Plots and Paranoia

A History of Political Espionage in Britain 1790-1988

Bernard Porter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138954434
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317356356
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Britain's secret state exists to protect her from 'enemies within'. It has always aroused controversy; on the one hand it is credited with preventing wars, revolutions and terrorism and on the other it is accused of subverting democratically elected governments and luring innocents to death. What is the true story? The book, first published in 1992, delves beneath the myths and deceptions surrounding the secret service to reveal the true nature and significance of covert political policing in Britain, from the 'spies and bloodites' of the eighteenth century to today's MI5. This title will be of interest to students of modern history and politics.

Chapter 1

Sly and subtil fellowes (4000 BC to AD 1790)

Most histories of espionage begin by describing it as ‘the second oldest profession’. One even takes that as its title.¹ It is a clever phrase. By linking espionage with the oldest profession of all – prostitution – it tars it, albeit lightly, with some of the latter’s disrepute. It also, of course, makes a point about its age. That point is crucial to many views of secret service work. Most of its defenders insist that it goes back to the earliest beginnings of history. They also maintain that it has been continuous. Every state and every government has resorted to it, since the dawn of time. The implication of this is that espionage is both necessary and ‘natural’, despite its disreputability. This can be seen both to excuse and to explain it, in a way.

All this may be true. It is important to understand at the outset, however, that there is no historical evidence for it. There may be other kinds of evidence. It may for example be possible to argue that espionage must have been ancient and continuous, because men and women are made that way. They are naturally curious, distrustful and prone to conspiracy, and so it is fair to assume that they have always indulged in curious, distrustful and conspiratorial acts. This is a somewhat cynical view of human nature, but it may be justified. It is not a view, however, which is derived from history.

History itself – the surviving record of the past – is inconclusive. In fact the earliest reference of all to espionage was a false alarm. This may indicate that imagining or inventing spies is older than the ‘profession’ itself. The Book of Genesis, chapter 42, describes how Joseph, who was working for the Pharaoh in Egypt at the time, pretended to suspect that his brothers had been sent there by the Israelites as spies ‘to see the nakedness of the land’ when in fact, as he knew full well, they had come to beg for corn. The first reference to espionage proper comes a little later, in the Book of Numbers, where we are told that Moses sent twelve men ‘to spy out the land of Canaan’, and return with intelligence about its people, products and fortifications. He did this on the direct orders of God, who thus becomes the first spymaster in recorded history. In fact the mission was not entirely successful, with the Israelites divided over how to interpret the intelligence thus obtained. A little later one of Moses’ twelve spies, Joshua the son of Nun, sent two of his own men from Shittim to spy in Jericho, where they were soon suspected, however, and spent all their time sheltering in an attic. The attic belonged to Rahab the prostitute, who clearly had a heart of gold when it came to fellow professionals.²

The ancient Egyptians may have been better at this sort of thing. But we are unlikely ever to know for sure. They do provide us with one of the first ever accounts of what today would be called a ‘covert operation’, when a provincial governor called T’hutiy captured the town of Jaffa (then Joppa) by sending in his best warriors concealed in panniers carried by donkeys. This may have been the origin of Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves. A man who was clever enough to think that up might well have used spies too. But there is little direct proof of it; and a certain amount of evidence that the Egyptians were, in fact, somewhat naïve in this regard. Around 1400 BC, for example, Amenhotep III was completely gulled by a Hittite double agent, Aziru of Amor, whose brief was to spread disinformation, as well as to spy.³ The Hittites came from Cappadocia in Asia Minor; and it is from around that area and further east that the first convincing accounts of ancient espionage and intelligence networks come. The masters of these arts were the Babylonians, the Assyrians and the Persians. Around 490 BC Sun Tzü of the Kingdom of Wu in China wrote his celebrated The Art of War, which carries a chapter on the importance of military espionage. One of Sun Tzu’s training methods was to cut young girls’ heads off when they did not do what he told them to.⁴ Early espionage was generally associated with this kind of regime.

That may be why it does not feature so prominently in Europe’s own slightly gentler ancient traditions. Classical Greek literature features it at one or two points. Book 4 of the Odyssey, for example, has Odysseus stealing in and out of Troy disguised as a beggar at the height of the siege. That same siege was also the occasion for the most celebrated covert operation in all history, when Odysseus took Troy by persuading its citizens to wheel in his wooden horse filled with fifth columnists. Later, on his way back from Troy, his skill – or luck – seems to have deserted him. Book 10 of the Odyssey, for example, carries an account of a scouting expedition by some of his men in Telepylus, which was aborted when a local chieftain’s wife, a creature of mountainous proportions’, rumbled them and threatened to serve them up to her husband for his supper.⁵ That one went badly wrong.

All this evidence is ambivalent, not least because it is entirely mythical. When we come on to less mythical times, however, there is scarcely more to go on. For Greece there is almost nothing. We know that military commanders used scouts to survey the terrain ahead of them, and extracted information from turncoats and prisoners. They also often got help from disloyal factions in enemy cities, who might be described as ‘fifth columnists’. Their ambassadors, or proxenoi, sometimes doubled as spies.⁶ All this was in the realm of foreign intelligence. There may have been some domestic espionage too. One would expect this in Sparta, which was continuously threatened by helot revolts, some of which were nipped in the bud on the basis of ‘information received’; but there is no evidence – and it does not necessarily follow – that this information came from spies. Sparta’s krypteia have been described as a ‘secret police’ force, but they had no intelligence function, and so do not count. (The krypteia were young upwardly mobile Spartans sent to hide in the country areas and sally out at night to slaughter any helots they found indiscriminately, in order to terrify them into submission.) A better example may be the Athenian ‘sycophants’, translated in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable as ‘fig-blabbers’, who began by informing on people whom they found exporting figs illegally, and then broadened their operations. Alexander the Great employed agents among his officers and men to sniff out plots against him.⁷ So there are some crumbs of evidence. But it does not amount to very much.

The Romans seem to have neglected intelligence almost entirely at first, under the republic. This was apparently because ‘the simple, straightforward, unspoiled Roman peasant stock, the basis of the proud Roman race, looked with supreme disdain upon anything which appeared artificial and disingenuous’.⁸ (Very much later on English Whig opponents of espionage, with their solid grounding in the classics, made a great deal of this.)⁹ It seems to have done the Romans no great harm until the time of the Punic Wars, in which the Carthaginians outwitted them more than once. The Carthaginians had probably learned their intelligence skills from their trading links with the East. Those skills included espionage, secret signs and codes, and disinformation. They were nearly Rome’s undoing. Some Romans drew the inevitable lesson. Around 200 BC Scipio Africanus, for example, who helped turn the tables on Carthage, used to dress up his soldiers as slaves to spy on the enemy. Once he was nearly found out when a Numidian general thought he recognized one of the ‘slaves’ as an old boy of his school in Greece. A century later Quintus Sertorius, serving in Roman Gaul which was under threat from neighbouring Teutons, offered to spy on them by ‘putting on Celtic dress and acquiring the commonest expressions of that language for such conversation as might be necessary’. Thus prepared, ‘he mingled with the barbarians, and after seeing or hearing what was necessary, came back’. But these were unusual enterprises at that time.¹⁰

Later on, as Rome became more imperial and more corrupt, such practices became less unusual. They also became turned inwards more. Earlier intelligence agencies had been designed mainly for external military purposes: to discover what was being planned among enemies or potential enemies abroad. Sometimes, when those enemies abroad were defeated and incorporated into great empires, they remained potentially subversive, and so needed to be carefully watched. So did the men sent out to govern them, who might – and often did – cultivate provincial power-bases to challenge the central authority from. The favourite counter to this was a corps of loyal functionaries, serving overtly as messengers or inspectors, whose real job was to report back on signs of disloyalty. In many ancient societies they were known as the ‘Eyes and Ears of the King’.¹¹ In some ways they were the equivalents of today’s secret or political police.

The Roman Empire used its fire brigade for this purpose, manned by vigilantes, as they were called, and charged with looking out for signs of rebellion as well as for fires. It may have got this idea from Egypt.¹² Later on a class of men known as frumentarii, because of their origins as grain dealers (frumentum = corn), was organized into a wide-ranging imperial intelligence network both in the provinces and in Italy. Epictetus described how they sometimes worked.

A soldier, dressed like a civilian, sits down by your side, and begins to speak ill of Caesar, and then you too, just as though you had received from him some guarantee of good faith in the fact he began the abuse, tell likewise everything you think, and the next thing is – you are led off to prison in chains.¹³

Later on he would have been called an agent provocateur. The frumentarii were also used for covert operations, like the spreading of ‘black’ propaganda, and even assassinations. Apparently Nero employed them to make sure that all his courtiers came to his lyre recitals, and kept awake.¹⁴ They became so unpopular in the third century AD that the Emperor Diocletian abolished them; but then found he missed them too much, and started up another intelligence cadre – the agentes in rebus – to take their place. They survived into the Byzantine period, changing their name to curiosi, very aptly, around AD 380.¹⁵

The early Arab and Muslim empires also employed networks of secret police. They were often headed by eunuchs. In early ninth century Baghdad, for example, the Caliph’s domestic intelligence agency included 1,700 old women, watching and reporting back to him. In sixteenth-century India the Emperor Akbar used state scavengers, or dustbin men, for the same purpose.¹⁶ They also employed merchants and pedlars. The practice appears to have been widely accepted amongst the Muslims, and even justified. ‘Sending out police agents and spies’, wrote the eleventh-century Persian Nizam al-Mulk, shows that the ruler is just, vigilant, and sagacious.’¹⁷ That was a point of view which finds echoes in some modern societies.

So what does all this tell us? At first glance, not a lot. There is absolutely no proof that espionage is the ‘second oldest profession’, or anything near it; or that it had an uninterrupted history even in ancient times. Examples can be found of ancient rulers and generals using intelligence-gathering techniques of various kinds, and covert tricks to gain advantages in battles, but only sporadically. A ‘profession’ is a full-time occupation, which is officially remunerated; and it is surely unlikely that espionage as a ‘profession’ in this sense predated – for example – flint-knapping, or witch-doctoring, or sooth-saying, or a dozen other vital specialist jobs in the ancient world.

Some classical societies appear to have done without it entirely. Certainly contemporaries looking back from later to earlier periods thought so. Pericles in his Funeral Oration, for example, boasted proudly of how ‘open’ his city – Athens – had been ‘to all the world’ in the fifth century BC, so that nothing there was kept hidden even from foreigners. Later on the second century BC historian Polybius wrote of a time in the past when ‘states neither used secret weapons nor sought to mislead their foes about time and place of battle’, which sounds more like cricket than war. Republican Rome had the special reputation of being free from this kind of thing. ‘Rome of old explored the limits of freedom,’ wrote Tacitus around AD 100; ‘we have plumbed the depths of slavery, robbed even of the interchange of ideas by the secret police.’¹⁸ Such statements may indicate that there were gaps in the tradition. They certainly indicate that there was also a counter-tradition in ancient times: of opposition to domestic and even military espionage, on moral and civil libertarian grounds.

We do not have to believe Pericles and Polybius and Tacitus. Some present-day historians do not. This is not because they have contrary evidence, but because they simply cannot credit their accounts.¹⁹ One such is the American Francis Dvornik, who published a pioneering general survey of ancient intelligence systems in 1974. His starting-point was the belief that successful ancient polities must have had extensive intelligence networks, because it was inconceivable that they could have been successful otherwise. This applied especially, he thought, to regimes which ‘neglected the social and economic welfare of their subjects’, who would surely have found ways of throwing off their oppressors if the latter had not employed covert means to keep them down. (One might add that Dvornik was originally commissioned to write his book by an ex-head of American intelligence, General ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, with the object of demonstrating historically ‘the importance of a good intelligence service for the security of our country’: but we can let that pass.)²⁰ Clearly such an interpretation goes beyond what the surviving evidence on its own will bear. But that is not to say that it is inherently unreasonable.

The problem is, of course, that paucity of evidence in this field does not prove a thing. It may well be that intelligence activities in ancient times were far more extensive than we can know. The point is that one would expect the evidence to be scanty in any case. Secret agents have to be adept at covering their tracks, which usually means covering them from the eyes of posterity too. Because we cannot find evidence of covert activities at certain periods, it does not mean that those activities did not go on. It might mean, on the contrary, that they went on far more cleverly at those times than at others, when they did leave traces for us to find. Alternatively, it might mean that they had thoroughly scared everyone into keeping quiet about them, even in what they wrote. After all, writes one historian, ‘to what extent would novelists or historians living in the police states of today discuss their surveillants?’²¹ If you believe that espionage is ‘natural’, or essential to the success of a state, then that is what you will prefer to think. This is a problem that dogs the historian of later days too.

Bearing this in mind, the lessons we can draw from these ancient times must be tentative. Here are some of them. It is likely that some societies abjured covert activities almost entirely – even Dvornik exempts the Roman Republic – and did not suffer unduly from it. That does not necessarily point any moral; they may merely have been lucky in their friends and enemies, or stronger in other ways. Such activities were more common in wartime, as one might expect, and more acceptable then than in peace. Full-time professional espionage agencies were comparatively rare. Intelligence, whether military, foreign, or domestic, was far more often gleaned through other channels entirely – captured prisoners, defectors, occasional informers, gossips, government officials, merchants, diplomats – than from genuine agents or spies. One of the reasons for this may have been the difficulty of passing oneself off as a member of a community which in the ancient world was bound to be far smaller than today, and where consequently strangers stood out more.

The first genuine espionage agencies did not emerge fully fledged, but evolved from organizations which initially had other functions – delivering mails, fighting fires, collecting taxes, distributing grain – which placed them in positions where they could perform this other duty too. For some of these organizations espionage remained a sideline, whereas others (like the frumentarii) were entirely taken over by it. So far as foreign espionage is concerned, it seems that expansionist, imperialist states indulged in it oftener than static and pacific ones. Domestic espionage was more likely to be directed against rivals to a ruling faction among the political élite of a state, obviously because that was where most realistic threats came from, than against the lower classes of society. There is scattered evidence of rulers abusing their secret services, and of complaints against this (like Tacitus’s); and a g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Sly and subtil fellowes (4000 BC to AD 1790)
• 2 The most powerful means of observation (1790–1805)
• 3 Spies and bloodites! (1805–25)
• 4 Mild and paternal government (1825–50)
• 5 No police over opinion (1850–80)
• 6 A permanent organization to detect and control (1880–1910)
• 7 A holy alliance against this midnight terror (1910–20)
• 8 Dangers ahead (1920–40)
• 9 Dazzled and confused (1940–70)
• 10 Dungeons and dragons (1970–88)
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Further reading
• Index