The Defence of the Realm (89 page)

A JIC Working Party on Intelligence Organization in Aden concluded that, despite some improvements, the intelligence organization ‘still does not work smoothly'.
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Among the reports which led it to this conclusion was one from the Political Adviser Middle East Command in December 1965:

There is no Intelligence Service, properly speaking, covering and targeting the Protectorate. The nearest thing to an Intelligence Service is the Special Branch, which is confined to Aden State, which has been gravely weakened by assassinations and which, because of these assassinations and through intimidation of the population, is receiving far less than the normal flow of information.

. . . Security Service material is available as necessary, but Security Service coverage outside Aden is very small indeed. The Security Service does not of course run its own intelligence network.
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In February 1966 Harold Wilson's Labour government announced that South Arabia was to be fully independent by 1968 at the latest, that Britain would withdraw from its Aden military base and end its defence commitment to the Federation. Sandy Stuart, who had become SLO four months earlier, wrote to Head Office: ‘The political side is thoroughly confused both locally and amongst the exiles abroad; and the decisions
concerning the base here and the absence of a defence treaty after independence have added to the confusion. My impression is that everyone is at present rather rudderless . . .'
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Stuart was also concerned by the brutality of some of the interrogations conducted by the Federal Ministry of Internal Security, and believed it necessary to:

emphasise that it is both morally wrong as well as being unproductive to torture or subject to third degree treatment the subjects of interrogation but, in so doing, also seek to have it clearly understood by the Federal Government that such procedures are not practised by ourselves in the Aden Interrogation Centre at Fort Morbut.
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The announcement of British withdrawal from South Arabia, which the Labour government had expected to diminish the insurgency, served only to intensify it. NLF spokesmen declared, ‘Some may ask, “Why fight for independence when the British will grant it freely?” Comrades, true independence is not given away, but taken.'
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On 28 February 1967 the Security Service suffered the only fatality of a member of staff or of staff family in the entire retreat from Empire (though some locally engaged staff had been killed in Palestine) during an Aden drinks party in the fourth-floor apartment of a British diplomatic couple. Sandy Stuart had reassured his wife Judi that the apartment was too high up for gun or grenade attacks. A Czech-manufactured anti-personnel mine, however, had been concealed in a bookcase and exploded during the party. Two of the guests, one of them Judi Stuart, were fatally wounded. As Sandy Stuart waited at the hospital, where his wife died on the operating table, John Prendergast, the Director of Intelligence, brought him a change of clothing (‘a Christian act', Stuart said later, because his own clothes were saturated with his wife's blood).
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‘Swallowing all emotion', he bravely sent back to Head Office the forensic report on Judi's death. Stuart accompanied his wife's body back to the UK for the funeral but then insisted on returning to his post. An investigation concluded that the bomb had been planted by a servant with ‘a grudge against the British', probably related to his treatment by a previous employer. A diagram of what was believed to be the electric circuit used for the bomb detonator was found in an exercise book in his room.
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Judi Stuart's death was part of an escalating pattern of violence during the final year of British rule. By September 1967 the Foreign Secretary, George Brown, had washed his hands of South Arabia. ‘It can't be helped,' he said privately. ‘Anyway, we want to be out of the whole of the Middle East as far and as fast as we possibly can.' Richard Crossman, Leader of the House of Commons, noted cynically in his diary that the fact that ‘the regime . . . should have been overthrown by terrorists and has forced our
speedy withdrawal, is nothing but good fortune'.
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On 30 November South Arabia became independent as the People's Republic of South Yemen.

In British Guiana, unlike South Arabia, Special Political Action had a major influence on the transition to independence in 1966. But for SPA, the first prime minister of independent British Guiana would almost certainly have been Cheddi Jagan, the Marxist leader of the People's Progressive Party (PPP), rather than the supposedly moderate, pro-Western Forbes Burnham. After being dismissed as chief minister a few months after the 1953 PPP election victory,
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Jagan returned to office when the PPP won the 1957 elections under a new colonial constitution. As elsewhere in the Empire and Commonwealth, the Security Service's role in SPA in British Guiana was peripheral. Unlike most other imperial troublespots, British Guiana lacked a resident SLO. The SLO in Trinidad from 1960 to 1963 visited British Guiana about once a month but regarded it as ‘the bane of my life – a ghastly place'.
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He reported in February 1961 that Jagan and his wife Janet were in effective control of the PPP. While some PPP office-holders had been committed members of the CPGB during their time in Britain, there was no evidence that the Jagans themselves, though undoubtedly Marxists, were members of any Communist organization. After independence, however, they could be expected to seek close relations with Castro's Cuba, to whom Cheddi Jagan paid an official visit in 1960, as well as with the Soviet Union and China. The SLO believed the PPP were likely to win the October 1961 elections, though by too small a majority to form a stable government. He was strongly opposed to the use of SPA to try to ensure Jagan's defeat; it would be unlikely, he warned in April, to influence the outcome of the elections and ‘the results of failure would probably be disastrous.'
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Contrary to the SLO's expectation, the PPP won a clear majority in the elections and Jagan became prime minister. Eavesdropping at the CPGB's London headquarters revealed that Jagan had approached it for help in recruiting financial, taxation and social security staff to work in British Guiana.
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Soon after his election victory, he went to visit President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office to seek US support for British Guianan independence. Cheddi Jagan might be a Marxist, Kennedy said afterwards, ‘but the United States doesn't object, because that choice was made by an honest election, which he won.' In private, JFK said the opposite. Following the humiliating failure to overthrow Fidel Castro by the CIA-backed landing of an anti-Castro brigade at the Bay of Pigs six months earlier, the President was determined not to allow the emergence of another potential Castro in the Caribbean.
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The US Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, wrote
to Lord Home, the British Foreign Secretary, on 19 February 1962, ‘I must tell you now that I have reached the conclusion that it is not possible for us to put up with an independent British Guiana under Jagan.'
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Macmillan told Home that Rusk's letter was ‘pure Machiavellianism', exposing a ‘degree of cynicism' which he found surprising in view of the fact the Secretary of State was ‘not an Irishman, nor a politician, nor a millionaire'. Home replied sharply to Rusk:

You say that it is not possible for you ‘to put up with an independent British Guiana under Jagan' and that ‘Jagan should not be allowed to accede to power again.' How would you suggest that this can be done in a democracy? And even if a device could be found, it would almost certainly be transparent. . .
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Macmillan and Home, however, gave way to American pressure. In no other British colony was the United States allowed to take the lead in covert action (the US term for SPA).
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On 15 August 1962 President Kennedy authorized a covert $2 million CIA operation to drive Jagan from power before British Guiana became independent.
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On 15 October, the Colonial Secretary, Duncan Sandys, agreed that the CIA should approach Jagan's two main political opponents, Forbes Burnham, leader of the People's National Congress (PNC), and Peter D'Aguiar, leader of the pro-business United Force (UF), which campaigned for ‘people's enterprise capitalism'.
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At a meeting with the Governor of British Guiana, Sir Ralph Grey, on 7 November, Hollis reaffirmed traditional Security Service policy on SPA: ‘that [head] office and the SLO should keep out of any direct association with the implementation of the plans, but that we were doing what we could at some remove from the actual site to see that the facts on which plans were based were accurate'.
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Director E, Alex Kellar, however, was passionately opposed to the use of Special Political Action against any colonial or Commonwealth government:

Despite the political stresses and strains that occur between the countries of the Commonwealth, there are factors that continue to bind the individual members together to make the Commonwealth still a powerful force with which to be reckoned in world affairs. Among these factors, none is more important than the Commonwealth security complex in which the Security Service and its SLO play so dominant and influential a role. Our SLOs, in particular, have taken a leading part because, whatever the personal contributions they have made in the field as individuals, all have conducted themselves with a complete honesty of purpose and, by so doing, have gained and retained the trust, confidence and respect of the indigenous officials, administrative as well as police, that matter so much; and no
more so than in the case of those new Commonwealth countries who, sensitive about their newly acquired independence, can so easily go sour on us should they identify us in, or even suspect us of, activity behind their backs.

This danger becomes more and more real as pressures . . . for clandestine action within these emergent territories gain momentum with the inevitable, as it now seems, involvement of the SLO and consequent corruption of his position.

. . . I accept that there are recalcitrant members of our Commonwealth and that they try our patience to the full but the UK, with its greater maturity, political experience and pivotal position, has a special responsibility for exercising patience.
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SPA in British Guiana during 1963 went some way to justifying Kellar's fears about the ‘corruption' of the SLO's role. In January 1963 the White House was reported to be ‘well satisfied with the development of covert operations' in British Guiana.
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On 10 April the British Guiana TUC began a crippling general strike which was to last ten weeks – longer than any general strike anywhere in the world had ever lasted before.
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On 8 May Jagan confronted the Governor with the dramatic claim that ‘US Intelligence agents with large sums of money' were trying to use the strike to bring down his government.
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Unknown to Jagan, after his 1961 election victory the head of the TUC, Richard Ishmael, had secretly lobbied Dean Rusk for support for future strike action against the ‘Jaganite Communist threat'.
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In response to Ishmael's request, US financial support for the TUC was channelled through American trade unions during the general strike. But the TUC leadership was told that the support would ‘cease the minute strike becomes political'.
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US covert action aimed, with British consent, at securing Jagan's electoral defeat – not at using a general strike to overthrow him.

In August 1963, a month after the end of the strike, the SLO called on Janet Jagan, Minister of Home Affairs in her husband's government, and told her he was ‘available to advise on security matters', in particular ‘protective security and the organisation of security intelligence'. He predictably failed to mention, however, that the main security threat to the Jagan government was CIA covert action designed to ensure that it was out of office by the time British Guiana became independent. At this and subsequent meetings with the SLO, Mrs Jagan ‘listened politely' and was ‘very friendly'. She said, however, that she had been ‘struck by the paucity of information she was receiving from Special Branch'. The SLO forbore to mention that the Special Branch had penetrated the PPP, though its head privately complained that it was currently ‘short of well placed agents'. After his August meeting with Mrs Jagan, the SLO reported to Head Office:

From my point of view, the meeting went off well. I believe that I was able to give a fairly plausible account of the SLO's functions (within the limits agreed with the Governor) without giving rise to embarrassing questions from the Minister. I have no doubt that she surmised there was more to it than I had outlined but I have no reason to suppose that her position will prevent me from doing a worthwhile job in British Guiana.
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SPA in British Guiana achieved its main objective of removing Jagan from power without the direct involvement of the SLO. The electoral system was changed to a system of proportional representation which favoured Burnham's PNC and D'Aguiar's UF,
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both of which received advice and funding from the CIA. After the Labour victory in the October 1964 British elections, Harold Wilson and an inner group of his ministers (including the Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, and the Colonial Secretary, Anthony Greenwood) approved the continuation of SPA in British Guiana.
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The PPP lost the December 1964 election, and Jagan's government was succeeded by a coalition of the PNC and UF, headed by Forbes Burnham, which led Guyana (as British Guiana was renamed) to independence in 1966.

Among at least some Security Service officers, the experience of observing SPA in British Guiana from the sidelines left a bitter taste. E5 minuted on the eve of independence that the Service was not being kept fully informed.
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Burnham's corrupt and incompetent rule was to wreck the Guyanese economy as well as to reinforce enmity between the Afro-Caribbean and Indian communities. Ironically by the 1970s he was to announce that Guyana was ‘on the road to socialism', nationalize the sugar plantations and form friendly ties with the Soviet Bloc.
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How far Cheddi Jagan would have aligned himself with the Soviet Union had he, rather than Burnham, led Guyana to independence is a matter of conjecture. It is significant, however, that after the suppression of ‘Socialism with a human face' in Czechoslovakia by the tanks of the Warsaw Pact in August 1968, he, like Fidel Castro, aligned himself with the destroyers of the Prague Spring. Jagan declared in Moscow in 1969, ‘Not only theory, but practice also, has taught us that this is where we belong.'
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