Dominic Sandbrook, reviewing Michael Smith’s Six: A history of Britain’s secret intelligence service called the book “engrossing”, and comments, “As a rollicking chronicle of demented derring-do, Smith’s book is hard to beat. His research is prodigious and his eye for a good story impeccable, and his book, while perfectly scholarly, often reads like a real-life James Bond thriller.”
To read the review on the Sunday Times website, click here. You will need to log in to access.
Many thought the author Arthur Ransome was a Bolshevik. In truth he was a British spy who seduced Trotsky’s secretary
The Sunday Times, 18th July
There seemed little doubt that one of Britain’s national newspapers was harbouring a red agent. Not only that, but Arthur Ransome — later to be renowned as the author of Swallows and Amazons — was publishing one pro-Bolshevik piece after another with seeming impunity.
It was an outrage, in the eyes of several senior military intelligence officers, who lobbied Ransome’s bosses at The Daily News to have him sacked.
They were pounding on an open door. The editor and the newspaper’s owner, the chocolate magnate George Cadbury, were so incensed by the tone of Ransome’s reports that they had already tried to recall him.
Before he could pack up his office in Moscow, however, they had received an unexpected visit from Robert Bruce Lockhart, a senior British diplomat. Ransome, he informed them in a way that brooked no argument, was far too valuable to Britain where he was: he would have to stay.
Even today the novelist’s reputation remains clouded by the insinuation that he was a naive, overenthusiastic and potentially traitorous supporter of Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky, who had become key members of the new leadership under Vladimir Lenin after the 1917 October revolution. The truth, however, is that Ransome was a British spy.
After becoming his paper’s Moscow correspondent, he had sought out Trotsky, the Bolshevik foreign affairs commissar, for an interview. The request was duly granted, and the arrangements were made by Evgenia Shelepina, Trotsky’s attractive 23-year-old secretary.
Ransome, then separated from his wife, became romantically involved with her and soon found himself deeply in love. What Shelepina did not know, at least to start with, was that her new beau was actually agent S76, working for British intelligence. And although the love affair was genuine, it also provided him with a good excuse to spend a lot of time in Trotsky’s offices.
When she found out about her lover’s activities, Shelepina appears to have decided that love conquers all. Over the next six months she gave Ransome detailed information on the intentions of the Bolshevik leadership and its attitude towards Britain in particular, which he passed on to Ernest Boyce, the head of the British secret service in Russia.
By the middle of 1918 those spymasters were growing concerned about the risks Shelepina was running. Foreseeing trouble, Lockhart asked for her name to be put on Ransome’s passport as the author’s wife, since “her services to the allies have been considerable”.
Ransome, too, realised she needed to be removed from danger. So he persuaded a Bolshevik diplomat to give Shelepina a job in the Russian legation in Stockholm and then moved his own office to Sweden. It was an ingenious solution, which gave Shelepina and Ransome a good chance of escaping if the Russians realised what was going on, while granting them continued access to Bolshevik secrets.
Meanwhile, his bosses at The Daily News were smarting under the onslaught of yet another slew of Ransome’s pro-Bolshevik pieces. This time they agreed they had no choice but to bring him home. But yet again they received a visit — on this occasion from the actor and theatre impresario Harley Granville-Barker. Claiming to represent the War Office, he “implored” them to keep their correspondent in Sweden. Informed that the paper could no longer afford to pay the hotel accommodation of both Ransome and Shelepina, Granville-Barker — in fact a senior member of the secret service — told them the War Office itself would meet the couple’s bills.
Soon another problem arose: the quality of Ransome’s secret reports from Sweden was starting to flag. But S76 dug in his heels: he did not want to return to Moscow because of the danger that Shelepina might be exposed as a British agent.
It was time, his secret bosses decided, to sully Ransome’s public image back home even further. John Scale, the British secret service representative in Stockholm, persuaded the Swedish authorities to put the couple on a list of 13 “dangerous Bolsheviks” to be expelled from Sweden. Meanwhile, Lockhart arranged to give a well-publicised talk at King’s College London, where, in front of representatives of the right-wing press, he stridently denounced Ransome’s pro-Bolshevik reporting.
With his reputation as an “out-and-out Bolshevik” happily restored, Ransome agreed to return to Russia with Shelepina. The ruses had worked, and the journalist continued to burrow into the heart of the Bolshevik establishment, having regular meetings with Lenin himself.
“I even got a letter from Lenin authorising all the commissars to give me whatever information I might ask for,” Ransome said. “I was entirely uncontrolled.”
And he told Boyce: “There is no one else who can keep in such close touch with affairs there as I can. I am just as friendly with the leaders of the other parties inside Soviet Russia as with the Bolsheviks.”
By May 1920, though, Ransome was again becoming jittery about Shelepina’s safety. After so many years as a secret agent, he knew that the net could soon be closing in.
To his delight Shelepina persuaded the Bolsheviks to let her go to Britain — on the one condition that she had to smuggle in more than 1m roubles’ worth of precious gems to fund communist parties in Europe. No one knows exactly what happened to the gems, but they were almost certainly delivered — no doubt under the surveillance of the British secret service. Certainly, Shelepina’s later years were untroubled by Soviet hit squads.
There was, however, a more immediate problem: Ransome’s estranged wife, Ivy, refused to divorce him. Knowing that the British mores of the day would have made life intolerable for his mistress, Ransome decided they would have to live abroad. In the end they went to Estonia, where he continued to work as a journalist.
He remained in contact with his friends in the British secret service until at least 1922, providing them with further intelligence. One valuable piece of information he delivered was a list of the former tsarist officers serving in the Soviet forces who might make British agents.
In 1924, finally divorced and free to marry Shelepina, he brought her to Britain. Comfortably installed in the Lake District, where he wrote the series of children’s books that made his name, he gently discouraged all questions about his Bolshevik past until his death in 1967.
Six — A History of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Part 1: Murder and Mayhem 1909-1939, by Michael Smith, is published by Dialogue at £19.99
Part one of a major two-part history of Britain’s external intelligence community by the acclaimed writer, award-winning journalist and defence correspondent for The Sunday Times, Michael Smith.
This first part of acclaimed author Mick Smith’s epic unauthorised history of Britain’s external intelligence community begins with the creation of the Secret Service Bureau in 1909, charged with controlling intelligence within Britain and overseas, and establishing through spies the strength of the Imperial German army and navy. This naturally came to the fore during World War One. Between the wars the service really established itself, restyling itself the “Secret Intelligence Service”. Under the aegis of the diplomatic service, the SIS expanded its network of European spies in order to counter the threat of Russian Bolshevism. In 1918 an operation to overthrow the Bolshevik government by SIS agents failed badly. With the ascent of the Nazis, the SIS switched its focus to the threat of German aggression, recruiting sources within the German government and admiralty. SIX tells the complete story of the service’s birth and early years, including the tragic, untold tale of what happened to Britain’s extensive networks in Soviet Russia between the wars. It reveals for the first time how the playwright and MI6 agent Harley Granville Barker bribed the Daily News to keep Arthur Ransome in Russia, and the real reason Paul Dukes returned there. It shows development of “tradecraft” and the great personal risk officers and their agents took, far from home and unprotected. In Salonika, for example, Lieutenant Norman Dewhurst realised it was time to leave when he opened his door to find one of his agents hanging dismembered in a sack.
This first part of SIX takes us up to the eve of the conflict, using hundreds of previously unreleased files and interviews with key players to show how one of the world’s most secretive of secret agencies originated and developed into something like the MI6 we know today. The second part, published in Spring 2011, will tell the story from the outbreak of World War Two to the present.
SIX: A History of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Part 1: Murder and Mayhem 1909-1939, by Michael Smith is available to buy HERE.
February 14, 2010
Seeking Gadaffi by Daniel Kawczynski
The Sunday Times review by Stephen Robinson
Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi attends a celebration of the 40th anniversary of his coming to power at the Green Square in Tripoli September 1, 2009 If you have the good fortune not to be a Libyan, it is tempting to laugh at all the camp, insane excesses of the man who grabbed power in a military coup in 1969, and has clung on ever since through barbarism and canniness. For there is something superficially arresting about what Daniel Kawczynski terms the “corrupt grandiosity” of Colonel Gadaffi’s rule. These include his absurd revolutionary outfits, platform heels (he is touchy about his height), risibly dyed hair, and overseas travels with glamorous female guards who dress in foxy paramilitary gear and thigh-high boots. But the absurd posturing conceals a much shrewder figure who switches his ideological rhetoric to suit changed international circumstances, who has used terrorist proxies to undermine rivals and raise his international standing, and who has deployed terror within Libya with a cynical effectiveness.
The only truthful aspect of the official Gadaffi story that is drummed into the minds of his subject population is that he was born into a family of Bedouin goatherds, members of a minor clan whose name translates as “spitters of blood”, which might explain what was to follow. He picked the traditional African route to political power, the army, having come under the influence of Nasser’s anti-colonial ideology as a young man. He was handsome in his youth, with a certain charisma.
At the age of only 27, he and a group of fellow army officers struck against the hapless and hopeless King Idris. The coup was relatively bloodless as the monarchy quickly disintegrated, but brutal purges and public hangings were soon to mock the western and Arab governments that recognised his power grab. As Kawczynski grudgingly concedes, Gadaffi’s capacity to cause mayhem by funding international terrorism means that Libya (a country of just 6m) punches above its weight. This brings him some prestige at home, and this kudos, along with Libya’s vast oil wealth, and the weakness of the civil and political institutions inherited from Idris, explains why his domestic enemies have failed to topple him.He funded and gave sanctuary to several factions within the broader Palestinian cause, often it seemed to spite his rivals rather than to advance Arab interests. He was an early backer of Abu Nidal and Carlos the Jackal — both kept luxury apartments in Libya in the 1970s and 1980s. Money and equipment were also directed towards ETA, the Italian Red Brigades, Action Directe, Baader-Meinhof, and, of course, the IRA. Gerry Adams was so impressed by his credentials that he set up a Revolutionary Council modelled on the Libyan version. When Gadaffi bores of a terrorist cause, though, he drops the group and, as in the case of the Lockerbie bombing, frequently pays compensation to its victims, tacitly — but not formally — conceding “general responsibility”.
Internal oppression through ¬violence has been his consistent hallmark. In 1996, prisoners at Abu Salim prison in Tripoli took guards hostage in protest at the disgusting conditions. The rebellion was put down relatively peacefully, and the prisoners were ordered to muster in the prison yard, reportedly by Gadaffi’s brother-in-law. For the next four hours, guards posted on the rooftop shot at them until some 1,200 were dead. After years of denial of the massacre, relatives have since received compensation.
Journalists, Islamic scholars and internal dissidents are routinely killed. One journalist, Daif al-Ghazal, was abducted in 2005, and when his body was recovered, most of his fingers had been cut off. When the publicity for that murder proved embarrassing, Gadaffi had three Revolutionary Guards held responsible executed.
The Gadaffi who emerges in this study is not really a ideological zealot; indeed he does not seem to believe in anything much beyond entrenching his power and rewarding his family. Immediately after taking control, he replaced Libya’s legal code with Sharia law, but later realising the threat from Islamic fundamentalism to his own power, replaced that with the incoherent political credo laid down in the Green Book. This created a new form of state, jamahiriya, supposedly based on direct consultation of the people, but in reality establishing a vast network of informers.
Gadaffi’s essential canniness is evident in how he has changed his tune since September 2001, fearing he would go the way of Saddam Hussein. Now he describes radical Islam as “more dangerous than Aids”; last year he wrote an article in the New York Times on the importance of being nice to Jews. He is on first-name terms with Tony and Cherie. For Gadaffi, international terrorism has served its purpose.
Kawczynski is a 6ft 8in tall Tory MP of recent Polish descent who views Britain’s emerging relationship with Libya with a detached bemusement. As chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Libya, he argues that it is perfectly reasonable that the British government should cut deals that allow firms such as BP to share the vast oil wealth that Gadaffi withholds from his subjects.
This is a lightly written and well-researched account of Gadaffi’s life, though dependent largely on secondary sources. Kawczynski failed in his efforts to meet his subject, an obvious flaw in a book called Seeking Gadaffi. But it offers an intelligent analysis of Britain’s relations with Tripoli, even if Kawczynski seems as conflicted as many of the Lockerbie families as to Gadaffi’s culpability in the Lockerbie attack, pointing out that Iran also had good reason to order the bombing.
But he is surely right to be enraged by successive governments’ refusal to order a proper public inquiry; and he finds it shameful that London has normalised relations with Libya without ensuring that the killer of policewoman Yvonne Fletcher is sent for trial here. He is disgusted, too, that the government has not pursued justice and compensation for the victims of the IRA bombs made with Semtex provided by Libya.
In the 1980s, western governments made the mistake of ¬demonising Gadaffi as “mad” and “evil”, which missed the point and only encouraged him. Kawczynski argues persuasively that Ronald Reagan’s bombing of Libya, though richly deserved, probably cemented his rule to this day. Now Gadaffi’s regime is sanctified by western governments who tolerate his domestic oppression in exchange for his rhetorical attacks on Al-Qaeda, a force that threatens him much more than the West.
When he dies, Libya will almost certainly lapse into chaos. His sons who might succeed him are, if anything, worse and more absurd than he is. There is the brutal playboy Hannibal, who triggered a huge diplomatic breach with Switzerland by beating up a member of his entourage there. Then there is the preposterous London-based Saif, the British university-educated “intellectual”, painter of kitsch watercolours and close friend of Lord Mandelson. It is bad enough that Libyans have to tolerate this dismal dynasty of vainglorious freaks; it is surely worse that we encourage them and call them our friends.
Inside Out. Review in The Sunday Times by Rod Liddle
Inside Out: My Story of Betrayal and Cowardice at the Heart of New Labour by Peter Watt with Isabel Oakeshott
The Sunday Times review by Rod Liddle
Peter Watt was the general secretary of the Labour party — an important post, previously held by the likes of Ramsay McDonald, Arthur Henderson and so on — for the best part of two years, until he was coerced in November 2007 into resigning over financial irregularities regarding Labour party donors. He has now written a very readable book designed to be as damaging to the party to which he owed his allegiance as it is possible to imagine, and especially so for the prime minister, Gordon Brown, who comes across — as he usually does on these occasions — as a psychologically damaged, sulking bully without a policy to his name. And at one point even as “bonkers”.
Watt has delivered himself of this stream of self-serving and vindictive bile because he believes he was hard done by when his Labour party career came to an end. My guess, reading between the lines, is that he was only a little hard done by, although, as a nurse from Dorset who rose without trace within 10 years to the most senior post in the Labour party, he may also have been over promoted in the first place. He would have us believe that he took the bullet and resigned for the good of the party — but the obvious question if that is so, then, is why this, now? And the answer is because the real or imagined iniquities he has suffered far outweigh any loyalty he might have to those he has left behind, even those few he quite liked. That’s the way it is right now, though, with this rapidly decomposing corpse of an administration.
Watt, a Blairite through convenience if not conviction, dishes it out from page one and his particular target is Brown. The prime minister emerges as a man incapable of taking a decision, especially if it is a big decision. Even more damningly, Watt suggests on several occasions that Brown did not have a political thought in his head. Perhaps one reason why there was not a general election in autumn 2007 is because Brown had no idea what he would put in the manifesto: “Everyone around him thought that there was some big plan sitting in a bottom drawer somewhere, just ready to be pulled out when the moment came. In fact, there was nothing,” says Watt. The prime minister was also startlingly inept at personal relations and Watt quotes Douglas Alexander — international development secretary, and nominally a Brownite — as saying that he and his colleagues had been working for this man night and day for 10 years, but that they really didn’t like him. Invited to meet and greet party workers, Brown would circle the room with a glassy stare and spooky rictus grin, often asking the same questions of the same people, in the manner of an aged monarch with Alzheimer’s.
Watt relates the tale of a ghastly dinner party at No 10 that he attended with his wife. Before the guests were seated, Brown was called away to the phone. When he returned the guests had sat around the table and Brown said furiously: “I didn’t sit you all down!” Watt takes up the tale: “Then he swivelled in his chair, so that he almost had his back to everybody and leaned his head on his arm. For the rest of the meal he was monosyllabic, sulking because he had lost control of the seating plan. The plates had not even been cleared when, quite suddenly, without saying anything, he just got up and left. As Sarah had also disappeared by then we all quite literally had to show ourselves out. ‘He’s bonkers,’ Vilma [Watt’s wife] whispered, as we trooped out.”
Prior to occupying No 10, Brown is revealed as a shadowy and divisive presence, commandeering his own sums of money from Labour party funds for private polling and what have you, wreathed in suspicion and bitterness, trusting nobody.
Mind you, not many people come out of this book terribly well — except, in common with almost all of these rat-on-your-party memoirs we’ve seen in the past couple of years, John Prescott, whom everybody seems to like. Prescott emerges as humane and principled and kindly towards party workers. However, Watt cannot abide Harriet Harman and her constant “dog whistling to the left”, and has even less time for her husband, Jack Dromey, considering him duplicitous and self-indulgent. The national executive committee of the party was, as a whole, an annoying and disruptive influence. But then an awful lot of this book consists of Watt bemoaning the thoughtlessness of others for doing stuff that made his job more onerous. The most telling sentence of Inside Out comes on page 125: “Dad became terminally ill at what was already a hugely difficult time for me.”
Watt left his post a year or so ago when it seemed that he might face criminal charges for having allowed a wealthy donor to funnel funds to the party through a number of third parties. Undoubtedly it was a horrible, frightening time for the young man and he did not receive much in the way of support. But it was nonetheless his responsibility, in the end, a notion that does not seem to have occurred to him.
Inside Out by Peter Watt with Isabel Oakeshott
Biteback £16.99 pp210
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