Stephen Dorril Did the British

Stephen Dorril

Did the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, intentionally, deliberately help to initiate the Cold War, and then keep it going? That is one of the thrusts of Stephen Dorril's book, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence. Another clear message from Dorril's 900-page book is that there were numerous misguided and failed strategies used by the British in their attempts at covert influence against communism during the Cold War.

At the outset, Dorril provides six pages of acronyms to aid readers, and as one reads through the book, a frequent flip back to those pages is necessary - it's either that or make a photocopy of those pages for quick reference. One encounters excruciatingly complicated details as Dorril takes readers through the sometimes grim and often macabre facts of espionage, betrayal, bloodletting, backstabbing and bureaucratic complications.

This paper will outline several intelligence operations that were run against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It will also review whether the operation was a success or a failure, and assess the reasons why they succeeded or failed. Meanwhile, to set the book's thrust in motion, it is established that there was the "natural suspicion" in the MI6 ranks that Stalin "would not be a durable peacetime ally" Dorril writes. That doesn't sound today like much of a revelation, but history reveals that indeed while the UK, the U.S., and Stalin's Soviet Union were allied against the threat of Hitler, there was no shortage of paranoia when it came to Britain and the U.S. with regards to Stalin. In fact, the first joint Anglo-American intelligence project against Stalin was begun before the Allied invasion at Normandy, Dorril explains on page 13. There was a "deep suspicion of Stalin's future intentions" (Dorril 13), which set the stage for the growth of the anti-Soviet department within the MI6.

The Cold War was on, it seems, well before the "hot war" (WWII) ended. And by the end of the war, the MI6 power brokers were battling among themselves to gain the upper hand on how policymaking should proceed. In May 1948, the Information Research Department (IRD) began engaging in "propaganda in other countries designed to stimulate subversive activities in the Soviet orbits," Dorril explains on page 79. Working in tandem with the R5 (MI6's anti-Soviet group), IRD had agents in British embassies around the world. The task of the R5 was to plant stories, create forgeries, lies and fabrications to be broadcast on secretly funded (by the MI6) radio stations and newspapers. This was pure propaganda, and it was linked to the truth (because the Soviets indeed had slave labor camps and gulags), but ultimately it failed and was shut down. On page 80 Dorril explains that "secrecy does not ultimately corrupt" and the R5 was really no better, in the end, than Soviet propaganda. This was a dismal failure on the part of Britain to establish on the ground floor something that would eventually become an intelligence operation.

Among the major intelligence operations of the MI6 was the attempt in 1949-50 to use covert activities and propaganda in an attempt to "destabilize eastern Europe" (Dorril 83). It was to be "offensive" rather than "defensive" and it was called "Roll Back" - e.g., roll back Soviet power grabs in the eastern bloc of European nations. The idea was that "...war weary populations of Eastern Europe" would require very little "encouragement" to stand up and fight against Soviet repression. Indeed, the theory went, as Dorril describes on page 83, the spies and other MI6 talent sent in to those communities would "promote civil discontent, internal confusion and possibly strife," and that would become a source of "weakness" to Russia. How would this get done? Through a "revival of robust use of psychological warfare and Special Operations (SO) methods" (Dorril 83). As was the case with many MI6 covert planning objectives, there was dissention and foot-dragging during the process. The Foreign Office often butted against the MI6, and cross-purposes and power grabs tended to lessen the impact of good solid covert actions. Some of the covert "dirty tricks" were more ridiculous than effective, such as the stunt on page 83 in which Dorril describes MI5 agents "impregnating lavatory paper with an itching substance at halls hired by communist organizations."

On the more serious side, the MI6 anti-communist (Cold War) operations actually were taking place right after WWII ended, as MI6 officers (Dorril 113) were busy setting up contacts with organizations known to be fighting communism (Promethean League, Intermarium and Ukrainian OUN-B). While the British Army was "forcibly repatriating thousands of soldiers..." back to Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, MI6 were "simultaneously recruiting a number of quislings and war crime suspects for their own operations," Dorril writes. This seemed to pay off for MI6 as they trained these individuals to return to their homelands (Romania and Albania) and launched "guerrilla incursions."

However, Dorril continues on page 114, the Soviet and Yugoslav brass quickly became "aware of these operations" since their own communist agents had penetrated the very organizations that the MI6 were attempting to coalesce with and influence. Hence, this operation can be chalked up as "counterproductive"; rather than undermining communism, the recruited nationalists that MI6 was counting on "...helped push [local homeland people] them into the embrace of communism." This failed because the Soviets were smarter and wilier than the MI6.

On page 122-23 Dorril describes another anticommunist Cold War strategy employed by the MI6, which amounted to "releasing hydrogen balloons" which carried anticommunist propaganda leaflets over Soviet borders. This technique had been fine-tuned thanks to Japanese warfare scientists who had been captured at the end of WWII. The balloons were released - six or eight of them each night - for about two months with some degree of success. However, when one of the balloons drifted back into Austria, "causing embarrassment to the authorities" (Dorril 123), the operation was halted. Another failure to be chalked up to MI6 shortsightedness and lack of good planning.

Meantime, one of the most "productive" Cold War operations devised and carried out by the MI6 was the brainchild of Peter Lunn, an officer in the Royal Artillery with experience in covert activities. The idea - dubbed Operation CONFLICT - was to dig an underground tunnel (beneath the British and French sectors of Vienna) and tap into telephone cables that linked the Soviet Army HQs, airfields and other units. This was done without the knowledge of the British Foreign Office (Dorril 129-30); Lunn, knowing that the Foreign Office would disapprove of this effort, did so because he said he "...couldn't look at myself if there'd been an invasion and I denied the chance of getting the information" (Dorril 130).

Talk had been that the Soviets might invade Austria from Yugoslavia; hence there was a need to get reliable intelligence on that possibility. Operation CONFLICT was "an immediate success" and within two years, a couple more taps were done on cables, allowing the British to obtain a great deal of apparently valuable information from the Soviets. The CIA shared in that data, and Dorril writes that moreover, this successful operation led to the notion that "...the future of spying lay in the technical field" (Dorril 132); and future "clean operations" would be valuable because they not involve the "mess and time-consuming necessity of running and controlling agents in the field."

Yet another operation that MI6 carried out during the Cold War was the Operation OVERCAST, the plan to secure all the intelligence and specific science regarding Hitler's V-2 rocket program. but, as Dorril writes on page 136, the belief on the part of the British that there would be "close cooperation" with the U.S. On securing rocket secrets was "na ve" and showed "a lack of foresight" as to the power the U.S. would exhibit in this regard. When it came to capturing "knowledgeable experts and technologically useful materials" that would be useful in rocket technology, the MI6 professionals were "either too gentlemanly or else totally undisciplined" (Dorril 137). And indeed, Britain came in "second" to the U.S. In securing rocket technology, and moreover, "British rocket experts simply handed over to U.S. intelligence officers nearly 90% of their target intelligence and received little in return" (Dorril 137). This was a failure of enormous import.