That apart, MI5 is based at Thames House, on the north bank of the River Thames in London, a few hundred yards from Parliament, and the SIS at Vauxhall Cross on the South Bank almost a mile upstream, after moving from the shabby old Century House in the Elephant and Castle district.
The task of SIS is foreign information gathering and its presence is worldwide, with a “station” somewhere in almost all British embassies and sometimes consulates. Basically, it seeks to discover and forewarn. Politicians are wont to sneer when in opposition but drool with pleasure when, in office, they are taken to a quiet room to have explained to them what is really going on rather than what they thought was going on.
Politicians congenitally loathe to be taken by surprise, which is where the forewarning comes in, but forewarning depends on knowing what the bad people are planning, intending, or have in mind. As that is rarely given away, it has to be discovered clandestinely. Hence the espionage.
This broadly devolves into three categories: electronic intelligence, or ELINT, the scouring of the surface of the world with look-down cameras, mounted either in satellites, drones, or warplanes; signals intelligence, SIGINT, intercepting everything the bad people say to each other, even when they think they have absolute privacy; and HUMINT, or human intelligence gathering.
Britain has never been able to compete with the vast budgets of the United States, and has no space program, but it brings to the table a worthwhile contribution in HUMINT. Infiltrating an agent into the heart of a tricky situation can produce more product than all the “gizmos” could ever see or hear. It is the specialty of the SIS.
As for the terms, those inside the SIS called it “the Office”; those outside use the phrase “the Firm”; and the staffers of the firm are the “friends.” Not to be confused with the CIA, which is “the Agency” or “the Company,” and its staff, who are “the Cousins.”
Considering the sixty million–plus population of the UK and the size of its gross national product, it has always had a smaller SIS than almost any other developed nation in the world, and thus cheaper. The British taxpayer is far from shortchanged. There is a quixotic reason for this.
Unlike all other agencies, the Firm has always been able to rely on a widespread ad hoc army of volunteers prepared to help out if asked nicely. They come from a vast array of professions, something that causes them to travel a bit. They may agree while on a foreign visit for business purposes to pick up a package, deliver a letter to a hole in a tree, make a payment, or just keep their eyes and ears open and undergo a cheerful debriefing when they get home. It appears a bit weird, but it seems to work.
This is because the best “cover” in the world is no cover at all, but the truth. Thus, if Mr. Farnsbarns really is going to a trade fair to sell his paper clips, he might just slip into a phone booth, remove a letter from the pages of the telephone directory, and bring it home in an invisible slit in a specially prepared briefcase. That is where the economics come in; it is not done for money but just to help “the old country.” Very few nations can match that.
There are times in your life when you meet someone and in short order decide he is a thoroughly decent fellow and you can trust him. If you are ever deceived in this later, it is like a hot dagger.
In late 1968, on a brief home visit from Biafra to firm up some correspondent contracts with various London papers, I met a member of the Firm called Ronnie. He sought me out rather than the reverse, and made no bones about what he was, and we hit it off.
He was an Orientalist with good Mandarin Chinese, but to his bewilderment had been made head of the Africa desk. He admitted he knew little about Africa and less about what was really going on inside Biafra. I think we spent about twenty hours over several days while I explained how bad things were, as it became plain the children were now dying of starvation like flies. Had I not trusted his word, I would never have agreed to what came next.
The CRO had amalgamated with the Foreign Office to become the FCO. Both the former secretary of state for the CRO and his deputy, the minister of state, had resigned, one after the other. The former, a deeply devout Scottish Presbyterian, George Thomson, despite the official reason given, simply could not in all conscience continue to preside over a policy he found disgusting and immoral. His deputy, George Thomas, was a religious Welsh Methodist and shared precisely the same opinion.
(The latter went on to become speaker of the House of Commons and retired as Lord Tonypandy, a thoroughly honorable and respected politician, not least for his stand over Biafra.)
But the FCO was in the hands of the appalling Michael Stewart, a complete creature of his Civil Service mandarins. They, headed by Lord Greenhill, had absorbed, lock, stock, and barrel, the policy of the CRO, itself based on the flawed appraisal of Sir David Hunt, still en poste as British high commissioner in Lagos and pushing the pro-Nigeria, crush-Biafra policy line with every dispatch.
But there was a debate beginning after fifteen months of the Nigeria-Biafra war, and made more intense by the torrent of hideous pictures showing Biafran babies reduced to barely alive skeletons.
The public marches of protest were starting, notable figures were protesting; the debate might be at a very high level and in complete secrecy, but the FCO was fighting a rearguard action for the minds of the vacillating Harold Wilson government.
Technically, the SIS comes under the FCO but is entitled to disagree in certain circumstances, specifically if it has factual information rather than mere opinion. Ronnie’s problem was he had no specific eyes-on information from the heart of Biafra to offset the assurances coming through from Lagos to the effect that the horrors were grossly exaggerated and the war would in any case be over in very short order—the song that had now been sung for fifteen months of a two-week war.
I did what I did, not in order to do down the Biafrans—far from it. I did it to try to influence the Whitehall argument that continued intermittently for the next fifteen months until the final crushing of Biafra, with a million dead children.
The argument was between: “Prime Minister, this cannot be allowed to go on. The human cost is simply too high. We should reconsider our policy. We should use all our influence to urge a cease-fire, a peace conference, and a political solution,” and “Prime Minister, I can assure you the media reports are as usual sensationalist and grossly exaggerated. We have information the rebel regime is very close to collapse. The sooner it does, the sooner we can get columns of relief food into the rebel territory. Meanwhile, we urge you to stick with the hitherto-agreed policy and even increase the support for the federal government.”
Neither Ronnie nor I could know in October 1968 how long there was to go or how many more to die. But the argument for a cease-fire lost, for two reasons: the vanity factor and the cowardice factor.
It is said that if a tigress sees her cubs endangered, she will fight with deranged passion to defend them. But her dedication pales into submission compared with the fury with which senior civil servants and most notably of the Foreign Office will defend the fiction that they cannot have made a mistake.
The cowardice applied as usual to the politicians, Wilson and Stewart. Basically, it was: “Prime Minister, if you concede to the ‘reconsider’ argument you would have to admit that for fifteen months your government has made a mistake. How then do you reply to the media question: How can you explain to the public the quarter million children dead so far?” At that point, the response from Wilson and Stewart was, “Very well, do what you feel you must. But hurry.”
So the military, advisory, diplomatic, and propaganda help to the Lagos dictatorship quietly increased. Ronnie convinced me that the Firm might be able to win the argument if it could rebut the charge of media exaggeration with eyes-on evidence that the situation was as reported or worse.
But to do that, he needed an asset deep inside the Biafran enclave, what he termed “someone in on the ground.” When I
left for the return to the rain forest, he had one.
On my return, the job was threefold. To report through the various newspapers and magazines that had accepted me as a stringer (local correspondent on a non-staff basis) the military war as it crawled on its way. To use the same outlets to portray the humanitarian situation, the disaster among the children dying of kwashiorkor (protein deficiency), and the church-based efforts to keep them alive with an air bridge of illicit mercy flights bringing in relief food donated by literally the whole world.
In this, there were at least a dozen other journalists, sometimes twenty, who came and went; there were delegations of parliamentarians, senators, and emissaries from various concerned groups, who simply felt they had to see and report back.
In Europe and North America, the issue, based on the reports and the still and moving pictures, became massive, linking Left and Right, young and old, in marches and protests. There were times when Harold Wilson appeared almost under siege, and twice, I learned later, the “reconsider” policy was almost adopted. Had the opposition Conservative Party leaned its weight, the change of policy might have gone through and the dying of the children would have ended, but Edward Heath, the Tory leader, shared with the FCO his European Union obsession, and he was their man.
The third task was to keep Ronnie informed of things that could not, for various reasons, emerge in the media. Just once, after nine months, things became sticky, when a rumor spread that I was working for London. Had the suspicion developed, my situation might have become thoroughly tiresome. I discovered the source was the ex-Legionnaire German mercenary Rolf Steiner, with whom I had never been on the best of terms.