M16: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service
By Stephen Dorril . Free Press. 907 pp.$40
By Stephen Dorril . Free Press. 907 pp.$40
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
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