The world of spooks and shadows
Philip Ziegler
WAR, RESISTANCE AND INTELLIGENCE edited by K. G. Robertson Leo Cooper, £19.95, pp. 262 Festschrifts are of uncertain quality. At their best they can illuminate as well as honour the career of the academic to whom they are dedicated. At their worst they consist of by-products from work in progress or essays which have long lan- guished unloved in the bottom drawers of their authors. There are a few examples of the former in this collection, though none which does not exist happily in its own right; if there are specimens of the second category, then they are uncommonly well concealed. Almost everything in this book is worth reading and says something of interest and value about its subject.
M. R. D. Foot made his name as a histo- rian of the 19th century; in particular for launching the magisterial edition of The Gladstone Diaries, which was to be brought to completion by the sadly late Colin Matthew. It is, however, as a historian of war in the shadows, of espionage, resis- tance and cryptography, that he is most cel- ebrated. He has brought scholarship and cool objectivity to the world of blood and thunder or, as John Roberts reminds us in his lively foreword, the world of 'thud and blunder'. He 'straddles like no other the jagged intersection of the historical and intelligence professions', writes Peter Hen- nessy, and it is this role which is commemo- rated in War, Resistance and Intelligence.
In spite of the book's title, these essays are not confined to Foot's specialist inter- ests. Kathleen Burk on A. J. P. Taylor's `useful but unheroic war', or P. M. H. Bell's thoughtful analysis of the relationship between Britain, France and the USA at the end of the second world war, would have been as much at home in a festschrift devoted to half a dozen other contempo- rary historians. John Lukacs' passionately argued essay on historical revisionism is still more wide-ranging. All history of any value must be revisionist, he maintains:
But the revision of history must not be an ephemeral monopoly of ideologues or oppor- tunists who are ever ready to twist or even falsify evidences of the past in order to exem- plify current ideas — and their own adjust- ments to them.
Most of these pieces, however, deal with `Resistance and Intelligence'. There are plenty of thuds and not a few blunders, but achievements too, and, above all, astonishing courage and resourcefulness. When Hugh Verity describes with casual nonchalance Lysander flights into occupied Europe to drop or pick up Allied agents, one can only wonder at the skill and resolu- tion required to put down by night in enemy territory without knowing whether one was flying into an ambush or if one would be able to take off again. Still more impressive was the sustained heroism of the agents themselves and those who helped them, facing death if they were lucky, torture if they were not, if they were betrayed or slipped up in any way.
Was it all worth while? Wars are won in battle, and though there can be no doubt that, in the second world war, the course of those battles was affected by the Allied ability to break German and Japanese cyphers, there are those who would say that intelligence-gathering by other means, let alone the waging of covert war behind enemy lines, was a wasteful distraction from the serious business of destroying the opposing armies. Churchill, certainly, did not think so. As David Stafford demon- strates convincingly, he had believed, from the time that he had observed the unavail- ing Spanish efforts to crush the ill-armed and numerically weaker Cuban guerrillas in 1895, that knowledge was power, and that good intelligence about the enemy's dispo- sitions and intentions was worth half a dozen extra divisions or 100 bombers.
Yet today there is no major war, no Cold War even. In 1998 MI5, MI6 and GCHQ together cost some £750 million. Can this be justified? 'What shall I tell Her Majesty her Secret Intelligence Service is for?' asked the Queen's private secretary. `Please tell her it is the last penumbra of her Empire,' was the reply. If it were true that the British intelligence machine was indeed no more than a residue of former glories, largely irrelevant to present needs, then the sooner it was put to rest the bet- ter. But the sums involved are not enor- mous: as Peter Hennessy points out in the concluding essay, 'just one serious conflict avoided thanks to timely and accurate intelligence would pay for the whole of the UK's intelligence effort for several years'. And when conflicts do arise, as inevitably they will, good intelligence can vastly increase the chances of winning them quickly and economically. The machine must be kept turning, if only to counter the threats of terrorist organisations or drug barons; what a false economy it would be to so far reduce its capacity that it could no longer provide intelligence about the thoughts and doings of foreign powers.
The shadow world which Foot under- stands so well is as threatening as ever. These essays suggest that Britain has been, and probably still is, as well equipped as any other nation to survive within it.
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