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The Defence of the Realm |
最新书评 共 2 条
子风
从corpus christi的校友刊上抄的，为给大家分享一下写作背景。事关版权，请看在我辛苦敲字的份上，享受阅读，勿要转载。
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For most of its history the Security Service (MI5) has seemed to outsiders a deeply mysterious organisation. Successive governments intended it to be so. The Service, like the rest of the intelligence community, was told to stay as far from public view as possible. The historian, Sir Michael Howard, declared in 1985: 'So far as official government policy is concerned, the British security and intelligence services do not exist. Enemy agents are found under gooseberry bushes and intelligence is brought by the storks.' Even at the end of the Cold War, MI5 staff could scarcely have imagined that the Service would mark its centenary in October this year by publishing my authorized history of its first hundred years, The Defence of the Realm (published by Allen Lane/Penguin in the UK and by Knopf in the USA).
In 2003 I began part-time work as MI5 official historian with an office in its Thames House headquarters on Millbank and the help in London and Cambridge of a talented group of research assistants (including one old Corpuscle, Dr Peter Martland). It has been an exciting time to be a member of MI5. During the last six years the United Kingdom has faced the most dangerous terrorists offensive in its history from Al Qaida and its fellow travellers, who, unlike most IRA bombers of the previous generation, have no compunction about killing as many people as possible. In July 2004 the MI5 Director General, Eliza (later Baroness) Manningham-Buller (who has twice visited Corpus to speak to my Intelligence Seminar and have dinner with students), warned government; 'There are worrying developments in the radicalization of some young British Muslims. Action collectively and internationally has prevented or deterred some [terrorist] attacks. But it can only be a matter of time before something on a serious scale occurs in the UK.'
A year later, on Thursday 7 July 2005, I arrived at King's Cross from Cambridge and headed, as usual, for the tube en route to Thames House, only to discover that the underground had just been closed. Though news of the first tube explosion reached MI5 at 9.20 am, it was not until after 10 am that the evidence pointed to a series of terrorist attacks. By lunchtime, with tube carriages still trapped in underground tunnels, it was feared that the casualties might rise as high as the 191 deaths caused by Islamist terrorist attacks on crowded commuter trains in Madrid in February 2004. In the event the 7/7 suicide-bombings of three underground trains and one London bus led to the loss of fifty-two lives.
The shock generated within the Security Service by the slaughter of innocents was reinforced by further, this time unsuccessful, islamist bomb attacks on London Transport a fortnight later. Once again the Service had no advance warning, though it helped to track down the perpetrators. The current Director General, Jonathan Evans (who, like Manningham-Buller, has also addressed the Intelligence Seminar and had dinner with Corpus students) remembers 21/7 as 'even more of an emotional blow than 7/7': 'We were already feeling under the cosh and wondered,"Have they got wave after wave to throw at us?"'
Since 2005 MI5 successfully prevented a series of further Islamist terrorist attacks: among them a conspiracy to bomb seven flights leaving Heathrow during a three-hour period for North American cities. Suicide bombers were to detonate explosive concealed in soft drinks bottles, using the flash units on disposable cameras. As well as causing massive loss of life on the scale of 9/11 (even greater if the planes had exploded over cities), the plot would have caused lasting disruption to transatlantic air travel.
Shortly before the publication of The Defence of the Realm, the ringleaders, Abdulla Ahmed Ali, was sentenced to life imprisonment with a forty-year minimum term.
The sheer size of the Security Service Archive, to which I've had almost unlimited access, is thrilling. Almost 400,000 paper files survive, many of them multi-volume. The files on the KGB's 'Magnificent Five' (Kim Philbym, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross) recruited at--or soon after graduating from--Cambridge in the mid-1930s run to about fifty volumes each. They show vividly both the Five's extraordinary skill as Soviet agents and the increasing stress they were under. During years of questioning by MI5 in the mid- and later-sixties about his work for the KGB, Blunt's drinking ran out of control (despite being given immunity from prosecution). His drink bill grew to 100 a month--more than I earned at the time as a young Research Fellow at Gonville & Caius College. Philby's drinking was as prodigious as Blunt's. Despite his surface charm, thirty years of working for Stalin and his successors brutalised his personality. His behavious to his second wife was so appalling that her doctor believed he was trying to persuade her to commit suicide. After he defected to Moscow, Philby lied to the KGB just as he had earlier lied to MI5 and MI6.
One of the speakers at the Intelligence Seminar in Corpus last year played a recording, smuggled out of Russian intelligence headquarters, of Philby's only speech to KGB, given in English on the sixtieth anniversary of the Bolshevik October Revolution. Philby advised KGB officers to instill into their foreign agents that, whatever happened, they must 'never, never confess'. But he did not reveal to his comrades (though some may have realized it) that, on the eve of defecting to Moscow in 1963, he confessed to British intelligence some of his past career as a Soviet agent. A copy of that confession survives in MI5 archives.
Corpus, to the best of my knowledge, has never produced a Russian agent. Since the days of Christopher Marlowe (whose portrait I pass each day in the Old Combination Room), however, it has provided some interesting recruits to British intelligence. Among them was Cyril Mills, son and heir of Britain's leading circus owner, Bertram Mills, who as an MI5 officer during the Second World War took part in the 'Double Cross System' which used turned German agents to feed the enemy an unprecedented amount of disinformation. In the latter half of 1940 and 1941, when it was thought quite likely that Hitler might invade England, Mills was put in charge of a top secret operation codenamed MR MILLS' CIRCUS to hide the double agents in Wales in hotels at Betws-y-Coed, Llanrwst and Llandudno, whose owners had been vetted. MI5's local representative used circus metaphors in correpondence with headquarters, writing from Colwyn Bay in April 1941: 'I have now completed arrangements for the accommodation of the animals, the young and their keepers, together with accommodation for Mr Mills himself.' Though there was no German invasion and the CIRCUS operation turned out to be unnecessary, Cyril Mills was part of the most successful deception in the history of warfare, which played a key role in preparations for the D-Day landings.
For the past decades, more often than not, more candidates for Part II of the Historical Tripos have taken the paper on 'The Rise of the Secret World: Governments and Intelligence Communities since c.1900' than any other option. The debt I owe to the Corpus history undergraduates I have the good fortune to teach for this paper is exemplified by Pete Gallagher's ground-breaking 2009 final-year dissertation which I cite three times in The Defence of the Realm. The Intelligence Seminar, which meets at 5.30 pm every Friday during term in the New Combination Room brings together a remarkable group of postgraduates from around the world expert at identifying the role of intelligence in a variety of fields which more senior scholars have often overlooked. I have learned much from them and their research.
If you have MA dining rights, you might like to sign in to dine on High Table afterwards wi
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