations over the years.
“Six” is the first part of a major piece of work – a history of the Secret Intelligence Service. Until recent times, England - and then Britain - has always had a penchant for “secret service” work but has always resisted professionalising it. In classic British fashion, this has meant that, since the 16th Century, every time the need arose to develop a strategic intelligence organisation, one had to be evolved in a very short time using the people and resources to hand. It is a credit to successive charismatic leaders, starting perhaps with Francis Walsingham, that this has been achieved each time it was necessary.
Smith starts his story with the establishment of what became SIS and the Security Service in 1909. He charts in some detail – and with the insight of a veteran of bureaucratic infighting himself – the guerrilla warfare conducted with no little ability by the man who is in many ways the hero of his book, Mansfield Smith Cumming, the original “C”, in order to establish the Service, then known as M11(C), as a provider of assessed intelligence during the run up to the First World War.
Once the War begins, the Service expands massively and attracts a cast of buccaneering characters, businessmen and academics with extensive experience in the target geographies, commissioned as junior officers, often in their late 30s and 40s and despatched to foreign parts to recruit agents. Many elements of what has become SIS doctrine emerged during this time as highly intelligent folk applied common sense and imagination to the issue of obtaining agent intelligence and analysing it. Smith has found guidance notes in the National Archive on agent recruitment and product analysis which are still entirely relevant to this day.
Smith gives a fine account of a number of major operations throughout the theatres of war, with particular attention to SIS operations based in Holland and Russia and also describes the ongoing bureaucratic infighting between the armed forces, elements of whom felt that they were best suited to the task and that SIS was not serving them with useful intelligence, the diplomatic service, many of whom felt that intelligence work was both disreputable and dishonourable and the Service itself, which, despite Cumming’s leadership, did have some internal issues with which to contend. The reviewer hesitates to draw any parallels.
Smith is merciless when he considers the activities of some Army officers at HQ BEF in attempting to take over SIS train-watching networks in Holland, despite having neither knowledge of, nor aptitude for, intelligence operations and the reader can only wonder how the officers involved were able to resist posting to command a stevedore detachment in Benbecula.
Smith is also extremely interesting on the methods used for recruitment of agents and their means of obtaining intelligence. The use of seduction, blackmail, bribery and applied violence in support of the aim is covered and a number of imaginative operations are discussed.
SIS was also in the business of shaping policy and had a pivotal role in efforts to keep Russia involved in the War, despite the increasing anarchy and collapse of national morale on the Home Front. He has unearthed compelling evidence that at least one SIS officer was intimately involved in the murder of the mystic, Grigorij Rasputin, who was felt to be an unhealthy influence on the widely distrusted German Tsarina – and has also established that an SIS officer was unable to prevent the passage of Lenin across the Swedish border into the Grand Duchy of Finland and then on to the Finland Station in Petrograd in the famous sealed train.
It is in the chaos and confusion in Russia after the February Revolution that Smith’s research really shines. The fingerprints of SIS officers, including the legendary Sidney Reilly, are found on most pages of the history of the Revolution and subsequent Civil War and it is fascinating to discover, for example, that SIS, after the dust settled and the USSR was established, had a source providing verbatim accounts of Politburo meetings. Smith’s account of the raid on the Soviet Trade Mission in London also has much material new to this reviewer and brings into sharp focus the tensions between government, Security Service, Police Special Branch and the intelligence services which of course no longer complicate these matters….
As the world changes and the threat from a resurgent Germany becomes more apparent, the Service, brutally cut back after the First World War, begins to ramp up for hostilities. During the 1920s and early 30s, the Service maintained its capabilities by keeping in touch with its ‘old boys’ and was able to maintain patchy but adequate coverage of its areas of interest – and had remembered its early days and retained the ability to mobilise quickly, which it did with some success in the immediate pre-World War 2 period.
In summary, this is a fine book. On one level, it is a rattling good yarn which does what it says on the cover; on another level, Smith’s research illuminates the sometimes complex (and to the indifferent, dull) bureaucratic manoeuvring which is a feature of any intelligence organisation and on a third level, it is a fascinating insight into the people who came together to create one of the world’s foremost intelligence services. I can hardly wait for the next volume and would encourage Mick to man up and get on with it and stop faffing around with the newspapers until he has done so!
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5 mushrooms
Published by Dialogue ISBN 9781906447007 - £19.99
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