The Art of Betrayal

Gordon Corera,  “The Art of Betrayal: The Secret History of MI6”, Pegasus Books, 2012,  413 pp.

This book describes British MI6 and MI5 activities from the end of WWII to the present.  MI6 is comparable to our CIA.  Author Corera focuses on a small number of individuals and episodes.  The Cold War and after – the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 9-11 attacks and the Iraq war.   He maintains that our understanding of what it is to be a spy has been largely defined by the fictional worlds of James Bond and John le Carre.  This book provides the reality that lies behind the fiction; le Carre is much more realistic than Ian Fleming.  My impression after reading Corera’s book is that both the U.S. and Britain would be better off WITHOUT their secret services.  (Reading "The Brothers" also has something to do with my conclusion).  I believe our Foreign Service has a much more useful approach in gathering useful intelligence in the world.  The use of assassination and torture is a self-defeating activity but it is useful to provide a sanctuary for defectors with intelligence.

The most useful,  probably the only useful, item to come from the various spy activities was the dissemination of the true political and military thinking of the opposing sides.  But this intelligence was infrequently obtained.

My Notes:

Pg. 7:  Protecting the public against terrorist attack made the work of intelligence agencies public in a manner never witnessed in the past, but what really opened up MI6 to controversy was the use of its intelligence to justify a war of choice.  Iraq was the lowest moment for MI6 since the betrayal by Kim Philby.  Its intelligence turned out to be wrong and the aftermath of the war a disaster.  Thy myth came crashing against reality as MI6’s intelligence, on which a case for war was built, was shown to be dud.

Pg. 104:  In 1885, the Congo had become not a Belgian colony but a personal possession of King Leopold II, acquired with the assistance of the British explorer Henry Stanley.  Colonialism in Africa did not have a good record, but Leopold’s and Belgium’ record in the Congo was the most wretched.  Leopold never set foot in the country, but during the twenty-tree years that it was his personal fiefdom and estimated ten million Congolese died from disease or starvation or at the hands of the death squads led by the feared Force Publique. 

Pg. 118: U.S. involvement in getting rid of Lumumba:

In a meeting, Eisenhower turned to CIA Director Allen Dulles and said he wanted Lumumba ‘eliminated’.  Dulles personally cable Devlin “WE CONCLUDE THAT HIS REMOVAL MUST BE AN URGENT ANDPRIME OBJECTIVE AND THAT UNDER EIXSTING CONDITIONS THIS WOULD BE A HIGH PRIORITY OF OUR COVERT ACTION.  HENCE WE WISH TO GIVE YOU WIDE AUTHORITY.”

The Belgians actually ended up killing Lumumba saving MI6 and the CIA the trouble.  Lumumba was replaced by the tyrant Mobutu.

Pg. 267:  Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chief turned Soviet leader was convinced that the West was preparing a ‘first strike’ using nuclear weapons.  They believed Reagan’s rhetoric was designed to prepare the population for a nuclear war that the Americans hoped somehow to survive and win. 

Pg. 291:  The Soviet’s invasion of Afghanistan was viewed by the Cold War Warriors in London and Washington as an opportunity not to be missed and this invasion contributed in no small part to the demise of the Soviet Union; it became the pivot from the Cold War era to the present Terrorist Threat era.  Soviet soldiers finally marched out of Afghanistan on 15 February 1989.  Perhaps as many as two million Afghans had died and fourteen thousand Soviets. 

Addenda:
George Blake is the Soviet Spy whose treachery led to the loss of no fewer than 500 agents, many executed by the Russians. 

Daphne Park is the most useful agent portrayed in the book.  In the 1950s and early 1960s she saved the lives of many innocents in the Congo (as well as intelligence sources). During her career she was a clandestine senior controller in MI6 in Hanoi, Moscow, the Congo, and Zambia.   If there were more like her, I would change my position on mostly eliminating the CIA.

Even Ian Fleming would have been pushed to have come up with MI6's real ideas for killing the Egyptian dictator Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s with exploding razors and poison gas. However, at one point, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden's demanded MI6: "I want Nasser murdered, don't you understand?"  Yet, well-timed bullet for A.Q. Khan seems likely to be perfectly justifiable.

There are only six countries in the world that run global intelligence networks, and Britain's is the only one so politically correct as not to have a license to kill. What must the CIA's drone-managers think of their wimpy British counterparts?

Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky was a colonel with Soviet military intelligence (GRU) during the late 1950s and early 1960s who informed the United Kingdom and the United States about the Soviet emplacement of missiles in Cuba.