The entire Cyprus episode left a lasting impression on British colonial policy. Britain decolonized most successfully when we defeated the military insurgency first, using intelligence rather than force of arms, before negotiating a political solution based on the political leadership of the defeated insurgency movement, and with British force of arms to maintain the installed government. This is basically what happened in Malaya and Kenya, and both these countries have survived intact.
The fundamental problem was how to remove the colonial power while ensuring that the local military forces did not fill the vacuum. How, in other words, can you create a stable local political class? The Colonial Office were well versed in complicated, academic, democratic models - a constitution here, a parliament there - very few of which stood the remotest chance of success. After the Cyprus experience I wrote a paper and submitted it to Hollis, giving my views. I said that we ought to adopt the Bolshevik model, since it was the only one to have worked successfully. Lenin understood better than anyone how to gain control of a country and, just as important, how to keep it. Lenin believed that the political class had to control the men with the guns, and the intelligence service, and by these means could ensure that neither the Army nor another political class could challenge for power.
Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the modern Russian Intelligence Service, specifically set up the CHEKA (forerunner of the KGB) with these aims in mind. He established three main directorates - the First Chief Directorate to work against those people abroad who might conspire against the government; the Second Chief Directorate to work against those inside the Soviet Union who might conspire; and the Third Chief Directorate, which penetrated the armed forces, to ensure that no military coup could be plotted.
My paper was greeted with horror by Hollis and the rest of the MI5 Directors. They told me it was "cynical," and it was never even passed to the Colonial Office, but looking back over the past quarter of a century, it is only where a version of Lenin's principles has been applied in newly created countries that a military dictatorship has been avoided.
These ideas were also hotly contested by the CIA when I lectured to them in 1959. Helms told me flatly I was advocating Communism for the Third World. He felt that we had a decisive intelligence advantage which they lacked. We were the resident colonial power, whereas in the insurgencies which they faced in the Far East and Cuba, they were not, and therefore they felt the only policy they could pursue was a military solution. It was this thinking which ultimately led the USA into the Vietnam War.
More immediately, it led them into the Bay of Pigs, and when, two years later, Harvey listened to my Cyprus experiences, he was struck by the parallel between the two problems: both small islands with a guerrilla force led by a charismatic leader. He was particularly struck by my view that without Grivas, EOKA would have collapsed.
"What would the Brits do in Cuba?" he asked.
I was a shade anxious about being drawn into the Cuban business. Hollis and I had discussed it before I came to Washington, and he made no secret of his view that the CIA were blundering in the Caribbean. It was a subject, he felt, to steer clear of if at all possible. I was worried that if I made suggestions to Angleton and Harvey, I would soon find them being quoted around Washington by the CIA as the considered British view of things. It would not take long for word of that to filter back to Leconfield House, so I made it clear to them that I was talking off the record.
I said that we would try to develop whatever assets we had down there - alternative political leaders, that kind of thing.
"We've done all that," said Harvey impatiently, "but they're all in Florida. Since the Bay of Pigs, we've lost virtually everything we had inside..."
Harvey began to fish to see if I knew whether we had anything in the area, in view of the British colonial presence in the Caribbean.
"I doubt it," I told him, "the word in London is steer clear of Cuba. Six might have something, but you'd have to check with them."
"How would you handle Castro?" asked Angleton.
"We'd isolate him, turn the people against him..."
"Would you hit him?" interrupted Harvey.
I paused to fold my napkin. Waiters glided silently from table to table. I realized now why Harvey needed to know I could be trusted.
"We'd certainly have that capability," I replied, "but I doubt we would use it nowadays."
"Why not?"
"We're not in it anymore, Bill. We got out a couple of years ago, after Suez."
At the beginning of the Suez Crisis, MI6 developed a plan, through the London Station, to assassinate Nasser using nerve gas. Eden initially gave his approval to the operation, but later rescinded it when he got agreement from the French and Israelis to engage in joint military action. When this course failed, and he was forced to withdraw, Eden reactivated the assassination option a second time. By this time virtually all MI6 assets in Egypt had been rounded up by Nasser, and a new operation, using renegade Egyptian officers, was drawn up, but it failed lamentably, principally because the cache of weapons which had been hidden on the outskirts of Cairo was found to be defective.
"Were you involved?" Harvey asked.
"Only peripherally," I answered truthfully, "on the technical side."
I explained that I was consulted about the plan by John Henry and Peter Dixon, the two MI6 Technical Services officers from the London Station responsible for drawing it up. Dixon, Henry, and I all attended joint MI5/MI6 meetings to discuss technical research for the intelligence services at Porton Down, the government's chemical and biological Weapons Research Establishment. The whole area of chemical research was an active field in the 1950s. I was cooperating with MI6 in a joint program to investigate how far the hallucinatory drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) could be used in interrogations, and extensive trials took place at Porton. I even volunteered as guinea pig on one occasion. Both MI5 and MI6 also wanted to know a lot more about the advanced poisons then being developed at Porton, though for different reasons. I wanted the antidotes, in case the Russians used a poison on a defector in Britain, while MI6 wanted to use the poisons for operations abroad.
Henry and Dixon both discussed with me the use of poisons against Nasser, and asked my advice. Nerve gas obviously presented the best possibility, since it was easily administered. They told me that the London Station had an agent in Egypt with limited access to one of Nasser's headquarters. Their plan was to place canisters of nerve gas inside the ventilation system, but I pointed out that this would require large quantities of the gas, and would result in massive loss of life among Nasser's staff. It was the usual MI6 operation - hopelessly unrealistic - and it did not remotely surprise me when Henry told me later that Eden had backed away from the operation. The chances of its remaining undeniable were even slimmer than they had been with Buster Crabbe.
Harvey and Angleton questioned me closely about every part of the Suez Operation.
"We're developing a new capability in the Company to handle these kinds of problems," explained Harvey, "and we're in the market for the requisite expertise."
Whenever Harvey became serious, his voice dropped to a low monotone, and his vocabulary lapsed into the kind of strangled bureaucratic syntax beloved of Washington officials. He explained ponderously that they needed deniable personnel, and improved technical facilities - in Harvey jargon, "delivery mechanisms." They were especially interested in the SAS. Harvey knew that the SAS operated up on the Soviet border in the 1950s tracking Russian rocket signals with mobile receivers before the satellites took over, and that they were under orders not to be caught, even if this meant fighting their way out of trouble.