For Britain, the Suez Crisis remains as divisive as it is no doubt seminal to British post-war history. The received wisdom that it took the calamity at Suez to âshatter the illusion of Britain as a great imperial powerâ 1 has been countered by revisionist interpretations. Those accounts argue for the inevitability of British decline, 2 and that Suez was merely a notable yet âdramatic hiccupâ 3 in Britain coming to terms with its loss of power. Simply put, Britain would have become a middle ranking power whether or not Suez had happened. What remains in no doubt, however, is that Suez deserves its place in British political history as a key moment. The debates about the manner and timings of British decline notwithstanding, for the casual reader of history Suez provides the convenient marker point demonstrating clearly that British power was not only no longer dominant, but that it was required to bow to the wishes of larger powers, notably America. The crisis provided a genuine conspiracy to unearth, destroyed the political career of then Prime Minister Anthony Eden, and provoked a serious moment of soul-searching on the part of a Britain which, although grappling with the question of diminished status and a changed global order since 1945, realised graphically by 1957 that a serious answer was now required.
To state that at times Suez haunts British politics would be no exaggeration; Margaret Thatcher came to condemn what she termed the âSuez Syndromeâ, where the trauma of Suez had such an effect on the self-esteem of British foreign policy that it led to a persistent attitude of exaggerating Britainâs impotence in the world. 4 Thatcherâs own foreign policy, emboldened by her success in the Falklands War of 1982, was clearly motivated in part by a desire to halt the foreign policy trend that since Suez she described as âone long retreatâ. 5 The ghost of Suez was not fully excised with Thatcher, however; its presence in contemporary political vocabulary has not ceased, and Suez was indeed cited in the run-up to the controversial Iraq War of 2003. 6 The legacy of the politically ambiguous, and no doubt costlier, interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia of the 2000s has breathed fresh life into the lessons of Suez.
Although Suez is broadly well-understood, there are avenues of research with much to contribute to established knowledge. The intention of this book is to explore the intelligence story of Britain in the Suez Crisis. Before establishing the justification for this however, it is first necessary to discuss strategy and intelligence broadly.
Strategy and Intelligence
Intelligence holds a special place in the hearts of those who both do and study strategy. Arguably the only other dimension of strategy that evokes such impassioned representation in popular culture is combat itself; intelligence over the course of the past century has inspired such fascination that some of our most cherished fictional icons are products of the intelligence world. In current times, gone are the sceptical views of the early post-Cold War years, when it was asserted that intelligence âis a dying businessâ. 7 Since the events of 11 September 2001 intelligence has played an ever-increasing role, and one that has given it a level of public exposure never before seen. The decade labelled as âthe 9/11 warsâ 8 has placed increasing burdens on Western intelligence services in both counter-terrorist missions and counter-insurgency missions across the world. The importance of intelligence in these missions has continually gained greater patronage, such as from the world-renowned counter-insurgency expert, David Kilcullen, who argues for its vital role in population-focussed counter-insurgency. 9 The experiences of the 9/11 wars has only underlined further the vital role that intelligence plays in developing and executing strategy.
Into the second decade of the 2000s, the world has been rocked by Edward Snowdenâs revelations about the method and scale of signals intelligence practices undertaken by the American National Security Agency (NSA) and Britainâs Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). The details of Snowdenâs exposures are beyond the scope of this bookâs focus, 10 but serve to reveal the level of public engagement with the topic now that the British Parliament, through its Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), has called for a complete overhaul of the legal architecture under which British intelligence operates. 11 Events like this, as well as the targeted killing of Osama bin Laden by US Navy SEALs in May 2011âwhich was labelled an âintelligence triumphâ 12 âserve to reveal that intelligence is not the dying business that it was feared to be in the early 1990s. It is very much alive and in more demand from political actors than ever.
Despite this clear requirement for, and the actual use of, intelligence in the contemporary strategic environment, âIt appears that the role of intelligence is either overlooked or is taken for granted as operating as a hidden force in the background. This is odd when one considers the significance of intelligence in the work of Sun Tzu, one of the foremost classical theorists in the subject.â 13 With these words Lonsdale establishes the central justification for this bookâs exploration of the relationship between strategy and intelligence: that despite intelligence very clearly holding a special place not only in strategic theory generally, but also a central place in Sun Tzuâs work 14 âthe oldest-known treatise on strategy at over 2,500 years oldâits role therein remains formally unrecognised and certainly under-theorised.
Despite the indisputable importance of the relationship between strategy and intelligence, the respective sub-fields for their study within international relationsâstrategic studies and intelligence studiesâhave thus far carried out their intellectual endeavours without reference to one another. Strategic studies has marched to the sound of the guns, focusing its efforts on the challenges of the day, which in modern times have been overwhelmingly on the Cold War nuclear standoff and the persistent regularity of irregular warfare; in addition, the field has had its own internal debates about strategic theory. Intelligence studies, meanwhile, has always been conditioned by the secrecy of its topic as to what it can research. The focus has always fallen on those areas which have emerged into the public domain and provided publicly available evidence: warning failure, deep-penetration agents, covert operations, and oversight and accountability, before turning to the development of theory.
This lack of inter-disciplinary engagement has resulted in a gap in knowledge where the operating relationship between strategy and intelligence has been neither identified nor codified. The objective of this book is to identify, codify and operationalise that relationship into an explanatory model that can then be used against the single case study of Britain in the 1956 Suez Crisisâusing historical methodologyâin order to understand the real-world operation of, and generate broader conclusions on, the relationship.
Definitions
In dealing with issues of policy, and in making a central subscription to the Clausewitzian thesis of the political nature of war, 15 it is necessary to offer definitions of politics and policy, as well as strategy and intelligence, in order to establish conceptual clarity.
Politics must be the starting point for definitions because, out of politics and policy, âPolitics is the more authoritative of the two, since it provides much of the fuel and most of the process that yields what we call policy.â 16 Minogue also highlights this idea of process as representing a guiding theme of Western politics since Ancient Greece, where outcomes emerge from a process of dialogue. 17 Any understanding of policy must take heed of its origins in a political process. Laswell described the study of politics as âthe study of influence and the influential.â 18 The implication of this statement is that the practice of politics is the practice of wielding influence, hence the broader title of his work, and the definition of politics subscribed to here: âPolitics: Who Gets What, When, Howâ. 19
As politics is inclusive of a process, it is clear that policy must ultimately be an expression of this process, and is consequently a product of the political process. Policy, therefore, is the product of a political process, a product providing the political objectives upon which action and behaviour are both informed and conditioned towards the attainment of those objectives.
To define strategy we subscribe immediately to Clausewitz as the necessary start point. He states that strategy is âthe use of the engagement for the purposes of the warâ. 20 Clausewitzâs remark may appear to hold a narrow military-centric view on strategy, but it must be considered in any attempt at a satisfactory definition for two reasons: first, no definition of strategy should ever neglect the possibility of force being used, which Clausewitz explicitly provides; secondly, Clausewitz achieves, albeit more subtly, an appreciation that the real realm of strategy lies not in the use of force itself, but in the consequences of actions taken in the achievement of sought outcomes. 21 For this book, however, the definition of strategy offered by Gray will be adopted, due to its broader political inclusivity: âStrategy is the bridge that relates military power to political purpose; it is neither military power per se nor political purpose.â 22
Issuing a definition of intelligence is a difficult task indeed because, as Warner argues, âwe have no accepted definition of intelligenceâ. 23 The sharpest point of contention in defining intelligence lies in the disagreement over whether intelligence must necessarily be a secret pursuit or whether secrecy is simply a side-effect of good intelligence work. 24 The broad outline of this disagreement can be characterised by two schools: the American school, which believes that secrecy is not the defining characteristic of intelligence wo...