Patriot Games Essay, Research Paper

Patriot games Know Your Enemy: How the Joint Intelligence Committee Saw the World Percy Cradock

354pp, John Murray

The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War

Peter Hennessy

234pp, Allen Lane Twelve old ages ago, Sir Reginald Hibbert, a former senior Foreign Office diplomat, penned a annihilating essay about the Whitehall elite responsible for measuring secret intelligence. Long-run intelligence appraisals normally end up & # 8220 ; by reasoning that the hereafter is traveling to be loosely like the present, merely more so & # 8221 ; , he wrote. & # 8220 ; One knows that this can ne’er be true because of the incidence of the unexpected. Perestroika, for illustration, was inherently unpredictable, at any rate in its timing. & # 8221 ; However, Whitehall would non hold been so surprised by perestroika, and the subsequent prostration of communism, had it spent less clip numbering arms and more clip analyzing human existences. Excessively much accent was placed on menaces from the E revealed by secret beginnings, and excessively small on economic and political tendencies that were available for all to see. Hibbert pointed out the hazard of curates and their senior advisors going absorbed into a & # 8220 ; a civilization where secretiveness comes to be confused with truth and where, after a clip, contact is lost with earthly clumsiness & # 8221 ; . Intelligence bureaus were placed steadfastly under the limelight after the September 11 onslaughts on the US. But what is their old path record, apart from the failure to foretell the autumn of communism? Percy Cradock, former president of the Joint Intelligence Committee, one of Hibbert & # 8217 ; s chief marks, unsurprisingly takes a much less critical position. Though he acknowledges that the JIC was surprised by the velocity with which the Soviet Union developed the atom bomb, and overestimated its military strength, he emphasises that it was right in placing Soviet & # 8220 ; strategic cautiousness & # 8221 ; , which he sees as possibly the most of import individual judgement of the cold war. The JIC was besides right, he observes, in seeing China as a mostly independent histrion, and non merely a Soviet marionette, as the US believed. When things went severely and authoritiess were caught by surprise, Cradock blames policy-makers instead than the intelligence community. On the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968: & # 8220 ; It was in the field of political understanding more than difficult intelligence that the West went wrong. & # 8221 ; He skirts over the UDI crisis in Rhodesia, stating that intelligence merely had a little portion to play. The JIC is once more praised for its agnosticism about the consequence of countenances. Make this encourage sanction-busting by British oil companies? And we could hold had more on the analysis & # 8211 ; by MI6 & # 8211 ; of whether British forces would truly hold backed away from mili tary action against Thursday

eir “kith and kin”. Ken Flower, Rhodesia’s secret-service chief, admitted later that Ian Smith and his colleagues had been deeply worried about the possible use of force by the British. There were those in MI6 who did think it would work. How far they tried to impress their view on Harold Wilson we do not know. Cradock is certainly correct in describing Suez as a “policy rather than intelligence failure”. It was, of course, more than that – the attack on Egypt involved secret collusion with France and Israel. Cradock calls it a “stark lesson to Britain on the limits of power… a dramatic wastage of government resources through secrecy, duplicity and sheer muddle”. Cradock relies largely on JIC and other official documents released at the public record office. Curiously, he ignores the intelligence failings leading up to the Falklands war, even though they were vividly described by the Franks committee set up by Thatcher after the conflict was over. “The changes in the Argentine position,” it noted, “were, we believe, more evident on the diplomatic front and in the associated press campaign than in the intelligence reports…” But, in a curiously disappointing book, Cradock does refer to discussions in Whitehall about doomsday scenarios and nuclear options in the early days of the cold war. The original decision to embark on an “independent deterrent”, he says, was not the result of any elaborate strategic thought, but ministers’ instincts. Ernest Bevin, Attlee’s foreign secretary, summed up the mood by saying: “We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it.” Cradock writes: “Later he gave as his reason the need to ensure that no successor of his would be talked to as he just had been by his US counterpart, secretary of state Byrnes. His more formal comments… again turned less on threats from the Soviet Union than on independence from the United States: Britain ‘could not afford to acquiesce in an American monopoly of this new development’.” Neither could it long afford to maintain its independent ambitions. Nuclear war – or, rather, contingency planning, the procedures by which the prime minister would authorise an attack by Britain’s Trident submarine commanders, and how the government would hide from a Soviet attack in its bunkers – is the subject of Peter Hennessy’s rather misleadingly titled book, The Secret State. It has a narrow focus but, as one expects from Whitehall’s premier historian, it is well written and rich in anecdotes. How could a Trident commander be sure that the UK had suffered a catastrophic nuclear assault without an authenticated message from the prime minister? “One of the very last tests – over several days – is that BBC Radio 4’s Today programme has been silenced (a pleasing last touch of national identity, in every sense, I have always thought).”