The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [123]
The Near and Middle East
SIS’s organisation in Turkey emerged from the intelligence branch of the British occupation forces which remained in the former Ottoman empire until after the Treaty of Lausanne of 23 August 1923. For well over a century the Near and Middle East had been important for Britain. Apart from wide-ranging economic and commercial interests, the sea route from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean through the Suez Canal was a vital imperial line of communications, to be protected against other Great Powers, especially France and Russia, the latter also constantly seeking to control the passage from the Black Sea through the Straits at Constantinople (Istanbul). In the aftermath of the First World War, two new factors, nationalism and Communism, which British policy-makers and officials often (mistakenly) assumed to be the same thing, emerged to challenge imperial interests across the region. Among the most threatening was the nationalist movement under Kemal Atatürk, who from early 1920 sought to depose the Sultan (who had been kept in power by the victorious Allies), establish an independent Turkish republic and drive the British-backed Greeks from Asia Minor.25 From 1919 until the autumn of 1922 intelligence was at a premium as there was a real possibility of British forces in the region having to resume active operations. During the Chanak Crisis of September-October 1922 Lloyd George threatened to go to war against the Turkish nationalists, but his Conservative coalition partners had little stomach for such a fight and turned him out of office. The ensuing general election brought in a fervently anti-Communist right-wing Tory government under Bonar Law. In May 1923 Law was succeeded as Prime Minister by Stanley Baldwin, whose dedication to financial orthodoxy meant that government spending continued to be kept under very strict control.
During the immediate postwar years Cumming regarded the Constantinople operation as ‘one of the most important, if not the most important, of all my agencies’ and a colleague at Head Office asserted that ‘a better service of information has never been organised regarding events in the Near East’. Much of this came from a very productive signals intelligence unit working under army cover within the occupation forces. When in early 1922 to save money it was proposed to maintain this but cut human intelligence work, the head of station responded sharply with a reflection on the limitations of ‘sigint’ (signals intelligence). Acknowledging the British ability to read Turkey’s (and other countries’) diplomatic communications, he noted that signals intelligence ‘gets most valuable information regarding existing foreign relations, but it cannot hope to touch but very lightly all the movements of subversion & intrigue which go on behind the scenes, for the latter are seldom if ever mentioned even in cypher cables’. There were practical difficulties, too. Ready access to the actual cable traffic would last only for as long as the occupation forces remained. Thereafter the intercept operation could only ‘be worked with the greatest difficulty & danger’, and, in case it were ‘caught out’, an ‘ordinary S.I.S organisation’ should be maintained to ‘fall back upon’ and prevent a ‘complete break’ in intelligence work, ‘a contingency which must be avoided’.26
The station, too, proved