What's The Context? Blogs by Gill Bennett 2013-2020. History Note No.23

What’s the Context?

Blogs by Gill Bennett 2013-2020

History Note: No. 23

What’s the Context?

Blogs by Gill Bennett

History Note: No. 23

Contents Page Foreword

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Preface

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1.

The Munich Agreement: 30 September 1938

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2

The death of President John F Kennedy: 22 November 1963

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3.

Britain’s first Labour government takes office: 22 January 1924

11

4.

The signature of the North Atlantic Treaty: 4 April 1949

15

5.

D-Day: 6 June 1944

18

6.

President Richard M. Nixon announces his resignation: 8 August 1974

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7.

The Yalta Conference opens: 4 February 1945

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8.

An atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima: 6 August 1945

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9.

The execution of Edith Cavell: 12 October 2015

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10.

Frank Roberts’ ‘Long Telegram’: 21 March 1946

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11.

12.

Eden orders an enquiry into the disappearance of Commander ‘Buster’ Crabb: 9 May 1956 Nasser announces the nationalisation of the Suez Canal: 26 July 1956

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13.

Spy George Blake escapes from Wormwood Scrubs: 22 October 1966

45

14.

Fidel Castro enters Havana in triumph: 8 January 1959

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15.

US President announces the ‘Truman Doctrine’: 12 March 1947

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16.

Devaluation of Sterling: 18 November 1967

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17.

Formation of the Cheka, the first Soviet security and intelligence agency: 20 December 1917

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18.

The resignation of Anthony Eden: 20 February 1938

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19.

George Brown resigns as Foreign Secretary: 15 March 1968

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20.

Soviet forces invade Czechoslovakia: 20 to 21 August 1968

66

21.

The British guarantee to Poland: 31 March 1939

69

22.

Signature of the North Atlantic Treaty: 4 April 1949

72

23.

Polish cryptologists reveal they have cracked the Enigma code: 26 July 1939

75

24.

Sentencing of atomic spy Klaus Fuchs: 1 March 1950

77

25.

VE Day, the end of the war in Europe: 8 May 1945

79

26.

Outbreak of the Korean War: 25 June 1950

82

27.

Opening of the Potsdam Conference: 17 July 1945

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28.

VJ Day: 15 August 1945

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29.

Signing the Anglo-American Financial Agreement: 6 December 1945

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Foreword Gill Bennett – a birthday tribute

There’s an old saying that a nation without a history is like a man or woman without a memory. It may be trite, but it’s absolutely correct too.

As a Minister and before that as an MP, I always had the belief that it was impossible properly to understand any contemporary issue without understanding its history.

But this was not a view shared, as it turned out, by the Home Office. Early on in my time there, I asked for some historical background on a particularly tricky issue I was faced with.

‘Very sorry, Home Secretary’, but the Archivists’ Department was closed down a few years ago. Cuts, you know’, came the reply.

You can therefore all imagine my immense relief when I moved to the FCO in June 2001, and discovered that there was a whole department called the Historians, led by a brilliant Chief Historian, Gill Bennett, whose 70th birthday we celebrate this evening.

Gill came to work as a Research Assistant historian 49 years ago, in 1971, and in one capacity or another she has been involved with the FCO – or the FCDO as it now is – ever since. To my astonishment, I read in one biographical note about Gill that she had allegedly ‘retired’ 15 years ago! I wonder if I am the only person who hadn’t noticed this.

She has carried on working not only for the FCO but other government departments, and in the course of this has developed a serious expertise in the history of our intelligence agencies and their work.

As Gill has spelt out in a wonderful narrative account of her work, part of an oral history project, the work of the FCO Historians broadly divides into two – giving advice to Ministers and officials, and organising sections of the record for publication as official histories.

The justification for the first role is pretty obvious – though its importance had obviously eluded the bean counters in the Treasury and Home office when they decided in the nineties to abolish the Home Office’s memory.

The second however could easily be a target for cuts from those who naively think that memory doesn’t matter. It does. There will be thousands of professional historians who are deeply grateful to the Historians for the way in which they have made available impenetrable records – and this politician, for the help which I had when I wrote my recent book on the UK and Iran was invaluable.

Gill started her career in 1972, just a year after the FCO had abolished its rule that any woman officer who married had to resign the service. It was still a man’s world. Gill tells a rather harrowing account of how she tried to juggle child care, and the office, and as a single parent, but managed this; and how gradually the Office saw just what talents she had, and got her involved not just in the Historians’ departments but many other aspects of the department’s work.

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But it’s history which has been her first love, and for which the Office owes her the greatest debt.

She has published a number of books, including ‘Six Moments of Crisis’ which should be at the top of any brief for incoming Ministers; Churchill’s Man of Mystery; and the Zinoviev Letters – which conclusively showed that these letters which caused such a stir in the 1924 election were indeed a forgery – but were not quite so determinative of Labour’s defeat at that election that generations of party members have been taught, with their mother’s milk.

It’s an amazing record of achievement, Gill; and along with that achievement you’ve always been a wonderful human being too.

Happy Birthday!

Rt Hon. Jack Straw 29 January 2021

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Preface Gill Bennett has worked for the Foreign Office for almost fifty years. She joined as a research assistant in 1972, working on the series Documents on British Foreign Policy, 19191939, and ended her career as Chief Historian (1995-2005). During that time, she launched the new Series III of Documents on British Policy Overseas (DBPO) with a volume on Britain and the Soviet Union, 1968-1972, and undertook investigations into the history of Nazi Gold and the Zinoviev Letter of 1924 at the request of the Foreign Secretary.

Gill has remained active in retirement, still working part-time for the Office and having published three books (so far): Churchill’s Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence (2007), Six Moments of Crisis: Inside British Foreign Policy (2013) and The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy That Never Dies (2018).

Over the years, Gill has always held with the maxim of her mentor, Professor W.H. Medlicott, that when taking decisions Ministers always have to think about more than one thing at a time. Foreign policy is never made in a vacuum but alongside a host of other international and domestic political considerations. It was this axiom that led Gill to come up with the idea for a blog series – What’s the Context? – placing key events in their wider historical context to see the pressures policy-makers and decision-takers were under at the time. The series launched in 2013 on the Gov.UK website. To date Gill has produced almost 30 blogs, many of them tackling subjects she worked on, and drawing on research from throughout her career.

To celebrate Gill’s 70th birthday on 29 January 2021, we are publishing all her What’s the Context? blogs (in the order they were published). They are a tribute to Gill’s contribution to promoting a greater understanding of decision-making in British government and a token of affection from her colleagues in the Historians team.

FCDO Historians January 2021 Patrick Salmon

Richard Smith

Nevil Hagon

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Paul Bali

Sue Fleming

The Munich Agreement: 30 September 1938 Posted on: 30 September 2013

75 years ago today, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew back from Munich after two days of tense discussions with the German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler.

Neville Chamberlain arrives at Munich, 29 September 1938 (Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H12967 / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

He had reached an agreement setting out a timetable and terms for the Nazi takeover of the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland. And he had persuaded Hitler to sign a piece of paper stating that the two men were resolved to ‘continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe’.

In a groundbreaking episode of ‘shuttle diplomacy’, on his third visit to Germany in as many weeks Chamberlain felt he had achieved his objectives: instead of an immediate Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland (as threatened until a few days earlier), there was to be a phased occupation of the German-speaking areas; and there was to be no general European war yet.

The reality of the Munich Agreement Within a year, Czechoslovakia had been entirely overrun by Germany, and Britain was at war with Germany. ‘Munich’ became, and remains, a byword for shameful failure to stand up to dictators. Yet Chamberlain had been cheered by Germans in the streets of Munich; cheered when he returned to London on 30 September, declaiming from the Buckingham Palace balcony that ‘I believe it is peace for our time’ (a statement he immediately regretted).

At 7.30 p.m. the Chancellor of the Exchequer opened the Cabinet meeting by expressing on his colleagues’ behalf ‘their profound admiration for the unparalleled efforts’ Chamberlain had made and for what he had achieved. Ministers were, Sir John Simon said, ‘proud to be associated with the Prime Minister as his colleagues at this time’. Even Duff Cooper, whose uneasiness with Munich led him to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty, recognised that Chamberlain had done better than expected.

Munich was not an isolated crisis, but the latest episode in a five-year standoff in which Hitler made and broke successive promises and agreements in his bid to dominate central and eastern Europe, while the British government pursued a policy of neither saying it would, or would not fight, while buying time for rearmament.

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The international context Many books have been written on all this, and indeed on Munich itself. But on the 75th anniversary, it is worth taking a look at how the crisis looked elsewhere in the world in 1938: for the international context was crucial. And when we look at how the Munich crisis was viewed around the world—in Washington, Paris, Rome, in Tokyo and Moscow, as well as in London and Berlin—things not only look rather more complex, but also surprisingly contemporary.

United States A Democratic President faced fierce Republican opposition in both domestic and foreign policy. Roosevelt’s New Deal programme of social and economic measures to bring the US out of recession led to accusations that he was both a communist and a fascist (for giving government too much power). When he authorised a rearmament programme, it was branded a diversion from domestic failure. The only thing most agreed on was keeping America out of European wars.

Soviet Union Stalin convinced he faced a global imperialist and Trotskyist conspiracy, believed the British and French wanted to give Hitler what he wanted in central and eastern Europe and lure him into attacking Russia. Munich seemed proof of this. Stalin had had so many of his secret agents executed that his foreign intelligence was much reduced. Nor did the reports from the Cambridge Five disabuse Stalin of his delusions: they could not imagine that a year later he would sign a pact with Hitler. Stalin’s paranoid fantasies were quite alien to Chamberlain and his colleagues, who worried, needlessly at this point, about Soviet expansionist intentions.

Italy Fascist leader Mussolini enjoyed the opportunity for grandstanding that ‘mediation’ in the Munich crisis afforded. He and his Foreign Secretary, Ciano, found it hard to understand why the British should feel they would have to join in if the French fought Germany on behalf of their ally, Czechoslovakia. Surely, said Ciano, Britain would not want to fight on the same side as the Bolsheviks? Chamberlain had pushed through an Anglo-Italian agreement in April 1938, losing his Foreign Secretary Eden in the process, but in the final analysis Mussolini was bound to support Hitler.

Japan Japan was also allied to Germany and Italy, and had been engaged on a brutal and destructive war against China since 1937. Britain looked the biggest potential obstacle to Japanese domination of East Asia. By 1938 the Chinese situation seemed desperate.

Chiang Kai-shek’s pleas for help were received sympathetically in London but rejected in fear of Japanese reprisals, especially against Hong Kong.

Like Roosevelt, Chamberlain worried about the possibility of fighting a war on two fronts, and having to divert precious naval resources to the Far East. The British government knew that the Chinese were ‘fighting the battle of Western Nations in the Far East’ but felt they could not help. To Japan, Munich showed the British as reluctant to fight.

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France France was joined in alliance with the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, but very reluctant to risk war with Germany, and certainly not without British support. Some hoped that in the event of war the Soviet Union would fight on France’s side, but others were less sanguine and feared that neither Poland nor Roumania would willingly let Soviet troops pass through their territories. On 29 September the French Foreign Minister begged the British Ambassador in Paris to urge on Chamberlain ‘how absolutely vital he felt it was that an arrangement should be reached over the Sudeten question at Munich at almost any price’.

Germany Germany, as in Japan, Britain was seen as the biggest obstacle to Hitler’s plans. He did not want to fight Britain at all if possible, and in any case not yet. But, as British intelligence reports made clear, he had made up his mind what he wanted and was determined to get it. Chamberlain’s journeys to Germany threatened not only to disrupt his plans but also to steal his thunder. Nevertheless, Hitler was well aware that the Munich agreement provided the best chance of achieving his aims without an early war.

Chamberlain’s ‘piece of paper’ meant little to Hitler, but it did delay the inevitable.

There is no room to include every country that took a keen interest in the outcome of the Munich crisis. But this selection shows that the picture was not uncomplicated. Twenty years after the end of the First World War, politicians of all nationalities were very reluctant to contemplate the destruction and loss of life that another general war would entail, and were willing to go to considerable lengths to avoid it. At Munich, this was Chamberlain’s aim. It had been made clear to him that the Dominions did not consider Czechoslovakia worth a European war; the League of Nations expressed disapproval of German actions but offered no hope of practical assistance.

The bottom line was: did the British people want to go to war for the Sudetenland? His answer was ‘no’: and while there were certainly differences between Chamberlain and his colleagues, and indeed with the Foreign Office who had no real hope that Hitler would settle for a peaceful future, very few were prepared to answer ‘yes’ in 1938.

Munich was the logical conclusion. And while in hindsight the inaction of the international community in the face of dictators’ aggression and brutality may seem culpable, more recent history continues to demonstrate that such situations and decisions are never straightforward.

Suggested reading There is an extensive literature on the Munich crisis: this is a small selection of those that bring a wider context to the issue.

'The Munich Agreement' a blog post by the National Archives.

Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939 (DBFP), Third Series, Volumes I and II (HMSO, 1949). The decision to publish the official documents on the Munich crisis in advance of volumes on 1919-18 was taken in 1948 by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin,

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in response to an outpouring of material on interwar relations and wide public interest in the immediate lead-up to war.

The Munich crisis is in Volume II; where there is also an Appendix recording conversations between Sir Horace Wilson and members of the German opposition to Hitler.

DBFP, Second Series, Vols. XIX and XXI (HMSO, 1974 and 1984).

David Reynolds, Summits: Six meetings that shaped the twentieth century (Allen Lane, 2007).

Zara Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933-39 (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Donald Watt, How War Came (Pantheon Books, 1989).

Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (Penguin, 2009).

Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (Penguin, 1999).

Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909-49 (Bloomsbury, 2010).

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The death of President John F Kennedy: 22 November 1963 Posted on: 22 November 2013 Fifty years ago today, the 35th President of the United States of America was shot dead as his car drove through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.

President John F. Kennedy (US National Archives)

The brutal shock of the assassination made it one of the defining moments of the 20th century: those of us who were alive at the time remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news. Personally, I was in a cinema in London watching the newly-released West Side Story, when a news flash was projected onto the screen.

A loud gasp went up from the audience.

Fifty years on, a tidal wave of books, media events and films shows that Kennedy’s assassination is still a subject of intense interest, as well as the source of many conspiracy theories. Why have the events of that day had such a powerful impact, not just in the United States but also in the United Kingdom, on the European continent and elsewhere?

Of course, the killing of an American President is in itself an extraordinary and memorable event. In JFK’s case, it was made more poignant by his relative youth—he was 43—and the presence of his wife Jackie, sitting next to him in the car when he was shot. The fact that he was killed by a deluded and unstable ‘loser’ somehow made it all seem worse, particularly for his fellow Americans; this is one reason why conspiracy theories have persisted.

But there is more to it than this. JFK’s death seemed symbolic: a man in whom so much hope had been invested was cut off in his prime, during his first term as President, before he had a chance to show what he could achieve. Despite subsequent criticism of Kennedy, both professionally and personally, this remains the perception: but how well is it rooted in fact?

A look at the global context of Kennedy’s Presidency, and of his death, helps to explain why his assassination represented a turning point in history.

A President for peace Every political leader in the early 1960s had lived through, and often served in World War II. Kennedy, a decorated veteran, was no exception. But that did not stop him from being seen, and portraying himself, as the first of a new, non-military generation of American leaders: his predecessor was, after all, the wartime Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

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Like any newly-elected leader, Kennedy spoke of, and envisaged, a brighter, more prosperous and more peaceful future for his country and indeed for the world, starting with his famous Inauguration Address.

A gifted speaker with a formidable speechwriting team, Kennedy continued to articulate his vision and inspire audiences right up to his death. A constant theme of his speeches was peace. Not, as he said at The American University on 10 June 1963: a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.

Not: the peace of the grave or the security of the slave, But: genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life worth living. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

(Read the American University Speech in full).

Fifteen years after the Second World War, and less than ten after the Korean conflict, this was a potent and attractive message, as was the idea of cutting spending on armaments to combat ignorance, poverty and disease. But on the day of his 1963 speech, Congress passed its largest ever defence budget: and Kennedy’s presidency had already seen the world come closer to nuclear annihilation than ever before.

A hot period in a cold war Kennedy’s short presidency encompassed one of the most dangerous and frightening periods of the Cold War, including the erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962.

In addition, civil war in Laos and increasing tension between South and North Vietnam foreshadowed America’s long and painful involvement in south-east Asia, while Communist China, increasingly self-confident and aggressive, split with its Soviet mentor and contemplated developing nuclear weapons.

Cuba, after the humiliating failure of the Bay of Pigs expedition in April 1961, intended to stir up revolt against Fidel Castro, remained a festering sore to many Americans. It was a hot period in a cold war, and Kennedy was in the thick of it. Beset by competing advice from Congress, from the US military, from allies and those who hoped for American aid, Kennedy faced a basic dilemma: how could the US stand firm in the fight against global communism, while avoiding a nuclear cataclysm?

‘Nothing really happened’ In October 1964, nearly a year after Kennedy’s death, his friend, ally and mentor Harold Macmillan, British Prime Minister from 1957-63, wrote in his diary that: poor Jack achieved nothing positive . . . In spite of all the talk, on defence on monetary policy, on tariffs─nothing really happened.

Yet Macmillan admired and mourned Kennedy, whom he regarded as a great statesmen. It is true that Kennedy did not prevent the Vietnam War; did not resolve US policy towards Castro’s Cuba; did not tear down the Berlin Wall, let alone end the Cold

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War; did not achieve a significant diversion of resources from armaments to the eradication of poverty... But expectations of Kennedy’s presidency were so high that disappointment was inevitable, and many of the subsequent criticisms of his actions (or inaction) owe much to hindsight.

It is part of what Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman calls the ‘drive to replace history as celebration by history as indictment’.

There is another way of looking at this. ‘Nothing really happened’ might be seen as a considerable achievement in the context of 1961-63.

There was no nuclear war in 1962 over the placing of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Despite the tensions with the Soviet Union over Berlin, a modus vivendi was reached on a divided Germany, and a Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963.

The Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek did not, as he threatened, invade the mainland in 1962; border clashes between India and the People’s Republic of China did not result in war.

Kennedy exploited a potentially dangerous Sino-Soviet split to promote useful détente with the USSR. His willingness to negotiate defused the Skybolt crisis of December 1962, when cancellation of a US nuclear missile project threw Britain’s independent deterrent capability into doubt.

Of course, Kennedy did not do all these things single-handedly, and many of his plans went awry. But it is possible to argue that he left the world in a better position in 1963 than in 1961. The policies and decisions of the leader of the world’s greatest superpower affected everyone: whatever his failings or his faults, John F Kennedy was a symbol of hope for the future; a promise to try to do better.

His most enduring legacy is perhaps his belief that this was possible: Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again.

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Britain’s first Labour government takes office: 22 January 1924 Posted on: 22 January 2014 Ninety years ago today, the British political mould was shattered by the election of the first Labour government.

Ramsay MacDonald (National Portrait Gallery)

After an inconclusive election on 6 December 1923 that the ruling Conservatives lost but nobody won, Ramsay MacDonald took office as both Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary of a minority government on 22 January 1924.

Ramsay MacDonald, Labour Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary The Annual Register called it ‘A revolution in British politics as profound as that associated with the Reform Act of 1832’. Churchill called it ‘a national misfortune such as has usually befallen a great state only on the morrow of defeat in war’.

The right-wing press professed disbelief that a group of socialist ‘wild men’, whose party had been in existence for less than twenty years, could take charge of Britain and her Empire.

The Daily Mail begged Liberal leader Asquith to save society by forming a coalition to keep Labour out. But on 21 January 1924 Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin announced his resignation in the House, and ‘Thank God for that!’ rose from the Labour benches.

The following day Britain had a Labour government for the first time.

MacDonald and his Cabinet (assembled from a limited talent pool) were sworn in as ministers, the wild men limiting their wildness to a respectful refusal to wear knee breeches.

There is no doubt that the election results, and the responsibility of taking office, came as a surprise to the Labour party, though MacDonald at least was quite sure it was a responsibility that could not be shirked.

22 January was a milestone in British political history. But what is the context of this ‘revolution’?

Political stalemate In January 1924 both the traditional parties saw a Labour government not as a national catastrophe but as a political expedient.

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Baldwin, whose decision to call a snap election over tariff reform in 1923 had misfired, thought defeat would unite the Conservatives and strengthen his own position.

Asquith had similar aspirations for the Liberals, who had been losing electoral ground to Labour since the end of the First World War. Both parties were internally divided and (like Labour) short of good people. Both saw advantage in ‘allowing’ Labour to take office for a short period—MacDonald and his colleagues would, they thought, soon show themselves incapable of governing.

The experiment, Asquith declared with supreme miscalculation, could ‘hardly be tried under safer conditions’, for ‘it is we who really controls(?) the situation’. This was the political context in which Labour took power on 22 January 1924.

Foreign policy stalemate But Party politics were not the only reason Conservative and Liberal grandees thought a Labour government might be a good thing (for a while).

Five years after the end of a devastating world war, peace and prosperity were little in evidence. Britain and Europe were plagued by recession, inflation and insecurity.

The young League of Nations was already proving ineffectual, not least because the US refused to sign up. Disarmament remained a worthy aspiration undermined by a nationalism inflamed by contentious peace settlements.

In Britain, politicians knew that high unemployment, industrial unrest and deflation could only be tackled successfully if external factors such as debt settlement and trade expansion could be settled. But international agreement on intractable issues like reparations, French security and military control of Germany was elusive.

Lack of such agreement made the protection of British interests in the Middle, Near and Far East more difficult. Relations with Britain’s closest ally, the USA, were fractious, while a Bolshevik government that had defied expectations (and hopes) by remaining firmly in power in Russia since 1917, pursued an aggressive campaign of espionage and subversion against the British Empire while insisting on being treated as a ‘respectable’ power.

Lord Curzon, Foreign Secretary since 1919, had pursued British interests on the international stage with some skill, but difficult issues remained unresolved.

The US was driving a hard bargain on British war debts, while France and Belgium refused to honour their debts to Britain until German reparations payments, suspended when those powers occupied the Ruhr basin in January 1923, were resumed.

Allied military control in defeated Germany was problematic and ineffective, and there were worrying signs of Russo-German military links.

Yet despite professing repugnance for the Bolshevik regime, many countries, including Italy under its Fascist leader Mussolini, contemplated de jure recognition of the Soviet Union to secure favourable trade terms, whereas Curzon had spent 1923 in counterproductive attempts to shame the Soviet government into better behaviour.

By the end of 1923, Conservative foreign policy was at a stalemate and the Liberals had no better ideas. They were happy for someone else to take the strain.

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Labour’s foreign policy Labour’s foreign policy was no surprise to the older parties: as foreseen by Baldwin and Asquith, it was in many respects indistinguishable from theirs. Addressing the House when Parliament reconvened on 12 February 1924, MacDonald announced that the watchword of the government would be confidence (securities had risen in value since Labour took office).

For some time to come, he said, ‘the bargaining power of the British Foreign Secretary would depend not on military force, but on the reasonableness of the policy which he presented’. Policy should be based on universal principles—democracy, human rights, open diplomacy—underpinned by national interest and parliamentary consensus.

To a war-weary country, this seemed attractive; to the political classes, unexceptional.

MacDonald was unlikely to do anything rash and might have some success. And if things went wrong, Labour could be blamed.

It is generally agreed that MacDonald’s management of foreign affairs during the nine months Labour was in office was both inspired and effective: a notable achievement was the conclusion in August 1924 of agreements to implement the Dawes Plan on German reparations.

Apart from the importance of such issues to British interests, MacDonald knew Labour’s reputation was at stake.

As his biographer David Marquand put it: The sight of a Labour foreign secretary grappling successfully with problems which had baffled a Curzon or a Balfour would do more to disprove the charge that a working-class party was unfit to govern than would any conceivable action which minority Government could take at home.

MacDonald did more than enough to prove Labour’s competence in foreign affairs in 1924.

Recognition of the Soviet Union But it was relations with the Soviet Union that were to prove Labour’s downfall. De jure recognition was one of the first acts of the government, as had been promised.

MacDonald was well aware of Soviet shortcomings, and rejected the spread of Bolshevik ideas in the Labour movement—‘like trying to dance a Russian ballet in kilts’, he said, well aware of the need politically to distance his government from the excesses of communism.

Yet in the wider labour movement there was considerable fraternal sympathy for the revolution, and for this first Labour government, as for many of its successors, relations with the Soviet Union were ambivalent and fraught with difficulty.

For MacDonald, the real driver in 1924 was Britain’s need to engage with a significant international player, the Soviet Union, where the Bolshevik regime was firmly in the saddle. Although Lenin died on 21 January, the day before Labour took office, he was succeeded by the triumvirate of Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin, the latter already well on the way to outmanoeuvring his colleagues and taking a grip on power that was to last till his death in 1953.

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Labour took by the tail the Soviet tiger that neither Conservatives nor Liberals were willing to grasp, relieving them of responsibility for a step that was politically expedient but philosophically repugnant.

Draft Anglo-Soviet treaties were signed in August 1924, but a combination of hostile propaganda in both countries and the City’s refusal to contemplate a loan doomed them to failure.

MacDonald’s attempt to normalise relations also provided the opportunity for both Conservatives and Liberals to attack the Labour government and damage its reputation by a campaign of press vilification and political dirty tricks (including making use of the forged Zinoviev Letter in October 1924 during the election campaign).

These attacks left a lasting imprint on Labour, although the real reason for the government’s defeat in October 1924 was that the Conservatives had resolved their internal differences and the Liberals removed their temporary support for Labour.

Yet the first Labour government had lasted far longer, and achieved more, than anyone, including Labour itself, anticipated in January 1924. The political landscape in Britain had changed permanently.

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The signature of the North Atlantic Treaty: 4 April 1949 Posted on: 4 April 2014 How the West was won 65 years ago today the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in the State Department auditorium in Washington. An organisation was born—NATO— that remains a cornerstone of Western defence up to the present day. In 1949 there were twelve members: now there are 28.

Ernest Bevin signs the NATO Treaty for the United Kingdom (NATO)

The rationale, scope and cost of NATO provoked some controversy in 1949, and indeed continue to do so. Although the Cold War that provided the original context came to an end nearly 15 years ago, NATO remains very much alive. Only last week, the Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, referred to the Alliance as the ‘bedrock of security’ America and Europe, and stated that ‘our commitment to the defence of our Allies is unbreakable’.

The signing of the North Atlantic Treaty On 4 April 1949, at the signing ceremony, the United States Marine Band Orchestra played a medley from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Though ‘I got plenty of nothing’ and ‘It ain’t necessarily so’ might not seem quite the appropriate choice, there is no doubt that in 1949 the Treaty was seen as heralding a new era of security.

In his speech at the signing ceremony President Truman said he believed that if NATO had been in existence in 1914 or 1939 it would have prevented the acts of aggression that precipitated two world wars. Analysts might challenge this: but there is no getting away from the fact that there has been no global armed conflict since then.

Under the Treaty an armed attack against one or more of its signatories in Europe or North America counted as an attack against them all; they were, the Preamble stated, determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.

Whatever the rhetoric, NATO was aimed squarely at the Soviet Union, a product of the escalating East-West tension since the end of the Second World War. British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin—prime mover of the creation of NATO, as a forthcoming volume of Documents on British Policy Overseas shows—insisted that the Treaty was a protection against any future aggressor: if the Russians thought it was aimed at them, well, it was a clear case of ‘if the cap fits . . .’

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‘We now know’, to use John Lewis Gaddis’s phrase, how the Cold War ended: with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany. NATO did its job in protecting the West and deterring the East, and the West was won. But hindsight can be misleading: was it really that straightforward in 1949? A closer look at the context, both European and global, reveals a complex picture.

The Empire strikes back Since the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union appeared to the West to have evolved from wartime ally to a major threat to democracy and freedom: desiring global domination through the spread of communism, pursuing an ideological imperialism inimical to Western values. The Prague coup of February 1948, show trials in Hungary and bullying in Scandinavia, not to mention the blockading of the Western zones of Berlin in June 1948 that led to the Airlift; all these seemed to prove the West’s case.

These factors also led President Truman to approve contingency plans for the use of the atomic bomb.

But Soviet leader Josef Stalin had a case to put forward, too. He denounced what he claimed was an equally insidious western imperialism, both political and economic, manifested through such initiatives as the Truman Doctrine and the European Recovery Programme (Marshall Plan), in the stationing of British and US troops across the globe and in suppression of nationalist movements in colonial territories. The East, Stalin claimed, needed solidarity and mutual assistance just as much as the West: the North Atlantic Treaty, he claimed, proved his point. The successful testing of a Soviet atomic bomb in August 1949 underlined it.

The War of the Worlds By the beginning of 1949, both West and East had serious problems in Europe. For the West, apart from the perceived Soviet threat, there were economic difficulties yet to be alleviated by the European Recovery Programme, exacerbated by the Berlin crisis and the challenges posed by decisions on the future of a divided Germany; a Fascist regime in Spain, civil strife in Greece and political turbulence in Italy added to the mix. The United States had emerged from the war an economic and military superpower, but anxiety about the spread of communism and the threat to peace posed by European weakness made it clear that only America could guarantee Western security.

1949 started badly for the East, too. The success of the Allied Airlift in supplying the blockaded Western zones of Berlin meant the crisis was about to end in failure as an exercise in Soviet power. While Stalin tried to cement his grip on Eastern Europe, a defiant Yugoslavia, after splitting from Moscow in 1948, undermined Soviet control and weakened Eastern solidarity. Communist parties in Western European countries, far from taking political control, were often ineffective and divided. And the East, like the West, needed time and stability for economic recovery.

The Cold War was centred on Europe, but uncertainty, unrest and ideological struggle had a global dimension. At the beginning of 1949, Mao Zedong was on the brink of overcoming Nationalist resistance and the People’s Republic of China was about to be born, much to the dismay of the United States. In the Middle East, the newly formed state of Israel, having inflicted a series of defeats on Arab countries in 1948, was consolidating its territorial and political power, and 1949 saw the beginning of a longrunning Arab-Israeli war of attrition and an equally enduring Palestine refugee problem.

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Throughout the Middle, Near and Far East political unrest, fuelled by economic desperation as well as ideology and nationalism, threatened to destabilise a fragile global peace. The situation presented both opportunities and threats to East and West alike. The West sought security through NATO: the East sought it too; neither approved the other’s methods, but each felt they were the only way to secure the peace that would enable them to capitalise on the opportunities.

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D-Day: 6 June 1944 Posted on: 6 June 2014 In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies Troops approach ‘Omaha’ beach on D-Day (US National Archives)

Churchill to Stalin at the Teheran Conference, November 1943

Seventy years ago today, 130,000 American, British and Canadian troops began the largest seaborne assault ever attempted: Operation NEPTUNE, the assault phase of OVERLORD, overall codename for the Allied invasion of occupied north-western Europe.

After months of detailed planning, involving much discussion, a certain amount of friction between Allied military and civilian authorities, and considerable anxiety about everything from German intentions to security arrangements and the weather, the day had finally come.

There had been a false start on 4 June, when bad weather forced ships already embarked to turn back; that night the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was told that if the invasion did not start next day, the weather would cause another 2 weeks’ delay. At dawn on 5 June he gave the order to go ahead, officers on ships opened their sealed orders at 7am, and they set sail.

Though the idea had long been discussed, and Marshal Josef Stalin had been pressing for a ‘Second Front’ in Europe ever since the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, competing military strategies and tough campaigns in Southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle and Far East delayed a final decision until the Teheran Conference in November 1943. this was the first time when the ‘Big Three’—Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt—had met in person.

Plans were to be made for an Allied landing in Normandy by the end of May 1944 (OVERLORD), plus an attack in the South of France (ANVIL). Crucial to the success of OVERLORD, which after much hard fighting led to the final defeat of German forces on the European mainland, were a number of intelligence-based operations mounted by Britain and her Allies. Some of these are well known: others have been given less attention. But it is these operations that provide the context to D-Day. Deception operations Hitler and his military advisers were expecting an Allied offensive in Europe in 1944.

Directive No. 51 of 3 November 1943 stated that ‘Everything indicates that the enemy will launch an offensive against the Western Front of Europe, at the latest in the spring, perhaps even earlier’, and that Hitler had decided to reinforce Western defences, ‘particularly those places from which the long-range bombardment of England will begin’.

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Once the Allied decision to launch OVERLORD had been taken at Teheran, instructions were given for a major deception exercise, Operation BODYGUARD, to persuade the enemy to dispose his forces in areas that would least interfere with OVERLORD and ANVIL, and to deceive him as to the strength, timing and objectives of those operations.

An elaborate set of deception plans was implemented, including those designed to indicate a possible Allied attack on Norway (FORTITUDE North) and in the Pas de Calais region (FORTITUDE South), to inflate in the enemy’s mind the strength of Allied forces available for the invasion. The credibility of these plans was enhanced for the German High Command by intelligence received from double agents like Juan Pujol (GARBO) and Roman Czerniawksi (BRUTUS), who supplied, on MI5’s instructions, reports from imaginary networks of agents.

As D-Day approached, elaborate physical deception plans were set in place, involving dummy aircraft and landing craft, simulated wireless traffic and an entire bogus US Army Group. The cumulative effect was of misdirection and confusion, as intended. Also crucial to Allied success was the parallel deception plan mounted by the Soviet High Command: Operation BAGRATION, named after a Georgian general in the Napoleonic Wars.

By the spring of 1944 most of the Ukraine and Crimea had been liberated from Axis control, and the Soviet High Command were planning a major attack against the German Army Group Centre, the only significant German force still on Soviet territory, stationed at Minsk in Belorussia. The Germans expected an attack from the south.

BAGRATION, which involved the creation of two entire dummy armies, diversionary earthworks and the stationing of anti-aircraft artillery in the area where the Germans expected to find it, persuaded them that attack would come from the south, and not until the end of the summer.

Nor were they aware that Stalin, who had his eye on a conclusive victory and a swift advance across Eastern Europe, had massively increased the Soviet forces available for the real attack, which began in the north shortly after D-Day. BAGRATION, together with BODYGUARD and other deception plans, ensured that in May 1944, just before the Allied invasion, the Germans had no idea how many forces they would be facing on either the eastern or western front, where they would attack, or when.

Resistance and special operations Important contributions to the success of OVERLORD were also made through other clandestine channels, including by Resistance groups and underground intelligence networks in occupied Europe.

Particularly critical to the invasion, as Eisenhower acknowledged, was the disruption of the German V-Weapon programme. This was made possible by the Poles, who provided intelligence on the research facility in Peenemunde, that led to its being bombed in August 1943, delaying though not destroying the rocket programme.

Eisenhower later acknowledged that OVERLORD could have been a ‘washout’ if the VWeapons had been perfected six months earlier. The Peenemunde raid had a useful side-effect, too. In forcing the Germans to move the testing ground to Blizna in Poland when a complete V2 fell into muddy bushes in May 1944, it was hidden by the Polish

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Home Army, photographed, dismantled and key parts taken to London by a secret Dakota mission.

Before D-Day special teams were dropped into France to gather intelligence and prepare for the invasion. JEDBURGH teams, each consisting of an American, Englishman and Frenchman, trained in guerrilla tactics and demolition, were dropped in to help and coordinate local French Resistance units. French Special Air Service teams (COONEY) were dropped in to cut rail links with Normandy after the invasion; and 50 two-man Allied intelligence teams (SUSSEX) were dropped into France to transmit intelligence about German movements. All these were part of the massive Allied intelligence operation that backed up D-Day. Military operations While all these intelligence-based operations were crucial to D-Day, fighting continued elsewhere in Europe and in the Far East.

The hard-fought Allied campaign in Italy, which led to the fall of Rome two days before D-Day, was important in itself but also tied up German forces that might otherwise have been sent to North-West Europe. In Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito and his People’s Liberation Movement played a significant part in tying up German forces, who mounted a surprise attack on Partisan HQ in May 1944, when Tito was forced to escape to the island of Vis. The war in the Far East was also at a crucial stage in June 1944, particularly in Burma, New Guinea and the Philippines, though the tide was now turning against the Japanese.

In all these campaigns, intelligence played a key part through the supply of intelligence based on the interception and decryption of enemy traffic: ULTRA, the product of code breaking operations at Bletchley Park and elsewhere. Global conflict is complex, and no single element is decisive. But a large part of the answer to the question ‘What’s the context?’ of D-Day must be the use of secret intelligence and clandestine methods.

Further reading suggestions D-Day and the Battle for Normandy by Antony Beevor (Penguin, 2012).

Russia’s War by Richard Overy (Penguin, 2010).

The Double Cross System by J.C. Masterman (Lyons Press, 2000).

Strategic Deception, Vol. 5 of British Intelligence in the Second World War by Michael Howard (Stationery Office Books, July 1990).

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President Richard M. Nixon announces his resignation: 8 August 1974 Posted on: 8 August 2014 Nixon says goodbye to White House Staff (Ollie Atkins, Wikimedia Commons)

The most powerful government ever to fall as a result of American covert action was the administration of Richard Nixon Christopher Andrew, For The President’s Eyes Only

Forty years ago, on the evening of Thursday, 8 August 1974, the 37th President of the United States addressed the nation in a television broadcast and announced that he was resigning with effect from noon the following day. On 9 August, Vice President Gerald Ford—who had himself only taken office in October 1973 when the previous incumbent had resigned when charged with bribery, conspiracy and tax fraud—succeeded to the most powerful job in the world.

Political Ruin So ended the process of political ruin that began with the discovery in June 1972 of a burglary at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate building in Washington, carried out by ham-fisted covert operatives whose activities were traced back to the Republican White House and eventually to the President himself, despite elaborate efforts at concealment and misdirection. Investigations revealed a complex web of dirty tricks and covert operations authorised by Nixon and his close advisers, implicating all organs of the US government and intelligence establishment, and dating back long before Watergate. Now, as Jonathan Schell wrote in an illuminating series of New Yorker articles in 1975: ‘The body of secret information which had begun to build up in the White House as far back as the Kennedy years had grown to a size that was unmanageable within the framework of a Constitutional democracy.’

Incriminating tape recordings The Supreme Court ruled at the end of July 1974 that executive privilege was not unlimited, and that Nixon must surrender incriminating tape recordings—recordings he himself had ordered, obsessed with memorialising every detail of his presidency; he employed an army of ‘anecdotists’ as well as taking his own notes. The contents of the tapes finally destroyed Nixon’s credibility and led most of his Congressional supporters to vote in favour of impeachment. Even Henry Kissinger, his Secretary of State, National Security Adviser and close friend, had told him on 6 August that he should go: an impeachment trial would paralyse foreign policy and demean the Presidency.

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Faced with all this, Nixon decided to resign. By this time, successive revelations meant the decision was not unexpected and caused surprisingly few ripples across the world: most British political diaries and memoirs fail to mention it at all, while in the Soviet Union, where Nixon had visited only 6 weeks before, President Brezhnev fretted only that Nixon’s disgrace might weaken his own reputation. But the resignation of a US President, leader of one of the world’s two Cold War superpowers, was a unique event nevertheless.

Achievements ‘I have never been a quitter’, Nixon said in his broadcast, but ‘as President I must put the interest of America first’. Though apologetic up to a point, expressing regret for ‘any injuries that may have been done in the course of the events that led to this decision’, he was not reticent about his achievements.

Since becoming President in 1969 he had, he claimed, ended ‘America’s longest war’ in Vietnam by the agreement signed with North Vietnam in January 1973; ‘unlocked the doors’ between the USA and Communist China by his groundbreaking visit in February 1972; achieved a limited degree of peace in the Middle East, still in turmoil after the Yom Kippur war of October 1973 (including, crucially, Saudi agreement to resume oil sales to the US); and signed an important arms limitation agreement (SALT 1) with the Soviet Union in 1972.

Though some of these achievements were incomplete or hedged with qualifications, they were nevertheless considerable. As Christopher Andrew puts it, ‘The NixonKissinger combination was arguably the most talented ever to run American foreign and security policy.’ And though the idea has become a commonplace that preoccupation with Watergate took Nixon’s eye off the ball in both domestic and foreign policy during the 18 months before his resignation, the evidence does not entirely support this.

It is easy to say what Nixon ‘would have done’ in a particular situation if not distracted: but impossible to prove. Who is to say inaction or delay was not a deliberate policy choice? For example, when Nixon and Kissinger resisted pressure from British Foreign Secretary James Callaghan to take a tough line in the Cyprus crisis in July 1974, the evidence suggests their reluctance was rooted in a calculation of US interest, rather than a lack of interest.

Global instability The context of Nixon’s resignation was a high degree of global political and economic instability in which the energy crisis caused by the Middle East war of 1973 and an Arab oil embargo against the western powers was a major factor.

1974 saw a number of game-changing events, including the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and the downfall of the Colonels’ regime in Greece; the fall of the Caetano regime in Portugal and the end of Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique; the failure of Kissinger’s ‘Year of Europe’ and a fractious relationship between the US and Europe in which the British government, in its first year of EEC membership, found itself in the familiar position of piggy in the middle.

Significant figures other than Nixon left the world stage in 1974. Some exits were permanent: in France, the death of Georges Pompidou in April brought the Gaullist era

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to an end, and the Presidency to Giscard d’Estaing; in Argentina, the veteran President Juan Peron was succeeded by his second wife, Isabel; in West Germany, the resignation of Willy Brandt over a spy scandal made Helmut Schmidt the new Chancellor; and in Ethiopia, riots and student protests so undermined Emperor Haile Selassie that he was deposed in September. Other departures were temporary: President Makarios of Cyprus, ousted in a Greek coup in July, was to return to office in December; in Spain, the ailing dictator General Franco handed over power to Prince Juan Carlos - but only for a few months; and in Libya, the erratic Colonel Qadafi was relieved of day-to-day duties by the Revolution Command Council in order to concentrate on the ‘ideological direction’ of the Libyan people - but remained head of state.

Shocking contrast Against this context, Nixon’s resignation may seem just one more shifting pattern in the kaleidoscope. But 40 years later, the contrast still seems shocking between the President’s experience, abilities and undoubted flair for international affairs, and the depth of his disgrace. Nixon was wracked by insecurity and believed that the only way to succeed in politics was to get your retaliation in first: at some point, he lost the ability to distinguish between threat and reality, executive power and contempt for the law.

For Jonathan Schell, there was a direct causal connection between the Vietnam war and Watergate: one of Nixon’s first acts as President was to order a secret bombing campaign against neutral Cambodia. For Richard E. Neustadt, Nixon, like his predecessor Lyndon Johnson, was ‘a driving man and driven, tending to excess, compulsive in seeking control, taking frustration hard’. But we should give the last word to Henry Kissinger, who knew him better than most: ‘It was impossible to talk to Nixon without wondering afterward what other game he might be engaged in at the moment.

Of one thing you could be sure. No single conversation with Nixon ever encapsulated the totality of his purpose.’

Suggestions for reading Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982) Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series III: Vol. IV, The Year of Europe: America, Europe and the Energy Crisis 1972-74; Vol V, The Southern Flank in Crisis, 1973-76 (London: Routledge, both 2006).

Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (London: Macmillan, revised edn 1980) Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (London: HarperCollins, 1995) Jonathan Schell, ‘Reflexions on the Nixon Years’, 6 articles in the New Yorker, 1975; cited here, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1975/06/30/the-time-of-illusion-v-thescript-and-the-players

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The Yalta Conference opens: 4 February 1945 Posted on: 4 February 2015 The Yalta Myth Between 4 and 11 February 1945, while the Second World War still raged Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference both in Europe and in the Far East, the (The National Archives) ‘Big Three’—Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill—met at the Black Sea resort of Yalta, supported by large delegations, to discuss the shape of the postwar world. The agreements reached there, including arrangements for an occupied and denazified Germany, for a ‘World Organisation’ to ensure peace (the UN), for bringing the war in Japan to a successful conclusion and for the future of Eastern Europe, have been instrumental in ensuring that of all wartime Allied conferences, Yalta has retained the most negative resonance.

The enduring Yalta Myth is that Europe was ‘carved up’ at the conference, to the advantage of the Soviet Union and at the expense of countries like Poland. Roosevelt and Churchill were ‘outwitted’ by Stalin, and condemned Eastern Europe to years of Soviet domination. The Big Three leaders played a game of power politics that rode roughshod over the rights of countries and individuals, including Prisoners of War for whom enforced repatriation could mean death. Promises were made that no one had any intention of fulfilling.

Like all myths, these allegations contain an element of truth and provide a useful propaganda weapon. But they distort the reality of the situation. The Cold War cannot be laid at Yalta’s door, except in the sense that the decisions reached continued a longestablished direction of travel. Sir Frank Roberts, the veteran British diplomat who attended Yalta and was still giving fascinating talks about it up to his death in 1998, stressed that context was the key to understanding what happened at Yalta, in particular ‘place and timing’: the timing because the end of the war in Europe was then in sight and the place because it was so obviously under exclusively Soviet control and so far from Western eyes.

Why Yalta?

Holding the Conference at Yalta demonstrated Stalin’s power. Claiming his health would not permit air travel, the Soviet leader insisted on meeting at the Black Sea. So the ailing US President Roosevelt had to make an arduous journey of 6000 miles; Churchill, aged over 70, 4000 miles. After meeting in Malta on 2 February, Roosevelt and Churchill flew 1400 miles to the Crimea, followed by an eight-hour drive. In fact, Soviet organisation of the conference was good, but the choice of Yalta reflected, intentionally, a shift in the axis of world power.

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Stalin took a train to Yalta from Moscow. He controlled the physical aspect of the Conference, which included bugging his foreign guests’ quarters. This meant he knew some of what they were thinking: it also meant their whims could be accommodated; after Churchill’s daughter Sarah mentioned in the Vorontsov Palace, where the British were staying, that lemon juice went well with caviar, a lemon tree laden with fruit appeared overnight in the orangery. The surveillance was hardly a surprise to his British and American guests: Churchill, for example, had been warned that he could not receive his ULTRA messages at Yalta. But he did get lemons with his caviar.

Why February 1945?

The war in Europe was almost won. 1944 had been a decisive year, with the Normandy landings in June and the huge Russian summer offensive in the east. Stalin, despite the terrible losses suffered by Soviet forces, was in a dominant military position. By the beginning of 1945 the Eastern Front ran from Memel on the Baltic through Poland and Czechoslovakia down to Yugoslavia. The Red Army was on the Oder, barely 40 miles from Berlin; the Western allies were closing in on the Rhine, but held up by the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes.

The defeat of Germany was close: that of Japan, much less so. Nevertheless, postwar planning was well under way. At the beginning of 1945 all the Big Three recognised the pressing need to reach agreement on how the war would end, in Europe and the Far East, and also on what peace would look like. They all wanted to continue the wartime practice of sorting out global issues between themselves. But their priorities were different, and did not necessarily coincide.

Stalin: A Bear who knows his own mind?

Anthony Eden observed that the British and Americans had no negotiating strategy for Yalta sufficient to combat ‘a Bear who would certainly know his own mind’. But Stalin’s plans should have been no surprise. His intentions had been clear since 1939: to recover or control the territories of the old Russian Empire. He had spelled it out to William Strang in the abortive negotiations before the Nazi-Soviet Pact; he spelled it out to Eden himself in Moscow in 1941. By early 1945, Germany, thought Stalin, was finished as a world power: the USSR was poised to become one, based on its outstanding military contribution; now was the time to press his advantage.

But it was not as simple as that. At Yalta, Stalin’s priorities were to protect the frontiers of the expanded Soviet state and to be accepted as a superpower. He was deeply suspicious of the territorial, political and commercial ambitions of his fellow Allies.

Intelligence he received from Soviet spies in both American and British official circles increased that suspicion. The Soviet Union badly needed to replenish its resources, human and material, depleted by its superhuman efforts in the armed struggle. How a defeated Germany was organised mattered to Stalin as a source of reparations; dominance in Eastern Europe was about populations and trade, as well as politics. The Soviet Union had frontiers in the Far East, too, so the outcome of war with Japan mattered. Stalin did not want the postwar world arranged by the old imperialist power, Britain, or the new military and economic superpower, America. His was a defensive as well as offensive position.

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Roosevelt: What price Uncle Joe? Roosevelt was a sick man, and died two months after Yalta. His main priority was to secure the Soviet Union’s entry into the war against Japan. US military advisers warned that victory could take another 18 months, and at this stage it was by no means certain that the atom bomb would work, or that it would force Japan into submission. Roosevelt needed Soviet help in beating Japan, and was prepared to pay for it by conceding Stalin’s demands, whether to independent membership of the UN for the Soviet Republics of Ukraine and Byelorussia, to a veto system in the Security Council, or to the Kurile and Southern Sakhalin islands, regardless of other regional powers like China.

Roosevelt wanted final victory over Germany, of course, but could afford to wait for it a while if necessary. Postwar, he envisaged only short-term American involvement in Europe, and was more interested in formulating principles than in the details that affected individual countries. Roosevelt’s other pet project, the United Nations, would, he was determined, ensure a peaceful environment that permitted US disengagement.

The Second World War had given the US global military and economic dominance. It was Roosevelt who was in the real position of power at Yalta. Though he valued the Anglo-American relationship, he was quite prepared to overlook British interests, ridiculing Churchill’s so-called ‘imperialist’ policies as outdated and irrelevant, playing up the importance of the Soviet Union. In reality, he was determined that US interests should prevail, and his two Allies had to find their own ways of dealing with that.

Churchill: the world at our feet?

Despite his more grandiloquent statements, Churchill was well aware of the dangers that Yalta posed to British interests, to the future peace of Europe and the wider world.

Above all, he needed hostilities to end quickly: the burden of fighting a long war, alone from 1939 to 1941, had crippled Britain financially and forced it into what J.M. Keynes called ‘Starvation Corner’. US support for and aid to Britain, and a major American commitment to European defence, would be essential. At Yalta Churchill was frustrated by what he saw as Roosevelt’s lack of understanding of Britain’s global commitments, and of the threat perceived from Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe, but in the end his only weapon was persuasion. Though it was hard for Churchill to accept, Britain had little leverage at Yalta, and must concentrate on moderating, rather than dictating outcomes.

Churchill did score some successes at Yalta. One was the agreement that France should be invited to occupy a zone in Germany and participate in the Control Commission, an outcome crucial in view of Roosevelt’s determination to restrict the length of time American troops would stay in Europe. Less specific but nevertheless important was Churchill’s tough stance in defence of freedom and the rule of law, for example in the drafting of the Declaration on Liberated Europe that committed the three powers to establishing free elections and democratic governments. The fact that the Soviet Union failed to abide by its commitments does not diminish Churchill’s efforts to secure them. But he was playing a weak hand compared to that of Stalin and, even more, of Roosevelt.

What Yalta was—and was not The Yalta Conference was significant, but that significance should not be inflated. Yalta was not a peace conference. It was just one, and not the most important in a series of Allied wartime meetings to address the issues that would face the post-war world. Many

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of the Yalta decisions, including those on the frontiers of Poland, enacted agreements already arrived at. Others (like reparations) were not to be worked out fully until the Potsdam conference in July-August 1945. Yalta was, in a sense, a transitional conference, marking the beginning of the end of the second global conflict within the memory of its participants. In assessing its proceedings, the effects on its participants— not just the Big Three, but the 700 delegates—of sheer exhaustion, of deprivation and loss, and of anxiety about the future, should not be underestimated. Yalta foreshadowed the emerging world, rather than determining it.

Suggestions for further reading John Erickson, The Road to Berlin: Stalin’s War with Germany (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983).

Michael Charlton, The Eagle and the Small Birds (BBC, 1984).

C.M. Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (Hodder and Stoughton, 1990).

Gill Bennett (ed), The End of the War in Europe (HMSO, 1996).

David Reynolds, Summits (Allen Lane, 2007).

Fraser Harbutt, Yalta 1945: Europe and America at the Crossroads (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

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An atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima: 6 August 1945 Posted on: 6 August 2015

Mushroom cloud over Hiroshima (US National Archives)

    

The historian John Ehrman, who wrote an account of the atomic bomb and British policy based on privileged access to government records,1 wrote in 1953 that there were five questions that needed to be asked about the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan on 6 and 9 August 1945:

Why were the bombs dropped?

Why were they dropped on the particular dates, 6 and 9 August?

Why were they dropped on the particular targets, Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

How far were the British consulted on 1?

How far were the British consulted on 2 and 3?

Although it is not possible to answer them in detail in a short blog, these questions make a good framework in which to examine the context of dropping of ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima on 6 August and ‘Fat Boy’ on Nagasaki on 9 August, the first ever use of atomic weapons that killed more than 200,000 people, devastated large areas and brought about Japanese surrender and the end of the Second World War. Why were the bombs dropped?

The short answer is that they were available. Once an atomic bomb had been produced and tested successfully, there was little doubt that it would be used. As Henry Stimson, US Secretary of State for War, wrote: ‘it was our common objective, throughout the war, to be the first to produce an atomic weapon and use it’2. Huge amounts had been spent on the Manhattan Project. Congress would want to see value for money. The ending of a devastating global conflict by conclusive force might deter future aggression, as well as demonstrating US dominance.

In the short term, the bombs were dropped to bring an end to the war with Japan. The objective of the Combined Chiefs of Staff (American and British) had been the surrender of the Axis Powers, and then of Japan. The first was achieved in May 1945: the second looked much more problematical. Although there was a peace party in Japan, the military were adamant that unconditional surrender, insisted on by the Americans, was equivalent to national extinction. Dropping the bomb—a demonstration of overwhelming force—might be the only way to compel Japan to accept defeat. The long-heralded Soviet attack, planned for early August, not only seemed uncertain to bring about Japanese surrender, but also increasingly unwelcome in the light of Russian behaviour

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in Europe in the summer of 1945. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote on 23 July after talking to US Secretary of State Byrnes: ‘It is quite clear that the United States do not at the present time desire Russian participation in the war against Japan.’ 3 Why were they dropped on the particular dates, 6 and 9 August?

Once it became clear in the spring of 1945 that an atomic weapon was likely to be ready in the summer, American plans included a probable operational date during August. On 2 July Stimson briefed President Truman, who had taken over on Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, advising a carefully timed Allied warning to Japan of the ‘varied and overwhelming character of the force we are about to bring upon the islands’ and the ‘inevitability and completeness’ of the destruction that would follow if Japan did not surrender.4 A proclamation was issued on 26 July 1945 calling on Japan to surrender.

Though the Japanese Supreme War Council sought Russian mediation, this was rejected by Stalin and there was no sign that the Japanese leaders were ready to agree to surrender unconditionally.

After the successful test at Alamogordo in New Mexico on 16 July (the day before the Allied conference opened at Potsdam) a more specific date for the use of the weapon could be set. Two bombs were ready: delay in their use might complicate the situation.

An opposed US land invasion of Japan would undoubtedly cost many American lives: a Soviet invasion of Japan, proposed for 8 August, might have unwelcome political consequences. The specific dates were chosen for technical reasons (including the weather) and military ones. But political factors were also important.

Why were they dropped on the particular targets, Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

If this terrible new weapon were to be used, it must have maximum impact to bring about the desired result. The Interim Committee set up by the Americans to consider the political implications of the use of the bomb had recommended on 1 June that it should be used on a dual target: a military installation surrounded by or adjacent to houses and other buildings most susceptible to damage. It must be remembered that although the bomb was tested successfully on 16 July, the scientists were not sure how it would work in different atmospheric conditions or on different types of terrain. Nothing would be more damaging to the object of forcing surrender than a warning or demonstration followed by weapons failure. It had to work.

The Target committee had chosen Hiroshima, after much discussion, as a city that had not been affected by the US Air Force’s offensives, so that the damage would clearly be attributable to the new weapon and therefore create the strongest impression to the Japanese government of the destruction it could wreak. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August had been intended for Kokura, but was diverted to Nagasaki when heavy cloud obscured the intended target. Though the Nagasaki bomb was bigger, its destructive effects were reduced by the terrain.

How far were the British consulted on 1, 2 and 3?

The answers to Ehrman’s questions 4 and 5 can be dealt with together. The British had of course been intimately involved in the development of the atomic bomb. The project began life in Britain with the work of refugee scientists, and after it was transferred to the US British scientists worked closely on its development there and in Canada, the third partner.5 Prime Minister Winston Churchill and those of his advisers party to the secret

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project codenamed Tube Alloys were kept informed of developments, and British scientists and officials were involved with the planning process for the use of the bomb.

But US financial, scientific and military resources dwarfed those of the British, and in practice the major decisions were taken by the Americans. ‘The balance of power, both in Tube Alloys and in the Pacific, lay too heavily with the United States for the British to be able to oppose this particular decision.’6 The British did not intend to oppose the decision. Under the Quebec Agreement of 1943 and the Hyde Park memorandum of September 1944 the bomb was not to be used without British consent. Churchill, confident in the closeness of Anglo-American relations, agreed in principle in early July 1945 to the operational use of the atom bomb.

He discussed it with Truman at Potsdam, and after the shock Labour victory in the general election later that month the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, took Churchill’s place at Potsdam and was content to issue a statement on the use and development of atomic weapons drafted by his predecessor. Britain had fought a long, exhausting and ruinous global war: an early end to the Far Eastern conflict was what the Labour Government wanted just as much as its predecessor.7 In detailed planning for the dropping of the bombs, the Americans took the decisions, and the British did not know all the details. But they agreed on the need to use the weapon.

The intelligence context John Ehrman’s 1953 account was naturally reticent on the subject of intelligence, but it was an important element in the context of dropping the bombs. Allied intelligence, from both Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and other sources, indicated that the Japanese were unlikely to surrender as a result of an invasion of the islands by the US or of Manchuria and other territory by the Russians. It also contained warnings of the scale and ambition of Soviet plans in postwar Europe. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union had made a major contribution to Allied victory and Stalin was very much one of the ‘Big Three’. There were strong arguments for telling the Russians about the bomb.

What the Americans and British did not know was that Stalin was already well-informed on the development of the bomb by his spies within the Manhattan Project and elsewhere. The extent of this would not emerge for some years, through the revelations of the defector Igor Gouzenko and the VENONA traffic.8 Meanwhile, Truman had decided to tell Stalin about the bomb at the Potsdam Conference, after the Alamogordo test, and consulted Churchill on the best way to do it. Following a prickly conference session on 24 July, Truman told Stalin about the new weapon. ‘Uncle Joe’ thanked the President, but seemed unsurprised.9

Notes 1. John Ehrman, The Atomic Bomb: An Account of British Policy in the Second World War (Cabinet Office official history, 1953, unpublished but available at The National Archives (TNA) in CAB 101/45.

2. Henry L. Stimson, ‘The Decision to use the Bomb’, Harpers Magazine, February 1947.

3. Documents on British Policy Overseas (DBPO), Series I, vol. I, No. 236.

4. Stimson’s memo is printed in Ehrman, pp. 241-44.

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5. See Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy 1935-45 (1964).

6. Ehrman, p. 258.

7. DBPO, Nos. 457, 502, 511.

8. On these revelations of atomic espionage see Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 (Penguin, 2009). See also G. Bennett, ‘The Defection of Igor Gouzenko, September 1945’, http://issuu.com/fcohistorians/docs/pusdessays 9. DBPO, Nos. 181 and 258; Harry S. Truman, Year of Decisions, 1945 (London, 1955), p. 346.

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The execution of Edith Cavell: 12 October 2015 Posted: 12 October 2015

Edith Cavell (National Portrait Gallery)

In the early hours of Tuesday, 12 October 1915, Edith Cavell, a British nurse who had been working in Belgium, was executed by the Germans after being found guilty of helping over 200 Allied servicemen escape to England. At her trial she confessed freely to doing this. Many others, mostly Belgian, had been arrested with her, of whom 26 were found guilty and 5 condemned to death, though in only two cases was the sentence carried out. Cavell’s hasty execution, before anyone had time to appeal on her behalf, caused international outrage. She became, literally, a poster girl for both sides in the First World War.

The Germans publicised her fate to discourage resistance and espionage; the Allies publicised it to encourage recruitment and stiffen public resolve against German barbarity. A Foreign Office official, however, suggested that her death, while ‘part and parcel’ of a German ‘policy of frightfulness’, might also be a sign of weakness.1 Cavell’s execution needs to be set in its wartime context to understand its particular resonance.

1915: a year of transition By the autumn of 1915 it was clear to all warring parties that the war initially expected to last six months was going to go on for a long time. It had become, as historian Sir Michael Howard has written, less a traditional struggle for power than a conflict of ideologies.2 Overall, the advantage in 1915 seemed to lie with the Central Powers, principally Germany and Austria, though a divided approach to the campaign against Russia weakened their initiative and Austria was close to collapse. For Britain, the disastrous Dardanelles campaign in the spring had served to emphasise the fact that the Balkans were lost to the Allies, despite Italy’s joining the Allied cause in April. By the autumn, both sides were committed to renewed campaigns on the Western Front: the Allies, led

by Britain and France, to help their Russian ally, the Central Powers to encourage Russian weakness and strengthen the call for a separate peace.

During 1915 the Allies had discovered they did not have enough of the right kind of guns, ammunition or men to fight the war they were faced with, and their communications were poor. The Central Powers discovered that success would require new defensive tactics, while on the Eastern Front infantry attacks behind a curtain of prolonged artillery fire worked better.

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On the Western Front the difficulty for both sides of attack and defence meant that attrition—exhausting the opponent—became an objective. In 1915 the extension of hostilities fostered innovation on both sides, in armaments, in communications, in tactics and in staff work. It also increased the importance of propaganda.

Edith Cavell and the propaganda war Public perception was important to the prosecution of the war on both sides, to boost recruitment and ensure the continuing support of the belligerent peoples for a conflict with no early end in sight. Each side disseminated or encouraged the publication of material exposing the barbarity of the other. In Britain, popular opinion was whipped up by the press with stories of atrocities, especially after the Germans began to use chlorine gas as a weapon during the spring of 1915.

Anti-German sentiment led the Royal Family to change their Germanic surname to Mountbatten, German Shepherd dogs were rebranded as Alsatians and Wagner’s music outlawed from the concert halls. The Central Powers also put out stories of barbarity, accusing the Allies of colonial aggression and underhand tactics. In particular, the Germans wanted to discourage espionage and resistance in the countries they had overrun, such as Belgium.

The case of Edith Cavell played into both sides’ propaganda effort. In Britain, she was portrayed as an angel of mercy, persecuted for her efforts to nurse wounded and dying servicemen and for helping them get home. For the Germans, she was a symbol of underground resistance who must be made an example of, to discourage others.

Another Englishwoman nursing in Belgium wrote that after Cavell’s arrest posters appeared in the area, warning that ‘Whoever knowingly aids in any manner whatsoever an enemy of Germany in concealing his presence whether by giving him lodging, by clothing him or by giving him food is liable to the same punishment—Death or penal servitude’.3 Cavell’s execution also provided propaganda material in the Allied nations. She featured on the front page of the New York Times, and her image was used widely on recruitment posters and propaganda literature.

Regular army and territorial enlistment rose substantially in late October and November 1915. Certainly there was widespread public revulsion at her fate, particularly at the idea of executing a woman. The speed with which the Germans had acted in carrying out the sentence suggests they expected such reactions; it also shows how important they estimated the deterrent effect of her execution to be.

An unlikely spy?

There have been suggestions that Cavell was involved in espionage, for which her activities on behalf of servicemen were a useful screen. There is no evidence to suggest she was working for any formal intelligence organisation, and she was not charged with espionage by the Germans. But her activities in coordinating the shelter and onward passage of Allied servicemen through Belgium were undoubtedly part of an organised resistance network. Such networks were an important feature of the intelligence landscape of the First World War.

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In 1915 both MI1(c), the British overseas intelligence organisation (later called SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service), and British military intelligence were very active in Belgium and France, supported by a large number of civilian networks. For example, the Dame Blanche network of train-watchers in Belgium numbered about 800 people of all ages supplying intelligence on German troop and equipment movements to the Allied military authorities.4 The image of a young, innocent nurse (though Cavell was 49 when she died), bravely working in secret to protect Allied servicemen was a potent one that was useful to the intelligence authorities as well as the military and political ones.

Patriotism is not enough There are many memorials in Britain to Edith Cavell, some inscribed with her words: ‘I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone.’

German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann, commenting on Cavell’s fate, added a rider to this: ‘In war one must be prepared to seal one’s patriotism with blood, whether one faces the enemy in battle or otherwise in the interest of one’s cause.’ 5

Notes 1. Minute of 14 October 1915, FO 383/15.

2. Michael Howard, The First World War: A Very Short Introduction (London: 2007).

3. Tammy Proctor, Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War (London: 2003). On Cavell’s activities see also Diana Souhami, Edith Cavell: Nurse, Martyr, Heroine (London: 2010, memorial edn 2015); and Herbert Leeds, Edith Cavell, her Life Story (1915, reissued by Classic Reprints 2012).

4. See Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949 (London: 2010), pp. 78-82.

5. www.firstworldwar.com/source/cavell_zimmermann.htm

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Frank Roberts’ ‘Long Telegram’: 21 March 1946 Posted on: 21 March 2016

No one who has served in Moscow can ever be quite the same person again . . . Those who have had this experience may be pardoned if they think that, among themselves, they can speak a language and carry thoughts which no one who has not shared that experience can fully understand.1 At the beginning of 1946 Frank Roberts2 Sir Frank Roberts (National Portrait Gallery) was British Minister in Moscow, acting as Chargé after the departure of the Ambassador. His American counterpart was George Kennan, who famously sent an 8000-word telegram to the State Department on 22 February 1946, analysing Soviet policy and recommending a strategy of containment to frustrate its aggressive expansionism.3 Three weeks later Roberts sent an equally long and penetrating analysis to the Foreign Office in a set of reports including three telegrams on 21 March 1946. 4 The quotations below are taken from these documents unless otherwise stated. The two men agreed on many points: but aspects of Roberts’ reporting shed interesting light on the global context and on differences between the British and American approach to the USSR. Roberts, representing a weakened and exhausted power, sought to understand the Soviet Union in order to work with it; Kennan, representing a world superpower, sought to understand it in order to counter its ambitions. This is an over-simplification, but holds some truth.

The world in March 1946 No one thought in March 1946 ‘this is the beginning of a long Cold War’, though it already seemed the postwar world was dividing on ideological lines, reinforced by military might. Less than a year since the end of the war in Europe, seven months since the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan, the victorious Allied powers were mired in fractious negotiations on peace-making and institution-building. Europe was devastated physically and economically, with millions of people displaced; nationalist uprisings, civil wars and competition for scarce resources disturbed the peace on a global scale. The new world organisation, the United Nations, already seemed unlikely to fulfil the aspirations of its Charter. The wartime Allies—Britain, the US and the USSR—had lost their common purpose and with it the imperative to work together harmoniously.

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Bring back the ‘Big Three’ In 1945 the UK, US and USSR all thought they had won the war, individually as well as jointly, yet with the euphoria of hard-won victory came disappointment. American money and military might had transformed the struggle against the Axis powers after the US entered the war in December 1941, but when peace came the rest of the world seemed chaotic, unstable and needy, reluctant to pick itself up and let the US alone to mind its own business. Britain felt its monumental efforts since 1939 had been rewarded by bankruptcy and crippling global responsibilities, rather than the chance for domestic reconstruction.

For the Soviet Union, invaded by Nazi Germany in June 1941, the hard-fought battles that secured victory on the Eastern Front and thereby ensured success in the West had been won at immense human and economic cost. The reward, in Stalin’s eyes, was to be marginalised by the Anglo-American special relationship, excluded from the atomic club and pressurised by a capitalist expansion alien not just to Soviet Marxist ideology but to economic recovery. The result was resentment, suspicion and, in Roberts’ words, ‘high-handedness’. Roberts understood that the Soviet Union wanted to resurrect the Big Three, for reasons rooted in geography, history and ideology, as well as prestige.

Geography: ‘the constant striving for security of a state with no natural frontiers’ In October 1945 the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) had described Russia’s geographical situation as ‘strategically relatively invulnerable’.5 But the view from Moscow was quite different. Russia felt both vulnerable and insecure, seeking to establish a protective belt of Soviet republics, with acquiescent or subservient nearneighbours, the scope to exert influence further afield (for example in the Middle East) and control over strategic waterways like the Dardanelles. Security meant keeping Soviet troops in Persia while resisting a continued Western military presence in Greece.

It meant making sure that it could never again be threatened by a resurgent Germany, and that postwar Germany should look east, not west.

Where Russian interests were not threatened, Western interests and objectives could be accommodated; but any perceived encroachment would be resisted, with force if necessary. Security was, as Roberts said, Russia’s first priority. ‘The frontiers of Russia have never been fixed and have gone backwards and forwards with defeats or victories in war. But even after her greatest victories in the past, Russia has somehow found herself deprived of many of the fruits of those victories.’

History: the revolutionary legacy Before the wartime alliance, both Britain and the US had spent the years since the 1917 revolution opposing the Bolshevik system and hoping it would not last. Just as it was impossible for the Soviets to forget Allied intervention in the Russian civil war after 1917, it was impossible for Britain and America to forget that Stalin had signed a pact with Hitler in August 1939. Nor could the British Government forget unremitting Soviet efforts to inspire revolt and revolution in the Empire, especially in the context of postwar revelations of ongoing espionage activities. Difficult memories suppressed during the 1941-45 Alliance returned thereafter on both sides to poison the wells of cooperation.

History, as Roberts pointed out, showed that Britain and Russia could be brought together by a shared ‘deadly menace’, as they had been in 1812, 1914 and 1941. But it

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was also a powerful barrier to working with a regime underpinned by the ideology of world revolution.

Ideology: ‘present aggressive methods conform to long-term strategy indicated in ideological campaign revived since the war’ Roberts emphasised the importance of ideology in Soviet policy, together with Russian national tradition. Stalin supported this approach for domestic political reasons as well as ideological ones. It was useful to give the impression that the Soviet peoples were ‘surrounded by a hostile world composed largely of reactionary capitalists and their willing tolls in the social democratic movement’. A ‘foreign bogey’ justified the maintenance of a strong Russian army, a rigidly controlled political system, isolation from the outside world and pressure on the populace to fulfil the five-year plan for economic recovery. It increased confidence in the regime and gave it space to consolidate power.

Yet though Soviet policy was fundamentally hostile to Western liberal, democratic capitalist and imperialist conceptions, Roberts thought it ‘possible, though difficult’ to reconcile British and Soviet aims, ‘granted the right mixture of strength and patience and the avoidance of sabre-rattling or the raising of prestige issues’. It was a constant theme of his advice from Moscow, and undoubtedly influenced the way Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, approached policy towards the Soviet Union.

Bevin and Attlee took a much less rigid ideological approach than the US Government (which, indeed, mistrusted Britain’s ‘socialist administration’). (There were to be deep Anglo-American divisions over Communist China.) Stalin, however, disliked Britain’s ‘bourgeois liberalism’ much more than naked American capitalism: Roberts reported that Bevin was regarded like Trotsky−as a ‘very important but dangerous and hostile personality’.

Are we in for a permanent gale or a short squall?

Bevin asked Roberts this question on 12 March 1946, in response to a JIC report concluding that ‘although Soviet intentions may be defensive, tactics will be offensive’.

Roberts’ telegrams of 21 March 1946 formed part of his answer. He was clear that ‘all Soviet tactics are short-term, but their strategy, although flexible, is definitely long-term’.

The timing of short-term Soviet moves was usually informed by an assessment of the state of Anglo-American relations. The Soviet regime was dynamic and it was still expanding. But it did not want to achieve that expansion by armed conflict unless forced to it, or if it occurred through miscalculation.

In fact, there were signs in March 1946 that the Soviets wanted to reduce international tension, evacuating Bornholm, withdrawing forces from Manchuria, establishing diplomatic relations with Switzerland. Roberts thought these moves designed partly to deflect Security Council criticism, and partly because ‘Soviet policy has overreached itself recently’.

In Roberts’ view, in dealing with the Soviets there would clearly be a long-term requirement for navigating stormy seas. Sometimes oil might be poured on troubled waters; sometimes the storm must be ridden out. In all cases, it would be AngloAmerican solidarity that kept the ship on an even keel. It was a course that would be followed skilfully by Bevin in the next three years.

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Notes 1. William (Lord) Strang, Home and Abroad (London: Andre Deutsch, 1956), p. 61 2. F.K. (later Sir Frank) Roberts, 1907-1997, had a long and distinguished diplomatic career, including as HM Ambassador in Moscow 1960-62. He served as Minister in Moscow from January 1945, acting as Chargé on a number of occasions until early 1948 when he returned to become Bevin’s Principal Private Secretary.

3. Kennan’s telegram is printed in Foreign Relations of the United States 1946, vol. vi, pp. 696-709. See also www.history.state.gov/departmenthistory/short-history/kennan 4. Roberts’ despatches and the 21 March 1946 telegrams are printed in Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series I, Volume VI (London: HMSO, 1991), Nos. 79-87.

5. Ibid, No. 41.

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Eden orders an enquiry into the disappearance of Commander ‘Buster’ Crabb: 9 May 1956 Posted on: 9 May 2016 It would not be in the public interest to disclose the circumstances in which Commander Crabb is presumed to have met his death.1 Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb in 1944 (Imperial War Museum)

Mystery of the missing frogman Sixty years ago today, on 9 May 1956 the Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, wrote to Sir Edward Bridges, former Cabinet Secretary, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury and Head of the Home Civil Service, and charged him with carrying out an enquiry into the circumstances in which a retired Naval Commander, Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb, had on 19 April carried out an intelligence operation against Russian warships in Portsmouth Harbour—a diving mission from which he had not returned.

Eden wanted to know on what authority the operation had been carried out, and why its failure had not been reported to ministers until 4 May. On 9 May the Prime Minister also answered, in three uninformative sentences, a Parliamentary Question that had in fact been put to the First Lord of the Admiralty, refusing all requests for amplification.

Neither the note to Bridges nor the Parliamentary statement reveals fully the fury felt by Eden over this episode. He had specifically forbidden intelligence operations during the visit to the UK of Soviet leaders Bulganin and Khrushchev, respectively Premier and First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was a goodwill visit, offering the opportunity for productive talks at a time of relative thaw in Anglo-Soviet relations.

But to the UK’s intelligence agencies, it offered a rare opportunity for intelligence procurement. Although Eden had already vetoed the idea of placing microphones in Claridges Hotel (‘I am sorry but we cannot do anything of this kind on this occasion’), 2 an operation mounted by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), tasked by Naval Intelligence, without the knowledge or approval of ministers, had gone wrong disastrously and very publicly: by 9 May the press were already running a series of sensational stories.

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The Bridges Enquiry The story of Crabb’s ill-fated dive, and the discovery a year later of what appeared to be his mutilated body, is well known.3 The release in 2015 in the Cabinet Secretary’s Miscellaneous Papers of the full documentation on the Bridges Enquiry4 provides much detail on a sorry episode that did not reflect well on the intelligence agencies, or on senior officials in the Foreign Office and Admiralty.

It is clear that both Naval Intelligence and SIS thought it a low-risk operation, and that there was no chance of being found out: they had done something similar during a visit of Russian warships in November 1955. They were sure they could carry out the operation secretly and no one would ever be the wiser.

When Crabb failed to surface, the clumsy attempts to cover the operation’s tracks show that those involved still expected the matter to remain secret. In his evidence to the Bridges Enquiry, the head of MI5 (whose role was restricted to that of liaison with the local Chief Constable) observed that the episode showed ‘the chief risk against which one had to plan in mounting clandestine operations in this country was not the enemy or the object of the intelligence, but the British press’.5 As for informing ministers, the most senior officials in the Admiralty and Foreign Office each said they were waiting for the other to act. Successive witnesses to the Bridges Enquiry spent most of their evidence passing the blame on to others. It is not surprising the Prime Minister was incandescent with rage, and that part of the fallout from the affair was the retirement of ‘C’, Chief of SIS. The intelligence context But Eden and his fellow ministers in the Conservative Government in May 1956 had more on their minds than embarrassment (in the press or with the Russians), or the weaknesses revealed by the Crabb episode in the system for authorising intelligence operations. In addition, and not unconnected, they were also faced by other unwelcome intelligence-related developments in early 1956.

On 11 February, the spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean surfaced publicly in Moscow, where they had fled five years previously. Then in April 1956, Soviet Military Intelligence announced that it had ‘discovered’ the secret tunnel under Berlin, built by Western intelligence to listen in to Soviet landlines. In fact, plans for the tunnel had been betrayed by SIS officer George Blake to Soviet intelligence even before it was finished.

The breaking of the story in April had some direct relevance to the Crabb story: Patrick Dean, Secretary to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), told the Bridges Enquiry that he delayed informing the FO Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, about Crabb’s disappearance because the PUS was at Chequers, discussing the Berlin Tunnel.

Of course, the government did not at that time know that George Blake, then serving in Berlin, was also a Soviet spy; nor that Kim Philby, the former SIS officer interrogated in the autumn of 1955 in connection with the Burgess and Maclean case, was making arrangements in early 1956 to go as a journalist to Beirut, from where he, too, would flee to Moscow. There were quite enough intelligence-related problems for the government to sort out, without considering ones yet to be revealed.

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As the detailed evidence and report show, the Bridges Enquiry uncovered slack procedures and poor security, as well as inadequate appreciation of the balance between intelligence collection and the assessment of political risk. The SIS was criticised, FO and Admiralty officials do not come well out of it. The Crabb episode provoked much discussion, including with the JIC, about new procedures for obtaining clearance for intelligence-gathering operations. Bridges himself felt, however, that the results of the enquiry did not provide the kind of reassurance ministers were seeking that nothing like this episode could ever happen again.6

Notes 1. Statement by the Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, in the House of Commons on 9 May 1956: Parl. Debs, 5th series, House of Commons, vol. 552, cols. 1220-23.

2. PREM 11/1268.

3. See, for example, Michael S. Goodman, ‘Covering Up Spying in the “Buster” Crabb Affair’, International History Review, xxx. 4 December 2008, pp. 709-944.

4. Documentation on the Bridges Enquiry, codenamed FROGMAN, can be found in CAB 301/121-125, The National Archives. The original of Eden’s note of 9 May is in CAB 301/121.

5. Summary of Evidence, p. 25, CAB 301/121.

6. For the general intelligence context at this period see Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Penguin, 1999).

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Nasser announces the nationalisation of the Suez Canal: 26 July 1956 Posted on: 26 July 2016

The UK and the US shared common strategic interests in the region, but their analyses and policies were not identical and there were important differences in their tactical and diplomatic approaches.

Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser (Stevan Kragujević, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Chilcot Report on the Iraq enquiry, vol. I, p. 24.

The announcement sixty years ago today by President Gamal Abdel Nasser that he was taking the Suez Canal into Egyptian ownership provided the ‘inciting incident’, as screenwriters say, for a crisis that still haunts British politics. Enraged by Nasser’s defiance, fearful the Canal would be closed to British oil supplies, frustrated by the slow response of the military and intelligence organisations, thwarted by international politics, the British Government embarked with France and Israel on a flawed plan to force Nasser’s capitulation and Egyptian regime change that ended not just in failure but—for Prime Minister Anthony Eden in particular—in humiliation and loss of office.

But why did Nasser’s announcement have such a profound and far-reaching effect? The context reveals a series of preconceptions and misperceptions, particularly on the part of the British and American Governments.

Existential threat, neo-colonialism or regional power play?

Britain’s response to the nationalisation of the Canal was based on deep-rooted preconceptions that by 1956 were increasingly open to challenge. The Middle East was seen as a strategic land bridge between Europe, Asia and Africa and key to British security, particularly in the Cold War context of the Soviet Union’s regional ambitions.

Nasser’s actions and orchestration of anti-British agitation throughout the Arab world and beyond threatened what was seen as an accepted position of authority for Britain in Egypt.

Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, after meeting Nasser in March 1956, told the Cabinet the Egyptian leader would not work with the West or promote an Arab-Israeli settlement, and Britain should realign its policy accordingly. Britain’s oil supplies and trade routes to the southern hemisphere and Far East depended on free passage of the Canal; the British did not believe Egypt capable of running the Canal unaided, nor that it would be kept open to international traffic. Nasser’s announcement on 26 July seemed to pose an existential threat.

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The British Government’s misperception was that a shared Anglo-American belief that the Soviet Union was opening up a Cold War front in the Middle East meant agreement on regional policy. Some in Britain, looking back to wartime liaison and to the unseating of Mossadeq in 1953, assumed that the Americans, too, wanted a more cooperative partner than Nasser, and saw Arab insurgent nationalism as a threat.

But the US Government thought Britain and France were motivated by colonialism, and President Eisenhower declared he was ‘determined not to have the United States used as a cat’s paw to protect British oil interests’. The US did not rely on the Suez Canal for oil supplies, and was prepared to believe Egypt could run it and would keep it open.

Arab nationalism was seen as a healthy anti-imperialist activity, and the nationalisation of the Canal a natural demonstration of it (to British irritation, the US did not extend the same attitude to its own activities in South-East Asia).

Withdrawing funding from the Aswan Dam was motivated in part by domestic considerations in a Presidential election year. Though alienated by Nasser’s arms deal with Czechoslovakia and recognition of Communist China, the Americans still thought it better to keep him in power as a bulwark against the USSR. The poor relationship between Eden and US Secretary of State Dulles, who thought Britain was in decline and seeking to restore its imperial status, made things worse. For the US, Anglo-French ‘neo-colonialism’ was not only self-deluding but a threat to American commerce.

US intelligence, close to Nasser, thought the Egyptian leader was ‘a master of our kind of game’; British intelligence, under-resourced in the region and suffering from a series of spy scandals, did not have the same access nor share US insights. The British, thought CIA officer Miles Copeland, believed they ‘should get rid of Nasser, hang the practical consequences, just to show the world that an upstart like him couldn’t get away with so ostentatiously twisting the lion’s tail’.

And yet the US understanding of Nasser’s position and policies player was in itself a misperception. It underestimated Nasser’s ambitions as leader of the Arab world, the extent of his relations with Moscow and the implications of Arab nationalism for the stability of the region, for Egypt’s relations with the US and for the prospects of an ArabIsraeli peace process. Nasser was indeed a game player, but the rules by which he played were understood better in Jerusalem, Khartoum, Moscow or Riyadh than they were in London and Washington.

Nasser got it right The Egyptian leader displayed the most realistic appreciation of the situation. Though he framed Canal nationalisation as a direct response to the US decision to withdraw funding for the projected Aswan Dam, it had clearly been in preparation for some time.

The wealthy, Anglo-French Suez Canal Company’s control over a waterway that ran through Egyptian territory and employed many Egyptians was an obvious focus for nationalist agitation.

Since 1954 the Egyptian Government had presented the Company with a series of demands aimed at undermining its position. Egyptian technicians, many Soviet-trained, could run the Canal and keep it open to international traffic. Taking over the Canal would serve the dual purpose of increasing revenues and demonstrating Egypt’s defiance of Western ‘imperialism’. It would also strengthen Nasser’s hand against internal dissent, particularly from the powerful Moslem Brotherhood.

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At the same time, Nasser understood Egypt’s pivotal position in Cold War politics. He knew the Soviet Union was interested in extending influence in the region, not in direct aggression, but that both Britain and the US feared the Russians sought to open a new Cold War front in the Middle East. He knew the Americans hoped he would focus Arab opposition to Soviet ambitions. He knew the British disliked him but were over-committed militarily in the region at a time when Israel (supplied with arms by France) was threatening their treaty partner, Jordan.

Playing both ends against the middle was a tricky game, but Nasser reckoned US support for direct Western military action was unlikely, and that the UN would accept his assurances that the Canal would remain open. Control over the Canal also offered further opportunities to cause trouble for Israel by means short of war in revenge for Arab defeat in 1948. As Nasser later told his senior officers, after the Suez crisis was over: ‘The price of regular warfare is high and the opportunities to start it are infrequent . . . Irregular warfare costs us little and costs our enemies dear.’

Further reading Keith Kyle, Suez (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991).

Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991).

Miles Copeland, The Game Player (London: Aurum Press, 1989).

Gill Bennett, Six Moments of Crisis: Inside British Foreign Policy (Oxford: OUP, 2013).

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Spy George Blake escapes from Wormwood Scrubs: 22 October 1966 Posted on: 21 October 2016 The sentence was such that it almost became a question of honour to challenge it . . . like a POW, I had a duty to escape.1

‘Double Agent breaks out of jail’ On 11 November 2016, George Blake, the great survivor of those who spied for the Soviet Union against Britain in the early Cold War years, will celebrate his 94th birthday in Russia, where he is hailed as a hero. Fifty years ago, on 22 October 1966, after serving 5 years of a 42-year sentence, he scaled the wall of Wormwood Scrubs prison on a ladder made from knitting needles.

Blake was helped over the wall and hidden by Irishman Sean Bourke, who was sentenced to 7 years in 1961 for sending a bomb in a biscuit tin to a policeman. Then Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, anti-nuclear campaigners who had spent a short time in Wormwood Scrubs with Blake and saw him as a fellow political prisoner, organized his onward journey. Just before Christmas 1966 Randle, with his wife and children, concealed Blake under the seats in the back of their campervan and drove him across the Channel to an East German border checkpoint. His KGB controller, Sergei Kondrashev, then arranged Blake’s onward journey to Moscow.

Codenamed DIOMID An officer in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6) who had been captured by North Korean soldiers in 1950, Blake returned from captivity to work for Soviet as well as British intelligence, betraying many agents who were later executed, including a network in East Germany, as well as informing the Soviet authorities of the existence of the Anglo-American listening tunnel under Berlin.

Arrested following intelligence received from a Polish defector, Blake’s sentencing in May 1961 led to the appointment of the Radcliffe Committee on Security Procedures in the Public Service.2 According to the official history of MI5, Moscow Centre considered Blake—codenamed DIOMID—so important that only his controller had been permitted to know his real identity or that he was an SIS officer.3 As the existence of SIS was not avowed officially in 1966, on his escape Blake could not be identified in this way in Parliament or the British press, though the foreign media were

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less reticent. Blake’s escape received sensational media coverage and caused a good deal of public, as well as official alarm.

Initially it was assumed that he had been ‘sprung’ by Soviet or Eastern Bloc authorities (Special Branch even received a tip off that he was being smuggled out of the country in an instrument case belong to a harpist with the Czechoslovakia State Orchestra). But the evidence suggests arrangements were made by Blake himself, with considerable assistance from sympathetic fellow-inmates in Wormwood Scrubs, where he had been a model prisoner, helping with literacy classes. The prison authorities, however, had considered him a ‘unique prisoner not to be trusted’; according to the Deputy Governor, ‘This man must always be under the closest supervision. He is a security risk in every sense of the word, caution always’.4 ‘A pattern of wet impotence’5 Blake’s escape was a cause of embarrassment as well as alarm, not least for Home Secretary Roy Jenkins. It was the latest in what seemed like a long list of high-profile escapes on Jenkins’ watch, including Great Train Robbers Charlie Wilson and Ronnie Biggs in 1964 and 1965; 13 prisoners with violent records who escaped on 25 June 1966 while being moved from Winchester to Parkhurst; and 6 prisoners from Blake’s own wing of Wormwood Scrubs, whose escape on 5 June had led to tightened security.

Jenkins’ tenure as Home Secretary had produced a notable series of liberalising legislation, for which he faced much criticism from the Conservative Opposition, and also from the Metropolitan Police because of his refusal to restore the death penalty, abolition of corporal punishment in prisons and his call for the recruitment of black police officers.

The shooting of three policemen in Shepherd’s Bush on 12 August 1966 increased press hysteria.

An effective Parliamentary performance by Jenkins, and a weak one by Edward Heath meant the government defeated a motion of censure easily and also won subsequent votes on capital punishment and a Criminal Justice Bill; just before, as Jenkins points out in his memoirs, 10 more prisoners escaped from prison in December 1966, including Frank Mitchell, the ‘Mad Axeman’. ‘My nerve’, Jenkins admits, ‘was a bit shaken’. 6 A legacy of spies For Harold Wilson’s Labour Government, the Blake case was part of a much bigger legacy of espionage cases inherited from his Conservative predecessors. In the early 1960s Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had been faced with a series of espionage cases, including the Portland Spy Case in 1961, when Ethel Gee and Harry Houghton, their Soviet controller ‘Gordon Lonsdale’ (Konon Molody) and spies ‘Peter and Helen Kroger’ (Morris and Lona Cohen) were convicted of spying; Blake; John Vassall, a clerk in the Admiralty arrested in September 1962; and the defection of Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge spies, in 1963. In addition, the Director General of MI5, Roger Hollis, told Macmillan in the spring of 1963 that his deputy, Graham Mitchell, was under investigation as a Soviet penetration agent; an investigation that, like the subsequent suspicion of Hollis himself, proved groundless.

All this caused a major headache for Macmillan, so that the Profumo affair in 1963— which looked like, but was not an espionage case—was the last straw and a major factor in the Prime Minister’s resignation. At the same time, there was increasing evidence of

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Soviet espionage activity within the UK, a problem that was to grow during the 1960s and culminate in the mass expulsion of Soviet intelligence officers in 1971.

For the Wilson Government, taking office in 1964 meant taking on the management of imprisoned spies and ongoing cases, as well as tackling the Soviets about their ‘unacceptable activities’; an unwelcome legacy, particularly as there was initially a great deal of Labour suspicion of the security and intelligence services. In this context, the escape of George Blake seemed sinister as well as alarming. There is still a lot we do not know about Blake, despite the publication of his memoirs. When Randle and Pottle published their book about the escape in 1990, the press called it a ‘Boy’s Own Yarn that came true’; but neither Blake’s career, nor his escape, was a laughing matter.

Further Reading (in addition to notes) George Blake, No Other Choice (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990).

Sean Bourke, The Springing of George Blake (London: Mayflower Books, 1971).

David Murphy, Sergei Kondrashev and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs KGB in the Cold War (Yale University Press, 1997).

Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, The Blake Escape (London: Harrap Books, 1990).

Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London: Abacus, 2009).

Notes 1. Blake, quoted in Roger Hermiston, The Greatest Traitor: The Secret Lives of Agent George Blake (London: Aurum Press, 2013), p. 273.

2. Parts of the Radcliffe Committee’s Report, recommending improvements in security and combating Communist penetration in government services, were published as a White Paper in April 1962 (Cmd 1681), though not the section referring to Blake’s case.

Files relating to the Committee are also available at The National Archives (TNA).

3. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 48.

4. Hermiston, p. 265.

5. Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre (London: Politics edn, 2006, p. 201).

6. Jenkins, p. 204.

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Fidel Castro enters Havana in triumph: 8 January 1959 Posted on: 8 January 2017 As Cuban as palm trees The death of Fidel Castro at the age of 90 on 26 November 2016 marked the end of an extraordinary life: head of the Cuban government from 1959 until he handed over to his brother Raul in 2008, Castro was the longest serving non-royal leader of the 20th century and survivor of more than 600 assassination attempts by the CIA. Che Guevara & Fidel Castro (Alberto Korda, Museo Che Guevara, Havana Cuba)

Castro may have ruled over a small island in the Caribbean, but he was to become a powerful international figure, his influence felt from Moscow to Washington, from Buenos Aires to Cairo, from Caracas to Luanda. The most dangerous crisis of the Cold War was played out in Cuba in 1962. And yet Castro described himself as being ‘as Cuban as palm trees’, and the success of the revolutionary movement he led with his brother and Che Guevara, seizing power as the dictator Batista fled the island, came as a surprise to almost everyone—Fidel included.

The Castro brothers had formed an underground movement in the early 1950s to try and overthrow the corrupt regime of the dictator Fulgencio Batista, under whose rule Cuba had become a haven for organized crime while the general population was brutalized.

After an unsuccessful rising against Batista in 1953 the Castro brothers were jailed for 15 years, but were released after 2 and allowed to go into exile in Mexico. There they met the charismatic Argentinian doctor Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, who returned to Cuba with them and a small band of followers in 1956. Joining with mountain bandits, from their stronghold in Sierra Maestra Fidel and his followers smuggled in arms, mounted guerrilla raids, blew up bridges, kidnapped Americans and cut off the ports from which sugar was exported, damaging the economy. Batista finally fled on New Year’s Eve 1958, and Fidel, at the age of 30, entered Havana in triumph on 8 January 1959.

The eyes of the world were not on Cuba In the broader Cold War context, the international focus in 1958-9 was on Europe and the Middle East, not Latin America. In 1958 Khrushchev rose to supreme power in the Soviet Union, swiftly removing opponents and bringing his own supporters into power. A twin strategy of building up Soviet arms while calling for a nuclear test ban and initiating disarmament talks, plus increasing the pressure on the West over the status of Berlin and a divided Germany, kept the US Government headed by President Eisenhower

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preoccupied, while providing ammunition for Eisenhower’s political opponents. The President himself was recovering from a stroke, and beset by internal political difficulties.

The state of the US economy and allegations of corruption against advisers close to the President led to a heavy Republican defeat in the mid-term elections on 4 November 1958.

There were also major tensions between the USA and China over the status of Formosa (Taiwan), growing concern over Soviet influence in Egypt, and a proxy arms race in the Middle East as the US, Soviet Union and France supported opposing powers in the region. In July 1958, a coup in Baghdad overthrew the monarchy and led to the US and UK sending troops into the Lebanon and Jordan, a show of force intended to deter Nasser from becoming closer to Moscow.

Meanwhile, the UK Government under Harold Macmillan was preoccupied with unsuccessful efforts to promote a European Free Trade Area (EFTA) as a rival to the newly-established European Economic Community. No one was paying much attention to Latin America, let alone to Cuba, which fell into Castro’s lap almost before anyone had noticed.

The only leader in town The Americans regarded Latin America and the Caribbean as their back yard; Cuba was only 90 miles off the US coast, and a lot of Americans had business interests there. But Latin America had not been high on the agenda of the Eisenhower administration since 1954, when the Arbenz regime in Guatemala had been overthrown with CIA help.

In the region American policy was perceived as exploitative economically and supportive of dictators, and on his Latin American tour in 1958 Vice-President Richard Nixon was met by hostility (and rotten eggs). Although he returned home to advise that more support was needed to prevent the spread of communism, little changed. The stage was set for Castro, the charismatic and dynamic leader of a broadly-based anti-Batista movement, to increase his pressure on a regime with that Washington was unwilling to prop up.

At first Castro received some support in the US; he was not yet an avowed Communist, and it seemed possible he would bring a welcome boost to Cuba and its economy. A week after his triumphal entry into Havana, US Secretary of State Dulles wrote to Eisenhower that Castro’s Provisional Government appeared ‘free from Communist taint’ with ‘indications that it intends to pursue friendly relations with the United States’.

But Castro’s opposition to American economic interests, lack of interest in holding elections and programme of nationalization soon alienated the Eisenhower administration, which feared the example of a successful revolution might be emulated elsewhere in Latin America.

By March 1960 Eisenhower had approved the creation of a government-in-exile in preparation for Castro’s fall; however, CIA confidence that Castro could be unseated quickly was misplaced.

Nixon gets it right Before US-Cuban relations deteriorated badly, Castro visited the US in April 1959, though the visit was an awkward one and led to no meeting of minds. Vice-President

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Nixon commented: ‘whatever we may think of him, he is going to be a great factor in the development of Cuba and very possibly in Latin American affairs generally . . . we have no choice but at least to try to orient him in the right direction’ (FRUS 1958-60, vol. vi, p.

476). The first part of this judgement proved to be an understatement, but Castro was to remain resistant to ‘orientation’ until the day he died.

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US President announces the ‘Truman Doctrine’: 12 March 1947 Posted on: 10 March 2017

President Harry S. Truman addressing a joint session of Congress (Harry S. Truman Library & Museum

The missionary strain in the character of Americans leads many of them to feel that they have now received a call to extend to other countries the blessings with which the Almighty has endowed their own1 Seventy years ago, on 12 March 1947, President Harry Truman addressed a joint session of Congress and asked them to vote $400m for financial assistance to Greece and Turkey. The British government, which had been providing economic and military help for Greece and Turkey, said it could no longer afford to do so. On 19 February, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had instructed HM Ambassador to tell the State Department that British financial support for Greece and Turkey would stop at the end of March. Truman’s approach to Congress was based on the belief that without financial support Greece and Turkey would succumb to communist expansion, and that only the United States could prevent the extension of Soviet domination to Europe, the Middle East and Asia Bankruptcy and bad weather In the spring of 1947 the British Labour government faced a serious financial crisis, crippling global responsibilities and a deteriorating balance of payments, while the US loan negotiated in 1945 was fast running out. Britain could not produce enough for its own consumption or for export, and was forced to rely on dollar imports while American prices were rising. In addition, the government was committed to an ambitious programme of domestic reform. The situation was already alarming when extreme weather during January and February—the worst since 1880—brought the country to a standstill. Electricity for industry was cut off completely on 10 February, and domestic supplies restricted severely. Transport services were reduced, greyhound racing was banned—even the BBC’s Third Programme (now Radio 3) was suspended. On the day the Truman Doctrine was announced, the House of Commons was in the middle of a 3day debate during which the Conservative opposition was highly critical of the government’s economic planning.

The global context The financial crisis affected Britain’s overseas policy and commitments as well. The government did not see its request to the US to pay for Greece and Turkey as an

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abdication of responsibility, but a reluctant acceptance that ‘financial weakness has necessarily increased the need to coordinate our foreign policy with that of the only country which is able effectively to wield extensive economic influence—namely the United States.’2 A snapshot of some of the foreign policy challenges the Attlee government faced during the first two weeks of March 1947 shows what they were up against.

On 10 March the Conference of Foreign Ministers meeting opened in Moscow, where Bevin and US Secretary of State George C. Marshall continued long-running and frustrating discussions with the Russians over the future of divided Germany, reparations, peace treaties, German level of industry and the Soviet threat to the freedom of Eastern Europe. Talks continued until 24 April but little agreement was reached.

En route to Moscow, Bevin travelled to Dunkirk to sign an Anglo-French Treaty of Alliance; then stopped off briefly in Poland where a new communist-dominated government had been elected in what Western powers felt were rigged elections.

On 2 March, Martial Law was declared in Palestine after a terrorist attack in Jerusalem; the British mandate was in crisis and had been referred to the UN. On 5-6 March there was a House of Commons debate on India, against a backdrop of inter-communal rioting, following the announcement in February that Britain would transfer power to an Indian government no later than June 1948.

Problems remained in implementing the agreement on the fusion of the British and American zones of Germany, where Britain struggled to obtain enough food and raw materials to supply the population in its sector.

On 5 March the UK Representative at the UN warned that the Soviet delegate was about to veto a settlement of the Corfu Channel incident when British ships had been damaged by mines off the Albanian coast (it was not settled until 1996).

Also on 5 March, the head of the Joint Staff Mission in Washington told the Prime Minister that the US Chiefs of Staff opposed the development of an atomic plant in the UK to develop a British bomb.

Did the British ‘put one over’ on the Americans?

Some complained the British request for help was sprung upon the US government at short notice. But the Minister of Defence had warned Secretary of State Byrnes in October 1946 that Britain’s financial situation meant cutting back support for Greece and Turkey. Byrnes agreed that the US would help in view of the high strategic importance of the Near East. But no concrete US proposals were forthcoming, and in Bevin’s absence at international meetings from October-December 1946, the issue hung fire. Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton told the Cabinet in February 1947 that spending on Greece and Turkey must end in March, and Bevin then approached Marshall. Though some have argued Bevin used the issue to draw the Americans forcibly into the European arena, he was very reluctant, as the recently-published volume of Documents on British Policy Overseas shows, to approach them over Greece and Turkey, and only agreed to do so because of Treasury warnings.

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The news that Britain could no longer sustain its responsibilities was shocking to some Congressmen and to the American public, but there was general acceptance that the US had no option and the response was swift and generous. As Dean Acheson told the British Ambassador on 1 March, the US was ‘going over its overshoes’ to meet the British request.3 The Truman Doctrine, as it became known, was a turning point in US post-war foreign policy, and paved the way for the Marshall Plan, or European Recovery Programme for the rehabilitation of Europe, announced a few months later.

Suggestions for further reading Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series I, Volume XI, European Recovery and the Search for Western Security (London: Routledge, 2017).

Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (London: W.W. Norton, 1969).

Robert Frazier, ‘Did Britain Start the Cold War? Bevin and the Truman Doctrine’, The Historical Journal, vol. 27, No. 3, Sept. 1984.

Notes 1. Telegram from the British Embassy in Washington commenting on the Truman Doctrine, 14 March 1947, printed in Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series I, Volume XI, No. 62.

2. Memo of 12 February 1947, printed ibid., No. 48.

3. Washington telegram 1311 of 1 March 1947, printed ibid., No. 54.

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Devaluation of Sterling: 18 November 1967 Posted on: 17 November 2017 ‘Faith, hope and parity’ On Saturday, 18 November 1967, sterling was devalued by 14% from $2.80 to $2.40. Although rumours of impending devaluation had been widespread in the press, including in Europe and the United States, the announcement by the Labour government headed by Harold Wilson administered a severe shock to international confidence and to domestic opinion in the UK. James Callaghan Appearing on television the following day, the (Ron Kroon/Anefo, Dutch National Archives) Prime Minister’s assurance, that ‘the pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank’ was worth no less than before, was seen as a damaging blunder.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Callaghan, had vowed to resign if sterling were devalued, and was replaced by Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, who spent the next six weeks drawing up a programme of swingeing cuts at home and abroad that were to be fought over bitterly in Cabinet in January 1968.

Yet devaluation, despite being an unmentionable word in Cabinet, ministerial or official discussions (papers referring to it were burned), had long been on the cards; many thought it should have happened long before, perhaps even when the government took office in 1964. Since then ministers had struggled with recurrent economic difficulties, including a sterling crisis in the summer of 1966 only weathered with US support.

In 1967, a combination of domestic and overseas events would make devaluation inevitable. But for Wilson and Callaghan, refusal to countenance devaluation had been a point of principle, symbolic of a range of issues, economic, moral, personal and political.

‘The government was in headlong retreat in the face of forces it was no longer able to control’ The Labour government had weathered a number of economic storms since 1964, but actually achieved a budget surplus in the first half of 1967. However, from the summer onwards a series of events destabilised the economy, in particular the Arab-Israeli SixDay War in June, leading to the closure of the Suez Canal and subsequent sharp rise in oil and other commodity prices. The Americans were unwilling to bail sterling out yet again, particularly since defence cuts entailed withdrawing British forces from East of Suez at a time when the US Administration was embroiled in Vietnam.

The government was also beset by a range of complex foreign policy issues, including Sino-British tension after the torching of the British Embassy in Peking in August, riots in

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Hong Kong, civil war in Nigeria, sanctions against Ian Smith’s regime in Rhodesia and the early withdrawal of British forces from Aden. HMG’s global responsibilities were both heavy and unsustainable, further weakening sterling Also, although Britain’s renewed application to join the Common Market was not rejected formally until December 1967, General de Gaulle had already said ‘non’, and the Six EEC members were busy with what Harold Wilson called ‘financial manoeuvrings’, spreading rumours about British economic instability that led to heavy drawings on sterling.

The situation was made worse by damaging strikes on docks and railways in September 1967, further increasing the trade deficit and leading to a rise in the bank rate. By early November, the outpouring of sterling, combined with rumours that Britain was seeking an international loan led even those most opposed to devaluation realise that it was inevitable.

Devaluation as a ‘moral issue’ The word ‘moral’ was often used, both at the time and in retrospectively, about the 1967 decision to devalue. Transport Minister Barbara Castle wrote in her diary of Callaghan’s ‘high moral tone’ in the House of Commons when describing devaluation as a defeat for government policy; Foreign Secretary George Brown, together with the TUC, took the traditional Labour view that devaluation was a betrayal of the working classes; the Bank of England was opposed on principle, although Alec Cairncross, Head of the Treasury’s Economic Section, told the Chancellor it was his ‘moral responsibility and public duty’ to act.

Callaghan wrote about the ‘emotional effects’ of a decision that seemed to him to reflect badly both on Labour and on Britain as a trading country. For Harold Wilson, the memory of devaluation in 1949, when he was President of the Board of Trade, made him very reluctant to take a decision he felt could damage his government as it had that of Clement Attlee.

‘Did you ever see the knife put more deliberately into a leader’s back?'

But however high Callaghan’s moral tone, the way the Chancellor handled the devaluation and its aftermath were widely perceived as a power play in his rivalry with Wilson. Conscious of this political backdrop, officials tended to be over-cautious in their advice, lacking a major figure like JM Keynes—who believed one should change one’s mind when circumstances changed—to challenge prevailing orthodoxy.

The press were quick to contrast the over-optimism of the Prime Minister’s broadcast with the Chancellor’s solemn speech in the House, and rumours of a power struggle were rife. Wilson, always alert to a threat to his position, was certainly aware of this when appointing Jenkins, rather than Crosland, to the Exchequer, while giving Callaghan the Home Office rather than letting him cause trouble on the back benches while, as Richard Crossman put it, ‘intriguing with the City’.

‘Devaluation was something one occasionally did, because one was forced to, but never recommended’ Harold Wilson had both personal and political reasons for delaying devaluation until it was unavoidable. But as Prime Minister, he also bore the responsibility for the whole

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gamut of government policy, domestic and foreign, as well as trying to maintain an uneasy balance between different interest groups within his Cabinet, the Labour Party, and the Trade Unions. Those who criticised the devaluation as too little, too late, badly handled or ineffective, rarely appreciated the pressures faced by key ministers. Like Callaghan, Harold Wilson was reluctant to take a step that implied that Labour’s economic policies were a failure. But in the end, ‘events which could not have been foreseen a week earlier, except in nightmares, took charge with a rush’. In such circumstances, Prime Ministers face hard choices, both in taking decisions and in explaining them afterwards. The 1967 devaluation is a good illustration of this.

Further Reading ‘Faith, hope and parity’ - Phrase used in the analysis of the 1967 devaluation decision in Jock Bruce-Gardyne and Nigel Lawson, The Power Game: An examination of decisionmaking in government (London: Macmillan, 1976).

‘The government was in headlong retreat in the face of forces it was no longer able to control’. Kenneth O. Morgan, Callaghan: A Life (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 266.

‘Did you ever see the knife put more deliberately into a leader’s back?’ Barbara Castle.

The Castle Diaries 1964-70 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), p. 328.

‘Devaluation was something one occasionally did, because one was forced to, but never recommended’. Bruce-Gardyne and Lawson, p. 143. ‘events which could not have been foreseen a week earlier, except in nightmares, took charge with a rush’. Harold Wilson, The Labour Government 1964-70 (London: Penguin, 1974), p. 570.

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Formation of the Cheka, the first Soviet security and intelligence agency: 20 December 1917 Posted on: 20 December 2017 The Soviets would not last two days without the activities of the Cheka, but with the Cheka, the Soviet State was safe.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Defending the Revolution Badge of honour marking the 5th anniversary of the Cheka-GPU (Wikimedia Commons)

Before the October Revolution in 1917 that put the Bolsheviks in power in Russia, their long-exiled leader, Lenin, had insisted publicly that in a proletarian dictatorship there would be no need for a police force, let alone a security service. In fact, he had already concluded that a coercive organisation would be needed to ensure the success of the revolution and neutralise political opposition.

The Cheka, established on 20 December 1917, was in many ways a reincarnation of the Tsarist security service, the Okhrana, making use of its methods and in some cases its personnel, as well. The Cheka’s first head, the Pole Feliks Dzerzhinsky, had spent years in Tsarist prisons or exile, and had learned his tradecraft from the Okhrana.

The name ‘Cheka’ was a contraction of Chrezvychayneyye komissii—emergency committees—itself a shorter form of the ‘All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Sabotage and Speculation’. The Cheka later evolved into what eventually became the KGB; many KGB officers called themselves Chekisty and received their salaries on the 20th of the month in honour of the Cheka’s ‘birthday’.

Even today, the term remains in use as shorthand for Russian security and intelligence officers. The Cheka’s symbols were the shield and sword, the first to defend the revolution and the sword to smite its enemies.

Spreading the Revolution Initially focussed on internal opposition, the Cheka began very soon to send agents abroad to gather intelligence and promote revolution by covert means, drawing on the long experience of clandestine illegal action by the Bolsheviks in exile. Though the overthrow of capitalism globally was an avowed aim of the Bolsheviks, they also found it useful domestically to spread the idea that there was an orchestrated Western capitalist conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet regime. Uncovering plots, real or imaginary (often instigated by Chekists) enabled the Bolshevik leaders to claim victory over counterrevolutionary enemies, and to spread rumours justifying repressive measures: an early

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use of fake news, and recognition that the appearance of security was as important as its reality.

British intelligence versus the Bolsheviks The British intelligence establishment, though focussed primarily on the war with Germany, viewed the Bolshevik takeover and the formation of the Cheka with some concern. Both MI5, the domestic intelligence organisation (Security Service), and its overseas counterpart MI1c (later Secret Intelligence Service, MI6) had expanded enormously during the First World War, although both struggled with attempts by the War Office and Directorate of Military Intelligence to control their activities and by 1917 had been forced to reorganise. For MI5, the Bolshevik takeover increased the risk of subversion in Britain, as well as posing a global threat throughout the Empire (MI5 worked closely with Indian Political Intelligence, set up jointly with the Indian Government to detect seditious and subversive activities overseas).

MI1c was involved in counter-intelligence and counter-espionage activities against the Bolsheviks within Russia, in bordering territories and further afield. Much of its reporting from Russia, from officers like the novelist Somerset Maugham and the future Cabinet minister Sir Samuel Hoare, was shared with the United States through Sir William Wiseman, the British baronet and MI1c officer who established a remarkable liaison channel with the White House. There was no coordinated American intelligence effort at this time, and British intelligence exercised considerable influence on the US administration, particularly President Woodrow Wilson who rejected attempts by his own military advisers to strengthen American intelligence capability.

A major success story in the First World War was in the field of Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), where starting from virtually nothing in 1914, Britain had built up a considerable capability at the War Office, on the Western Front, in the Middle East and most notably in the Admiralty where by the end of 1917 almost complete mastery of German naval cryptographic methods had been established.

It was through the activities of Room 40 and Admiral ‘Blinker’ Hall that the intercepted Zimmerman telegram announcing Germany’s intention of resuming unrestricted submarine warfare was brought to the attention of the Americans, leading to their entry into the war in April 1917. Both War Office and Admiralty SIGINT sections already had some success against Russian ciphers, but their anti-Bolshevik capabilities were to expand greatly at the end of the war when they combined to form the Government Code and Cypher School, precursor of GCHQ. The First World War context The Bolshevik takeover, leading to the armistice between Russia and Germany on 16 December 1917 (four days before the Cheka was formed), came at a time when Allied prospects in the First World War seemed grim. Few American troops had yet landed in Europe, there had been huge losses during the horrific battle of Passchendaele, Haig’s attack on Cambrai had been pushed back, and Russia’s collapse meant that Turkey, no longer pressed on its Caucasian borders, was free to expand eastwards towards India, with German support. By the end of 1917 Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, had taken over the strategic conduct of the war, with a shake-up of the military leadership and an Allied Supreme War Council formed in cooperation with French premier Georges Clemenceau.

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There were some hopeful developments. On 11 December the British army entered Jerusalem after Allenby pushed the Turks out of Gaza (thereby making it possible to implement Balfour’s promise to establish a National Home for the Jewish People in Palestine); victory in the submarine war meant that much-needed American supplies could cross the Atlantic safely; and within Germany itself there was serious internal unrest and disputes between the political and military leadership about war aims.

The stage was set for a major ‘push’ by both sides on the Western front, ultimately leading to Allied victory in November 1918. That victory was to be followed by a Russian Civil War and abortive attempts by the Western allies to support those seeking the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime. But the Bolsheviks, and the Cheka, survived; and Western governments, together with their intelligence agencies, had to find a way to deal with them and counter their subversive activities.

Further reading Vasily Mitrokhin, ‘Chekisms’: A KGB Anthology (The Urasov Press, 2008).

Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (London: Penguin, 1999).

Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence from Washington to Bush (London: HarperCollins, 1995).

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The resignation of Anthony Eden: 20 February 1938 Posted on: 20 February 2018 On Sunday, 20 February 1938, after two days of fraught Cabinet discussion, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that he must resign rather than agree to enter into early talks with the Italian government led by Mussolini.

Eden’s resignation has often been portrayed as a principled rejection of appeasement, but in fact, as the Cabinet discussions showed, he and Chamberlain differed not on principle Sir Anthony Eden (National Portrait Gallery) but on method and timing. Eden felt Mussolini must offer some sign of good faith first, such as stopping Italian submarines attacking British ships off the coast of Spain. Chamberlain, though he described Italy as a ‘hysterical woman’, felt it important to show Mussolini ‘that he might have other friends beside Herr Hitler’.

Neither Chamberlain nor Eden saw appeasement as a dirty word: it meant the pacification of Europe, a state profoundly to be desired. Both men accepted the need to improve relations with Italy, to weaken the Rome-Berlin axis and avoid fighting two major European enemies at once (with an aggressive Japan waiting in the wings); both rejected Hitler’s ambitions for a free hand in Eastern Europe and Russia and for territorial changes brought about by force; both accepted that conflict with Hitler’s Nazi Germany was probably inevitable, but that delaying that confrontation was essential to give time for Britain’s rearmament. So why did Eden resign? The reasons lie in the personal and psychological, as well as political context.

Eden and Chamberlain: men with a mission Eden and Chamberlain had poor personal chemistry and had become exasperated with each other. Each thought himself better qualified to work for peace and to delay, if not avoid war. Eden had longer professional experience in international affairs, but Chamberlain had been dabbling—many said interfering—in foreign affairs long before he became Prime Minister in May 1937, and understood the costs of rearmament. A tough-minded man with a strong belief in his own convictions, Chamberlain was impatient with the professional caution of the Foreign Office. He relied on his own advisers, principally senior civil servant Sir Horace Wilson, and Sir Joseph Ball, former MI5 officer now Director of Research at Conservative Central Office, for information and back-channel diplomacy.

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Eden was also confident in his own judgement, encouraged in this by his FO officials, who followed the line that Britain should reject territorial change by force but neither say it would, nor that it would not fight in any given circumstance. The support of men like Oliver Harvey, who told Eden he was the most important person in the Cabinet and that the government would fall if he resigned, increased the Foreign Secretary’s willingness to dispute Chamberlain’s authority. Sir Alexander Cadogan, FO Permanent UnderSecretary, thought Eden ‘exaggerates as much one way as PM does on the other’.

Facing the Dictators: the European context The British government had been actively seeking better relations with both Nazi Germany and Italy since the summer of 1937, Chamberlain taking the opportunity of Eden’s holidays to see if anything might be done to deflect Hitler and Mussolini from aggression, Eden working through the League of Nations and other international groupings. The Chiefs of Staff insisted that Britain would not be ready for war before 1939, and refused to enter into any meaningful staff talks with the French, whom they did not trust.

In Cabinet on 16 February 1938 the Minister for the Coordination of Defence pressed for action to reduce the number of potential enemies since Britain was not equipped to defend the Empire against three major powers. British forces were already stretched: for example, 20,000 troops were committed against the Arab rebellion in Palestine which had erupted again in November 1937. Britain’s overseas intelligence organisation, the Secret Intelligence Service, was overstretched and underfunded, and unable to supply reliable information on German or Italian military preparations. Military and intelligence chiefs alike agreed that Britain was not ready to go to war.

Hitler and Mussolini also hoped to avoid war with Britain while achieving their own ambitions. Mussolini was agitating for recognition of his conquest of Ethiopia, and sought dominance in the Mediterranean; Hitler, ostensibly angling for colonial concessions in Africa, was firming up his plans for action against Austria and Czechoslovakia.

At the beginning of February 1938 Hitler engineered a major purge of the military, assuming personal command of the armed forces (leading the Chief of SIS to try and recruit disaffected German officers). In the Soviet Union, although purges were decimating the military hierarchy, Stalin played all ends against the middle, developing his links with Germany while promoting Russian influence in Western Europe. The backdrop was the Spanish Civil War, a proxy conflict with the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy all trying out their latest armaments against, or in support of General Franco.

International efforts to negotiate a peaceful solution or impose non-intervention had failed.

The Far Eastern Context The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in July 1937 threatened British interests, particularly in China. Japanese policy was to dominate mainland China before risking armed conflict with other major powers, but Tokyo had strong links to Berlin and Rome.

Chamberlain sought back-channel negotiations with Japan to try and avert the danger of a Triple Alliance against Britain; Eden put his faith more in the Americans, though Roosevelt, while making speeches about lawless behaviour, was unwilling to commit the US to action. Chamberlain considered it ‘best and safest to count on nothing from the

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Americans but words’, but though Eden shared his frustration with American isolationism, he was horrified when in January 1938 Chamberlain gave a dismissive reply to a rather vague Roosevelt initiative for a peace plan. FO policy was to keep the Americans close at all costs, and the profound disagreement between Eden and Chamberlain on this point contributed to the crisis culminating in Eden’s resignation.

In the end, it was personal incompatibility rather than policy that was decisive in Eden’s resignation. As Cadogan put it: ‘an ordinary man ought to have stayed. A., being what he is, was right to go.’ Over the past 80 years, that resignation has enhanced Eden’s reputation, while Chamberlain’s has declined. In the context of British policy, this is unfair.

Suggestions for further reading Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939, Second Series, Volumes XIX and XXI. George C. Peden, ‘Sir Horace Wilson and Appeasement’, Historical Journal, 2010, 53(4).

Gill Bennett, ‘The Roosevelt peace plan of 1938’, FCO Historians Occasional Papers, No. 1, 1987.

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George Brown resigns as Foreign Secretary: 15 March 1968 Posted on: 15 March 2018 George Brown (left) and Harold Wilson in The Hague, 1967 (Ron Kroon/Anefo, Dutch National Archives)

Recalling those days one is not only impressed, but almost oppressed, with the sense of how many issues we were faced with and had to handle at the same time.1 When George Brown stormed out of Downing St in the early hours of 15 March 1968, it was not the first time he had threatened to resign. On this occasion the trigger was his allegation that he had been deliberately excluded from an emergency ministerial meeting called in response to an American request to close the London foreign exchange market during an international gold crisis. His intemperate outburst in front of other ministers, accusing Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson of lying, crossed a line.

This time he did not retract his resignation, and this time Wilson accepted it.

Wilson and Brown later gave very different versions of the events of 14 to 15 March: the Prime Minister asserting that all present agreed Brown’s behaviour was intolerable; the Foreign Secretary accusing Wilson of taking decisions in a ‘presidential’ fashion over the heads of ministers.2 Wilson’s canny but manipulative prime ministerial style is welldocumented, as well as his habit of relying on a small group of advisers including Marcia Williams.

George Brown’s mercurial temperament, sometimes exacerbated by alcohol, is also well-known: as Denis Healey put it, ‘when he was good he was very good, but when he was bad he was horrid’, though Foreign Office officials, according to Sir Denis Greenhill, found they could forgive his ‘instability, intolerance and cruelty’ because of his ‘undoubted brilliance and the rightness of many of his policy aims’.3 Nevertheless, Wilson and Brown were men of exceptional ability who had worked together for years, successfully if not always harmoniously. Wilson appreciated Brown’s talents and judgement, and Brown recognised Wilson’s toughness and skill in leading Labour to victory in 1964 and to re-election with an increased majority in 1966, keeping a fractious Cabinet of ‘big beasts’ together.

So why did the break come on 15 March? Loss of patience and mutual exasperation played a part: but a snapshot of the wider context indicates that the responsibilities of power and problems of policy faced by the two men were also a key element in what happened.

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It’s the economy . . .

A combination of the effects of devaluation of sterling in November 1967, the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967 (including the closure of the Suez canal) and a growing US balance of payments deficit exacerbated by the costs of the Vietnam war, led directly to the gold crisis of March 1968 and presented the British government with difficult policy choices.

In January the Cabinet had to accept a tough package of cost-cutting measures drawn up by Chancellor of the Exchequer Roy Jenkins.4 Brown found some of these hard to accept, particularly since defence cuts were opposed by the US government who gave him a hard time in Washington. Britain could not sustain a large military presence in the Far East and Middle East as well as Europe without financial help from the US. But the Americans, mired in an escalating and apparently unwinnable war in South East Asia, were reluctant to bail the British government out again, though they still looked for (and got) British support in the gold crisis.

The Prime Minister, under pressure from the Labour Party and TUC to dissociate Britain from US policy in Vietnam, was also under American pressure to continue his mediation efforts in Moscow to get the Soviets to exert pressure on Hanoi, as well as on North Korea (who had recently seized a US ship). The Foreign Secretary, though keen to keep the Americans onside, favoured a tougher approach with the Russians at a time when KGB activities in Britain were increasingly blatant and the sincerity of the Soviet approach questionable.

The Soviet Union, working hard to re-establish its prestige in the Middle East after the 1967 war, encouraged Arab feeling that the British were in the US camp, supplying arms to the region and increasing the Soviet naval presence in the Mediterranean, all posing a strategic threat to British interests.

George Brown’s appointment as Foreign Secretary in August 1966 had been seen as a signal that Britain would make a serious attempt to engage with Europe, but the second application to join the EEC was rejected in late 1967; among the reasons given were Britain’s economic problems and the closeness of Anglo-American relations.

In wider Europe, a Soviet wedge-driving operation was underway, engaging with West Germany’s Ostpolitik and proposing a European security conference, while tightening the Soviet grip on East Germany, rejecting any idea of unification and engaging in an aggressive espionage campaign in Britain and on the European continent. Meanwhile, the US complained that European members of NATO were not contributing enough to their own defence.

Britain’s relations with China remained stormy after the sacking of the British Embassy in Peking in August 1967; a civil war was under way in Nigeria, the enforcement of sanctions against Ian Smith’s regime in Southern Rhodesia was both difficult and expensive. Wilson had only just managed to heal a damaging Cabinet split in December 1967 over the supply of arms to South Africa; while a large increase in the number of Kenyan Asians entering Britain caused problem for Harold Wilson on both the foreign policy and domestic front.

These are only some of the foreign policy issues facing George Brown and Harold Wilson in March 1968. But Prime Ministers are responsible for domestic problems too,

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and Wilson had many on his plate: splits in the Parliamentary Labour Party; industrial unrest; an outbreak of foot and mouth disease; and a resurgent Conservative Party under Edward Heath ready and willing to capitalise on all Labour’s difficulties. Both Wilson and Brown had plenty to be tired and emotional about in the small hours of 15 March 1968: it is hardly surprising that the strain proved too much for one of them.

Notes 1. George Brown, In My Way (London: Victor Gollancz, 1971), p. 140.

2. See Brown, In My Way; and Harold Wilson, The Labour Government 1964-70: A Personal Record (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971).

3. Denis Healey, The Time of My Life (London: Michael Joseph, 1989), p. 297; Denis Greenhill, More by Accident (York: Wilton 65, 1992), p. 133.

4. See Gill Bennett, Six Moments of Crisis: Inside British Foreign Policy (Oxford: OUP, 2013), Chapter 4.

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Soviet forces invade Czechoslovakia: 20-21 August 1968 Posted on: 20 August 2018

1968 wall slogan (Fortepan / Konok Tamás id)

This is not the action of strong ‘expansionist’ leaders, but of frightened men reacting indecisively to a situation which they judged to be crucially dangerous, but with which they did not know how to deal.1 On the night of Tuesday, 20 August 1968, Soviet military units crossed the borders of Czechoslovakia: at 1.30am. On 21 August a message was delivered informing Prime Minister Harold Wilson, that the Czechoslovak government had asked the Soviet Union for ‘fraternal assistance’ in the face of a threat to the Socialist order. Soon, with the help of East German, Bulgarian and Polish ground forces, Czechoslovakia was firmly under Soviet control.

Many people—in Moscow, as well as in London and Washington—had calculated that the Politburo might draw back from the brink. Later, a general consensus formed that the reform movement spearheaded in Czechoslovakia in 1968 by Alexander Dubcek, First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, had pushed the Soviet regime beyond the limits of tolerance.

Though Dubcek had been educated in the USSR, understood the system and assured Moscow that his programme of free socialist development, toleration of dissent and the secret ballot would not affect external policy, the Prague Spring appeared an unacceptable threat to Communist solidarity. But the decision to invade was a complex one, as the context shows.

The view from the East After the end of World War II the USSR sought to secure its position as a victorious superpower by dominating most of Eastern Europe. This was defensive as well as offensive, since the Soviet regime distrusted what it regarded as American imperialism, and saw Western security arrangements like NATO as a threat. Tight control over the Eastern bloc was essential, particularly in the 1960s at a time of slow economic growth and industrial discontent in the USSR. Yet meanwhile, the Soviet Union was pursuing a parallel policy of engagement with the West in areas like trade, proposals for a European security conference and negotiations with the USA for a non-proliferation treaty. This twin-track approach to policy produced some initial ambiguity in the Eastern response to the reform movement in Czechoslovakia.

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The view from the West Western policy was also conflicted. London and Washington rejected Communism and regarded Soviet overtures with caution, suspecting them of seeking to drive a wedge in Western security (just as Moscow suspected Western wedge-driving in the East). But in a Presidential election year the US government was disinclined to get involved in Eastern European affairs, and the ongoing war in Vietnam occupied political and military attention. Washington was keen for Britain to act as intermediary with Hanoi via Moscow, yet suspicious of any Anglo-Soviet rapprochement; dismayed by British defence cuts while unwilling to ease their financial burdens.

British policy was equally conflicted: a meeting in May 1968 of diplomats serving in Eastern Europe agreed it was important to ‘increase strains’ on the Soviet bloc by promoting bilateral ties, but ‘not at the expense of the Soviet Union’ (whatever that meant). The West accepted, however, that events were out of their control. In Moscow, Soviet leaders were beginning to suspect the same thing.

1968: year of protests Since the beginning of 1968, there had been worldwide protests against government action or inaction, internal repression and external aggression, in the name of freedom, peace and self-determination. Young people in particular were making their voices heard forcefully. In the UK and USA, as well as in Germany and Italy, there had been widespread and sometimes violent demonstrations against the Vietnam War; in France, a student revolt in May produced a national upheaval that almost brought the country to a standstill; in Northern Ireland, there were violent demonstrations against British rule; in Brazil, there were protests against a military dictatorship.

None of these posed much threat to the Soviet Union: indeed, unrest in the West was welcome to a regime that felt threatened by Western solidarity. But protests in Poland and Yugoslavia were a different matter; and if the contagion of unrest spread to East Germany, the spectre of an increasingly powerful West Germany eroding the supremacy of the Eastern Bloc would arise. In addition, the violence of Mao Zedong’s enforcement of the Cultural Revolution in China offered to the Soviet Union, another huge and disparate country, an awful example of continuing civil conflict and the need for costly repressive measures.

The intelligence dimension During the 1960s there was growing anxiety in Moscow, fuelled by KGB reports of ‘harmful attitudes’ and ‘hostile acts’ (such as listening to Western pop music),2 over the spread of Western influences within the Soviet bloc, through tourism, media and cultural exchanges. Soviet espionage in Western countries, particularly the UK and USA, expanded greatly.3 The KGB, led since 1967 by Yuri Andropov (who had played a part in the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956), pushed a consistently hard line in the Politburo in favour of crushing the Czechoslovakian reform movement. Evidence of supposed ‘Western plots’ was manufactured, while up to 20 ‘illegals’, posing as Western tourists, students and businessmen, were sent to Czechoslovakia in an operation codenamed PROGRESS to penetrate and discredit counter-revolutionary groups.4 Despite the reluctance of President Brezhnev, Prime Minister Kosygin and Foreign Minister Gromyko, Andropov tipped the balance by encouraging fears that

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Czechoslovakia might fall prey to a coup or NATO aggression. In the end the Soviet leaders, like those in the West, just could not be sure what would happen if the Prague Spring continued to bloom. Insecurity and fear produced the decision to invade.

The invaders did not have it all their own way, despite military dominance. Dubcek and his movement had too much popular support for the Soviets to install a puppet regime as planned; instead the reformers were taken to Moscow to be intimidated into submission, making a mockery of ‘fraternal solidarity’. In Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in the East, the legacy of August 1968 was long-term resentment and disaffection.

Meanwhile, the Soviet leaders embarked on a somewhat desperate charm offensive of détente with the West.

The last word goes to Sir Geoffrey Harrison, HM Ambassador in Moscow, who in May 1968 suggested three possible Soviet reactions to the Prague Spring:   

crushing the reform movement; accepting it, while trying to limit damage to the USSR’s position; and putting the Soviet regime at the head of a movement for détente in Europe. 5

In fact, the Soviet Union tried to do all three at once.

Notes 1. Moscow despatch of 30 September 1968 to the FCO, NS 3/18, printed in Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series III, Volume I, No. 15.

2. See Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (London: Penguin, 1999), Chapter 15, Part I: ‘Crushing the Prague Spring’.

3. See DBPO, Series III, Volume I, Britain and the Soviet Union 1968-72.

4. The Mitrokhin Archive, Chapter 15, Part I. 5. DBPO, Series III, Volume I, No. 10.

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The British guarantee to Poland: 31 March 1939 Posted on: 28 March 2019 Knowing the English and the traditions of British foreign policy, I could not accept that Chamberlain would make any firm commitments in Eastern Europe.1 On 31 March 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the House of Commons that ‘in the event of any action which clearly threatened Adolf Hitler (Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-13774/ Polish independence, and which the Polish Heinrich Hoffmann/CC-BY-SA 3.0) Government accordingly considered it vital to resist, His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power.’2 The French Government endorsed this pledge.

This guarantee was to lead Britain to declare war on Nazi Germany 6 months later. It was welcomed by those who thought Chamberlain had waited too long to challenge Hitler’s aggression in Europe, and surprised those who had not expected him to deviate from his insistence that the appeasement of Europe remained a realistic goal. Only 2 weeks earlier Chamberlain pronounced the international outlook ‘serene’, Anglo-German trade talks were planned, and his response to Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia on 15 March was one of sorrow more than anger. Why now pledge the British government to defend Poland, an Eastern European country vulnerable on all its borders?

Where will Hitler strike next?

The key to the Polish guarantee was the fact that the French would fight for Poland, as they would not fight for Czechoslovakia. The Chiefs of Staff told Chamberlain that if Britain had to fight Germany, it was better to do it in alliance with Poland and France.

The French were willing to have meaningful staff talks and there was close intelligence liaison, although they were sceptical about imminent German aggression in the West.3 Secret reports received in London in late March indicated Hitler planned to move against Poland, but they were treated with caution, in view of an embarrassing false warning passed on to Washington in January.4 Yet rumours abounded:   

Hitler was about to attack Holland, or Romania Italy was about to invade Albania (as it did in April), or demand colonial concessions from France the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis was about to become a firm military alliance, that Franco might join; Germany sought Polish help in an attack on the Soviet Union

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The US State Department believed Germany would mobilise on the Dutch frontier and demand the cession of the Netherlands East Indies.

By late March, it was clear that Hitler was poised to attack—somewhere. But as the Military Attaché in Berlin wrote, ‘the great difficulty—even to skilled observers—is to decide when “normal abnormality” merges into something more significant.’5 Two fighting fronts, 3 armed services and the fourth arm of defence Since 1934, British rearmament had been predicated on long-term deterrence rather than imminent conflict, based on the Treasury doctrine that economic stability was the fourth arm of defence. By February 1939 this had changed: Hitler’s aggression, the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis, Nationalist victory in the Spanish Civil War and the uncertainties of American and Russian policies meant that ‘military strategy was determining economic policy rather than the other way round’.6 All 3 armed services were competing for resources and equipment, scrambling to match (exaggerated) estimates of German military might.

The one thing the Chiefs of Staff agreed was that Britain would struggle to fight on more than one front at once. But Chamberlain’s attempts to secure the Mediterranean foundered on Mussolini’s ambitions, and British interests in the Far East were threatened

by Japanese plans for a Pan-Asian ‘new order’, while the USA urged support for the beleaguered Chinese nationalists in the bitter Sino-Japanese conflict.

The military challenges were diverse and demanding. 20,000 British troops were pinned down in peacekeeping operations in Palestine, while Chamberlain’s resolution, however, was confirmed by domestic, as well as international considerations.

Anderson Shelters and anti-semitism The public mood in Britain had changed since Chamberlain returned from Munich in September 1938 announcing ‘peace for our time’.7 Hitler’s increasingly intemperate outbursts, brutal measures against Jews, and aggressive treatment of Czechoslovakia seemed to even the most inward-looking citizens to be harbingers of war. To those on the Left, the British government’s recognition of the Franco regime in February 1939 appeared a bitter betrayal of the Republican cause, as well as appeasing a pro-Nazi dictator.

The League of Nations had proved powerless, and when German forces moved into Czechoslovakia on 15 March, it seemed clear Hitler was determined to dominate Europe. Many people now favoured rapid rearmament, anti-air raid precautions and the building of shelters for which Sir John Anderson had ordered 120,000 tons of steel sheets. They no longer believed Chamberlain when he spoke of peace, and wanted concrete preparations for war. The Prime Minister recognised this.

Time to call ‘Halt!’

For Sir Alexander Cadogan, FO Permanent Under-Secretary, by 20 March 1939 Chamberlain had ‘reached the cross-roads’. Poland ‘set up a signpost’ for the Prime Minister, despite his desire for peace, his reluctance to trust the Russians and doubts about American willingness to abandon neutrality. Giving a public guarantee would end the ‘agonising doubts and indecisions’ that had beset him in his efforts to secure the

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appeasement of Europe. ‘The die is now cast and Hitler may bomb us. But I think we’ve done right.’8

Notes 1. Diary entry by Ivan Maisky, Soviet Ambassador in London, 29 March 1939 (Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed), The Maisky Diaries (London: Yale, 2015).

2. Parl Debs, 5th ser., House of Commons, vol. 345, col. 2415.

3. See Paris telegram 1387 to the Foreign Office, 30 March 1939, printed in Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939 (DBFP), Third Series, Vol. IV, No. 574; and Keith Jeffery, MI6 (London; Bloomsbury, 2010). Pp. 291-2.

4. See ‘SIS on the eve of War, 1939’, in FCO Historians, The Records of the Permanent Under-Secretary’s Department, March 2005, https://issuu.com/fcohistorians/docs/therecordsofthepermanentundersecret 5. Berlin telegram 72 to the FO, 28 February 1939, printed in DBFP, ibid, No. 160.

6. G.C. Peden, Arms, Economics and British Strategy (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 172.

7. https://history.blog.gov.uk/2013/09/30/whats-the-context-30-september-1938-themunich-agreement/ 8. David Dilks (ed), The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan 1938-1945 (London: Cassell, 1971), entries for 20, 30 and 31 March 1939.

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Signature of the North Atlantic Treaty: 4 April 1949 Map of the world with NATO member countries highlighted

Posted on: 4 April 2019

Today, NATO is 70, its membership at 29. In recent years NATO’s remit and solidarity has been adapted, confirmed, extended and questioned, but for most members it remains the essential bedrock of Western security. The Cold War is long over, but some East-West tensions persist, and NATO plays a key role elsewhere, for example in Afghanistan.

Yet when we look round the world in 2019, other regions loom large on the global security landscape: for example, Latin America, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific including China. On NATO’s 70th birthday, it is interesting to note whether and how those regions figured in the context of the negotiations leading up to the signature of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949.

Latin America The NATO Treaty was based partly on the Rio Treaty (Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance), signed on 2 September 1947 by 19 states including the USA.1 The central principle was that an attack on any member would be taken as an attack on all (though a 2/3 majority was required for action to be taken, and each state could decide what to do). Argentina wanted this to apply only to aggression by non-American states, but others, suspicious of the intentions of President Peron, resisted this.

The Rio Treaty came into force on 3 February 1948, and two days later Belgian Prime Minister Spaak suggested to Hector McNeil, Foreign Office Minister of State, that a similar pact would be attractive to the US and help draw them into guaranteeing Western European security. They agreed that any agreement would need to provide for more rapid action, unanimously and more precisely defined, but that Rio was a good precedent to follow.2 Africa A number of prospective NATO members, including Britain, still had African colonies while the North Atlantic Treaty was being negotiated. Ernest Bevin thought if Western European countries could mobilise their colonial resources in support of a security pact, overall population and production capacity could counterbalance the Soviet bloc. 3 But US policy was resolutely anti-imperialist and any reference to colonies threatened to jeopardise American support for mutual defence arrangements. Nor did the Americans want to guarantee the security of European territories on the African mainland: after all, they said, they did not plan to include Hawaii.

On the other hand, the US was interested in strategic raw materials in Africa, and in establishing American bases in others’ colonial territories. Western European countries

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argued amongst themselves about including each other’s African territories in scope of NATO. There was an enduring tone of 19th century imperialism in the debate. But the African Conference in London in September 1948 foreshadowed a new role for emerging states in a changing world, making references to Africa in the NATO discussions ultimately anachronistic.

Asia-Pacific All prospective NATO members were worried about the spread of Communism in the Asia-Pacific region. At the beginning of 1949 Communist domination of China was almost complete, though Mao Tse-tung’s relationship with Moscow was a subject of speculation in the West. Korea and South-East Asian colonial possessions were threatened, while Britain worried about Hong Kong.

The future of British commercial interests in the region was uncertain. The US still controlled Japan, now regarding it as less as a security threat than as potential help against the USSR. Australia and New Zealand, though not included in NATO’s scope, worried about Japan and felt Western obsession with the Russian threat prevented any Asian-Pacific settlement.

In December 1948 the Cabinet authorised Bevin to consult with the US on extending the same mutual defence measures envisaged for Europe to the Far East.4 But ministers knew that in reality nothing other than political warfare—anti-Communist propaganda— was practicable. Though nominally supporting the Chinese nationalists, the US took the view that they were not there to bail out failing states and reward poor leadership.

Indian Foreign Minister Menon commented that if Western powers were so afraid of Communism in Asia they did ‘nothing more to check it than go on calling it a bogey and helping weaklings and puppets to fight nationalism’, Communism would flourish. 5 Though his criticisms were deliberately pointed, they rightly underscored a lack of understanding in the West of the true extent of profound change in the region.

References to the Asia-Pacific and the need for a concerted Western policy are threaded through the documentation leading up to the signature of the North Atlantic Treaty, but tackling security in the region was a longer-term problem.

The threat to Western civilisation When Bevin wrote in March 1948 that ‘physical control of the Eurasian land mass and eventual control of the whole World Island is what the Politburo is aiming at’, 1 he reflected profound concern at the polarisation of Europe and the need for a Western security pact. But as he and his colleagues in Washington and Western European capitals negotiated what became the North Atlantic Treaty, they talked about regions like Latin America, Africa and the Asia-Pacific using a pre-war frame of reference.

Despite an acceptance that the days of Empire were numbered, individual countries in those regions were regarded as passive, rather than active pieces on the global chessboard. While celebrating NATO’s birthday, the wider global context of its establishment is worth remembering.

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Notes 1. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1947, Vol. VIII. 2. Documents on British Policy Overseas (DBPO), Series I, Vol. X, No. 27.

3. DBPO, Series I, Vol. X, No. 11.

4. DBPO, Series I, Vol. VIII, No. 56.

5. DBPO, Series I, Vol. X, No. 54.

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Polish cryptologists reveal they have cracked the Enigma code: 26 July 1939 Posted on: 26 July 2019 ‘Il y a du nouveau’ On 26 July 1939, in the Pyry Forest south of Warsaw, Polish cryptologists revealed to their British and French counterparts that they had been reading German signals traffic, transmitted

by Enigma machines, since 1933. At a previous Enigma machine meeting in January, they had been reticent: but since then the threat from Nazi Germany had increased greatly. Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia in March led to a British guarantee to come to Poland’s aid if attacked.

But as SS troops flooded Danzig and German forces massed on the borders, the Polish General Staff were keen to tighten the links with Britain and France.

The head of the Polish Signals Bureau sent a coded message to his French counterpart on 30 June that ‘there is a new development’. This was not a cryptologic breakthrough, but a willingness to reveal the secret of the Enigma wiring sequence. Bletchley Park’s ‘Dilly’ Knox, while furious that the solution was one he had rejected, realised the importance of the Polish achievement, which shortened the British attack on Enigma by at least a year.1 At this time MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (named MI6 to sound more military as war approached) were struggling to expand operations with scarce resources. This made the Government Code & Cypher School’s achievement particularly valuable.

‘Fire escapes and fire extinguishers’ Poland was not the only country looking for supportive friends in July 1939. Britain and France, alarmed by the increasing closeness and strength of the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis, were trying to reach agreement with Turkey on co-operation in the event of hostilities in the Mediterranean. Istanbul, however, was hedging its bets in order not to alienate Berlin or Moscow. Italian claims of an imminent alliance with Spain, where Franco’s nationalist forces were now in control, increased the alarm felt in London and Paris.

During June and July, Anglo-French talks in Moscow aimed at securing a common front with the Soviet Union against Axis aggression progressed slowly. They were spun out by Foreign Minister Molotov who was adept in securing concessions (seeking a free hand in the Baltics) while giving none. William Strang, sent out by the Foreign Office to help, wrote that the negotiations with Moscow were

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a humiliating experience. Time after time we have taken up a position, and a week later we have abandoned it... our need for an agreement is more immediate than theirs.

Berlin claimed the Moscow talks threatened the ‘encirclement’ of Germany. In vain the British Ambassador in Istanbul argued that what we were doing was to supply our house with fire escapes and fire extinguishers... it would be ludicrous to interpret this as a sign that we intended to set fire to it.

German protests were cynically disingenuous, as Anglo-French hopes of a successful conclusion to their Moscow talks were dashed by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact a few weeks later.2 ‘The reality of the new Great Germany has got to be understood and faced’ Sir Nevile Henderson, British Ambassador in Berlin, wrote these words while expressing some admiration for Hitler’s ‘abounding faith in his own mission’, and hoping war might be averted.3 Though his faith was not shared in Whitehall, Chamberlain’s government was not quite ready, in late July 1939, to accept that war was inevitable.

But the desperate efforts to reach agreement with potential allies show how close the prospect appeared. Britain could not rely on the support of the United States, where President Roosevelt, though shocked by Hitler’s march into Prague, struggled to get Congressional approval for the amendment of isolationist legislation.

The military party in Japan accused Britain of supporting China in the Sino-Japanese war (treating Britain, as the Ambassador in Rome complained, ‘as if we were a secondclass Power’). There were even difficulties with Poland, which Chamberlain had pledged to defend, in negotiating a financial agreement.

The editor of Documents on British Foreign Policy, Sir E.L. Woodward, wrote in the preface to the volume documenting this period: ‘The choice between peace and war lay with Germany.’ To the cryptologists who met in the Pyry forest on 26 July 1939, that fact was abundantly clear. Their collaboration heralded ‘the most consequential intelligencesharing arrangement of World War Two’.4 Notes 1. Dermot Turing, X, Y & Z: The real story of how Enigma was broken (London: The History Press, 2018); see also Stephen Budiansky, Battle of Wits: The complete story of codebreaking in World War II (London: Viking, 2000).

2. Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939, Third Series, Vol. VI, Nos. 376, 399, 427 and passim.

3. Ibid., No. 460.

4. Turing, op. cit., p. 114.

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Sentencing of atomic spy Klaus Fuchs: 1 March 1950 Posted on: 2 March 2020 Seventy years ago, Klaus Fuchs was sentenced in the Crown Court to 14 years for passing classified information to the Soviet Union. Born in Germany, Fuchs had fled the Nazis to Britain in 1933.

A brilliant scientist, he became a naturalised British citizen and received security clearance to work from 1941 on the British atomic project Klaus Fuchs (The National Archives) codenamed TUBE ALLOYS. From 1943 he worked in the US on the Manhattan Project developing the atomic bomb, and from 1947 at the British nuclear establishment at Harwell.

Fuchs was identified as a traitor in signals traffic intercepted under the US VENONA programme, and arrested in February 1950, after a series of interviews with MI5. It was not just an embarrassment to British intelligence but sent shock waves through AngloAmerican atomic co-operation, already strained by US reluctance to share nuclear knowhow.1 The fundamentals of the Anglo-American relationship remained solid, including on security and intelligence matters. However Fuchs’ arrest and conviction came at a time when the Truman Administration and Attlee’s Labour government diverged on some areas of foreign policy. This was particularly marked in respect of Communist China, where British recognition of the People’s Republic in January 1950 angered a US administration that had not abandoned support for the Nationalists in Formosa (Taiwan).

In general, US policy in the Asia Pacific region was a work in progress in early 1950.

However there was a general unwillingness to do anything that might smack of supporting Western colonialism (such as British policy in the Middle East, or the Dutch and French in Indonesia).

The shock of the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, and the spread of Communism in South East Asia was to crystallise US policy in the region. But at the time of Fuchs’ arrest, when Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had just returned from the Colombo Conference, Bevin’s argument that a ‘Marshall Plan of the East’ was essential to underpin Western security found little resonance in Washington.

European integration Kissinger’s ‘Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?’ may be apocryphal. But in 1950 the United States, promoting free trade and convertible currencies, certainly preferred a European bloc, including Britain, to a collection of awkward independent countries.

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During negotiations for the implementation of the Marshall Plan, the British had resisted strong US pressure to join a European customs union.2 In February 1950, Chancellor Stafford Cripps rejected a plan from the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation for a multilateral clearing system. The broader scheme being developed by Jean Monnet for a European Coal and Steel Community was to be rejected soundly by the British a few months later.3 Bevin, from his sick bed in April, said he would ‘like to get away from talk about Europe’. In the European context, he was going against the tide; in his broader vision, he was much closer to the spirit of Anglo-US co-operation.

Business as usual?

The Fuchs case did not derail the ‘special relationship’, nor change the fundamentals of atomic co-operation, although tripartite UK/US/Canada talks were suspended when Fuchs was arrested, and the US continued its independent development of the H-Bomb.

Accusations of British security failure were tempered by the knowledge that there were US spies, to - producing headlines exploited by Senator Joseph McCarthy in his publicity-seeking crusade against the ‘Reds’.

The next few years were, of course, to see even more high-profile spy scandals, including the defection of Burgess and Maclean, and the identification of further atomic spies in America. It was to be many years before the full scale of the Soviet espionage and subversion campaign in the West became apparent.

In that context, the Fuchs case, though significant, was one element of a much broader threat, to which Anglo-American solidarity was to be a crucial part of the response. In April 1950, Ernest Bevin urged that ‘We must think in terms of the West, the Free Nations or the Free World’. While London and Washington may have differed on matters of emphasis and approach, they were at one on this point.

Notes 1. Full details of the Fuchs investigation can be found in Security Service files at The National Archives, KV 2/1245ff. See also Frank Close, TRINITY: The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History (London: Allen Lane, 2019) and the official history of MI5, Defence of the Realm by Christopher Andrew (London: Penguin, 2009).

2. See Documents on British Policy Overseas (DBPO), Series I, Vol. XI. 3. Details in Documents on British Policy Overseas (DBPO) Series II, Vol. I.

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VE Day, the end of the war in Europe: 8 May 1945 Posted on: 7 May 2020

Crowds gather in Whitehall on 8 May 1945 (Imperial War Museum)

The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7th 1945.1 Friday 8 May is a Bank Holiday in the UK to mark the 75th anniversary of VE Day. Although many commemorative events have been cancelled because of coronavirus (COVID-19), the anniversary will still be marked by governments, in the media and in many people’s thoughts. The number of surviving veterans is diminishing, but family memories, the work of historians and cultural organisations, including museums (even if closed) perpetuate the significance of the day when war in Europe ended.

For the political and military leaders, armed forces and civilian populations of those countries who had been engaged in a long and deadly struggle against Nazi Germany and its allies, VE Day was indeed a cause for celebration. The ‘Big Three’ Allies: Truman (only 1 month into his Presidency), Churchill and Stalin could congratulate themselves on a major achievement. Yet they knew the situation on 8 May 1945 remained precarious and the future uncertain.

Fighting continued in many parts of the world. Millions had been forced from their homes, most national economies (save that of the US) had been devastated, and the occupation of most of central and eastern Europe by Soviet forces posed questions for the future. While commemorating a day of victory, it is worth remembering its wider context.

War in Asia War continued against Japan, and some thought it could last another 2 years. No one yet knew whether the atomic bomb being developed at Los Alamos would work. British troops continued fighting in Burma until late August. In mainland China, the Nationalists who had borne the brunt of fighting the Japanese now risked losing the prize of overall authority to Mao Zedong’s Communists. Until Japan was defeated both the US and USSR would hedge their bets over who to support.

Japanese surrender came on 14 August, after the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The struggle for power in China continued until Communist victory in 1949.

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Meanwhile, the need to feed and supply their dependent territories in the region would impose a huge burden on governments who could barely feed their own populations.

This was a particular problem for Britain, bankrupt and exhausted.

Liberated Europe?

Though relief at the end of Nazi occupation was widespread, ‘Liberation’ meant different things across Europe.2 Stalin knew very little about the traditions and realities of life in those areas of Central and Eastern Europe occupied by his forces.3 He had already decided that the twin imperatives of security and economic reconstruction required Soviet domination or controlling influence in the countries on its borders (and further where possible). It was not a one-size-fits-all policy: at least in the immediate future, a compliant but not necessarily communist regime could be accepted in some countries, like Czechoslovakia. Deals could be done.

But the biggest problem was defeated Germany. Although decisions about post-war control had been taken at Teheran and Yalta, major differences between the occupying powers (Britain, France, the US and USSR) on the treatment of Germany and the allocation of its resources had already arisen by VE Day. They did agree, however, on the need to prosecute leading Nazis for war crimes, of which the liberation of concentration camps provided dreadful evidence.

Soviet interference was not the only problem for Liberated Europe. The return of governments-in-exile led to political tensions and clashes with Resistance movements who considered their efforts had earned inclusion in ruling regimes. The behaviour of wartime royalty was open to scrutiny. Soviet successes also strengthened communist parties throughout Europe, causing concern that some countries, like Belgium and the Netherlands, could descend into civil war like Greece.

Above all, for much of Europe, war had brought economic and physical devastation. The foundations of the post-war financial landscape had been laid in 1944 at Bretton Woods.4 However, the extent of economic collapse meant that huge injections of cash, principally from the US, would be required within the next few years. On VE Day, the priority was to provide food, shelter and safety, and to tackle the major problem posed by refugees and displaced persons.

Building a new World Organisation On 25 April 1945, the day that Soviet and US troops met at Torgau in Germany, the San Francisco Conference opened to establish the United Nations Organisation. Anthony Eden wondered whether it was worth attending when ‘Anglo-American relations with Russia are so completely lacking in confidence’.5 Yet though the precedent of the League of Nations, set up after the First World War, did not inspire confidence, most recognised the need for a forum where future disputes might be resolved. Recovery made a secure peace essential, and security meant a World Organisation.

Plans had already been laid at wartime conferences, foreshadowing later tensions and friction between the major powers, particularly the US and USSR, emerging as Superpowers from the war.

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Behind all this lay the knowledge that the exploitation of atomic energy could produce a decisive, if terrible weapon. On VE Day, that knowledge was restricted in principle to a limited circle in the UK and US. In practice, Stalin had been kept informed on progress

by Klaus Fuchs, working at Los Alamos, by Donald Maclean, in the British Embassy in Washington, and by Alger Hiss in the State Department. Guy Burgess, in the Foreign Office News Department, apparently passed to Moscow in May a Chiefs of Staff report on Operation Unthinkable, possible future war against the Soviet Union. In MI6, Kim Philby was in charge of the Soviet section. Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that VE Day, though a notable milestone, was by no means the end of the road.

Notes 1. Message from Supreme Allied Commander in Europe Dwight D. Eisenhower to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, following the unconditional surrender on 7 May of German forces by General Alfred Jodl, German Chief of Staff. The surrender was ratified on 8 May by the head of the German Armed Forces, Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel.

2. See Gill Bennett (ed), The End of the War in Europe (London: HMSO, 1995).

3. Malcolm Mackintosh, ‘The Campaign on the Eastern Front 1944-45 and its Political Aftermath: a British Perspective’, in Bennett, op. cit.

4. Conference held 1-22 July 1944 providing for the establishment of an International Monetary Fund and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

5. Earl of Avon, The Eden Memoirs: The Reckoning (London: Cassell, 1965), p. 526.

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Outbreak of the Korean War: 25 June 1950 Posted on: 25 June 2020 If you ask me where I think we might all be in for further trouble, I believe Korea is the place.1

Ernest Bevin (National Portrait Gallery)

Seventy years ago today, the North Korean People’s Army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) swept south across the 38th parallel. This had divided the Korean peninsula as Japanese troops were driven out by the Allies at the end of the Second World War.

The DPRK regime, under Kim Il-sung (grandfather of the current leader) was backed by the Soviet Union, and by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) which entered the war in October 1950. The South Korean regime, led by Syngman Rhee, was supported by the United States. The DPRK invasion precipitated a conflict that lasted until 1953 at the cost of more than 1 million casualties, involving the Soviet Union, PRC and 21 nations (including UK) in the United Nations Command led by the US. The outbreak of war in Korea caught Western governments napping. But it should not have been such a surprise. Bevin was not the only one to foresee trouble. At the State Department, George Kennan also identified Korea as a hot spot in the spring of 1950.

Monthly CIA reports described the build-up of DPRK forces, and on 10 May the South Korean Defence minister warned publicly of the invasion risk.2 But the Pentagon and General MacArthur dismissed these warnings. In Britain the Joint Intelligence Committee was more interested in Malaya and Hong Kong.

Neither the US nor UK had reliable up-to-date sources of intelligence in the Far East.

And disagreements over policy towards Communist China meant that US intelligence on Korea was withheld from the British. Still, there was sufficient evidence of approaching conflict, so why was the invasion such a surprise?

Both the US and UK fell into the classic beartraps of intelligence: confirmation bias, and mirror imaging. They assumed that because the DPRK was a communist regime, its policies would be dictated by Moscow and/or Peking. (In fact, the invasion was Kim Ilsung’s idea, though he did consult Stalin and Mao).

The US and UK did not believe that the Soviet Union, who they thought was pulling the DPRK strings, wanted a conflict with the West at that time. They thought the Soviet Union was distracted by other concerns, whether European (aftermath of Berlin crisis), or regional (Iran).

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Also, while acknowledging superior DPRK military strength, US and UK strategists believed their technical and administrative ability was inferior, and that South Korea’s strong anti-communist stance, backed by the US, would be a deterrent. In this context, a DPRK invasion of South Korea did not seem logical to Washington or London; therefore it would not happen, or at least not in June 1950.

There is a helpful military equation that might have provided useful strategic input: capability plus intent = threat, and threat combined with vulnerability = risk Were the DPRK forces capable of invading South Korea? Yes. Did they want to (not, was it a logical thing to do)? Yes. So there was a threat. And the South Korean regime, despite US support, was corrupt and creaking, and distracted by rigged elections leading to a new Assembly meeting on 19 June. South Korea was vulnerable: so, combined with the threat from the North there was a risk. But it was either dismissed, or downplayed, in the West.3 After the outbreak of the conflict, the US responded quickly, securing within 3 days a Security Council resolution in support of South Korea. It was assumed that Stalin was behind the DPRK’s move. Both Foreign Office and State Department thought he might be trying to divert attention to the Far East, to mask aggression elsewhere. The DPRK’s invasion might herald a wider Soviet threat or even a third world war. There was no alternative to armed response. In Britain, Attlee’s Labour government, despite strained resources, agreed in July to send a brigade to Korea.4 As the official history puts it: ‘Here was the rub: the blaze might be in Korea just now but if [Stalin] started fires elsewhere over the range of oceans and continents they would run out of fire brigades’. 5 The Korean War was the first serious conflict involving international armed forces since 1945. It was the first where the knowledge of the existence of atomic weapons was always in policymakers’ minds, and the first serious test of UN machinery. It did not become a world war, but it was a significant milestone. Nor was the end really conclusive. The armistice agreement was signed in July 1953 by North and South Korea, as well as by the US and People’s Republic of China. It created a demilitarised zone dividing Korea that remains the de facto boundary—and source of friction—today.

Notes 1. Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary, en route to Colombo Conference in January 1950.

Quoted in the official history by Anthony Farrar-Hockley, The British Part in the Korean War, Vol. I, A Distant Obligation (London: HMSO, 1990).

2. See P.K. Rose, ‘Two strategic intelligence mistakes in Korea 1950’, CIA Center for Study of Intelligence, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csipublications/csi-stsudies/studies/fall_winter_2001/article06.html 3. On this see former DNI analyst Cynthia Grabo, Anticipating surprise: Analysis for Strategic Warning (Maryland; University Press of America, 2004).

4. See Gill Bennett, Six Moments of Crisis: Inside British Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 2013), Chap. 1.

5. Farrar-Hockley, p. 46.

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Opening of the Potsdam Conference: 17 July 1945 Posted on: 17 July 2020

Cecilienhof Palace, Potsdam (Photo by Gill Bennett)

We must base our foreign policy on the principle of co-operation between the three World Powers.

Sir Orme Sargent, 11 July 19451

Seventy-five years ago, President Harry Truman, Marshal Josef Stalin and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, leaders of the victorious wartime Alliance, met in the Cecilienhof Palace in a small town outside Berlin, for the Potsdam Conference. Between 17 July and 2 August, American, British and Russian delegations discussed all the major issues confronting the post-war world. It was the last of the great tripartite conferences of the Second World War. The last great conference In fact, the war was not yet over. Though victory was achieved in Europe, fighting continued against Japan. The day before Potsdam opened, the atomic bomb was tested successfully in New Mexico. Its use, on 6 and 9 August, would lead to Japanese surrender and the final end to the global conflict. At Potsdam, Truman would tell Stalin about the ‘atomic secret’ supposedly known only to the US, UK and Canada. But Stalin already knew about it, from Soviet spies in the Manhattan Project and elsewhere.

Many decisions about the post-war world had been taken earlier, including at Yalta in February 1945.2 At the San Francisco Conference, which ended on 26 June 1945, the United Nations Organisation had been established. But much remained for discussion at Potsdam, including European economic reconstruction, international waterways, Iran, Italian colonies, constitutional crisis in Belgium, elections in Greece, civil war in China and the future of the Middle East.

A contentious issue was the future of defeated Germany: its administration, industrial disarmament, allocation of reparations, and how its people should be treated, fed, housed and re-educated. The fate of many thousands of refugees and displaced persons, as well as Prisoners of War, had to be considered.

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Britain’s predicament To mark the 75th anniversary FCO Historians have published a collection of documents: Britain and the making of the Post-War World: the Potsdam conference and beyond. The publication includes previously unpublished intelligence material, gives real insights into the challenges the British government faced.

See one of the book’s editors, Gill Bennett, discuss events at Potsdam and Britain’s place in the immediate post-war world in conversation with FCO Chief Historian Patrick Salmon.

For all except the US, the end of war meant economic crisis. Britain was bankrupt: economist JM Keynes talked of a ‘financial Dunkirk’. Financial help from the US would be essential if Britain was to meet its global responsibilities.

Britain was one of the Big Three. But would it still be a ‘Great Power’ in the post-war world, or squeezed between the Soviet and US Superpowers? This was a question that preoccupied ministers and Foreign Office officials at Potsdam.

During the conference there was a change of government in Britain. Results of the 5 July General Election were not declared until 26th.3 Churchill, who had flown home expecting to triumph, was defeated. A Labour landslide meant that Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin flew back to Potsdam to lead the British Delegation as Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. Both men had been in the War Cabinet, and Attlee had attended Potsdam from the start. The British negotiating line did not change.

At Potsdam, the Big Three worked together and hoped for postwar collaboration. No one foresaw 40 years of ‘Cold War’. But mutual suspicion underpinned the Potsdam discussions. Stalin feared the dominance of Western capitalism, while Britain and the US worried about communist influence in Europe. No peace treaty was signed at Potsdam, and many difficult issues remained to be settled.

But in an important sense, the Potsdam Conference represented a doorway between the old world and the new.

Notes 1. Sargent’s memorandum, ‘Stocktaking after VE Day’, included in the new FCO Historians’ publication, Britain & the Making of the Post-War World: The Potsdam Conference & Beyond (Amazon, 2020). A digital version available at www.issuu.com/fcohistorians 2. See https://history.blog.gov.uk/2015/02/04/whats-the-context-4-february-1945-theyalta-conference-opens/ 3. The delay was to allow time for British servicemen and servicewomen to vote, and for counting.

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VJ Day: 15 August 1945 Posted on: 14 August 2020

Surrender of Japan, Tokyo Bay, 2 September 1945. Representatives of the Empire of Japan on board USS Missouri during the surrender ceremonies (US National Archives)

We call upon the Government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all the Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.

Proclamation by the Heads of Government, United States, United Kingdom and China, 26 July 19451

On 15 August 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Imperial Japan to the Allies, making an unprecedented broadcast to his nation. This ended the Second World War. ‘VJ Day’, Victory over Japan Day, is marked by Japan and the UK on 15 August. The United States marks it on 2 September, the anniversary of the signature of the Instrument of Surrender on the USS Missouri in the presence of General Douglas Macarthur, Supreme Commander in the Southwest Pacific theatre.

The end of the Second World War was a cause for celebration on the part of the victors, and relief to all those tired of fighting. Yet many conflicts remained to be resolved and problems tackled. For the defeated, relief was tinged with despair and disbelief, even guilt. But the wider context of VJ Day 75 years ago was complex, for all those involved.

Japan 14 August, the day on which surrender was agreed at an Imperial Council, marked the end of two devastating weeks for Japan. On 6 and 9 August atomic bombs dropped by US planes had demolished Hiroshima and Nagasaki with massive loss of life. On 8 August the Soviet Union, which had signed a neutrality agreement with Japan in 1941, allied itself to the Tripartite Proclamation seeking unconditional surrender. The Japanese did not know of Stalin’s promise, at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, to enter the Pacific war on the Allied side within 3 months of the defeat of Germany. On 9 August, Soviet forces mounted a massive attack in Manchuria and Korea, overwhelming the Kwantung Army. Japanese defeat was inescapable.

The idea of surrender, in Japanese military culture, was unacceptable. The idea that the Emperor might bear any guilt for the sufferings of his country or the crimes of which his

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officers were accused, was unthinkable. The scale of Japanese deaths, past and future, was unimaginable. The prospect of occupation by the victorious powers, particularly the US, was bewildering. In addition, 6.5 million Japanese were stranded overseas at the time of surrender. The future seemed puzzling, uncertain and bleak.

United States For the United States, VJ Day brought rejoicing at victory. But as the Potsdam conference had revealed, the question of what to do about, and with Japan, and indeed the rest of the Pacific region, was not straightforward. President Truman and his advisers had been focussed on winning the war. The Tripartite Proclamation spoke of destroying Japan’s war-making power, punishing war crimes, limiting Japanese sovereignty, removing obstacles to ‘democratic tendencies’ and restricting its industrial base.

But there was less agreement, between the Allies or within the US Administration itself, on how these things should be achieved. No developed policy for the region existed.

Meanwhile, Macarthur was determined to retain supreme command in Japan, rejecting co-operation with other powers.

Soviet Union Stalin’s association with the Tripartite Declaration, and entry into war against Japan, were based on a calculation of self-interest as much as solidarity with the wartime alliance. He wished to retain territorial gains agreed at Yalta or acquired during the brief Soviet campaign in Manchuria. Ever distrustful of the Western powers, he was on the alert for attempts to extend US hegemony, whether political or economic. That applied to the Far East as much as to Europe.

For that reason, Stalin continued to hedge his bets in the bitter struggle in China between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government - signatory of the Proclamation - and Mao Ze Dong’s Communists. Disturbed by the prospect of an American presence in the wider Pacific region that might encroach on the Soviet Union’s borders, Stalin and Molotov could be counted on to take a tough line in any negotiation.

Great Britain Relief at the end of war in the Far East was tempered by extreme anxiety. Anxiety on how to bring British forces home as soon as possible, and to repatriate British Prisoners of War, many of whom had suffered terribly at Japanese hands. Anxiety over how to provide food and supplies for British colonial territories, when Britain ended the war bankrupt. Anxiety at the knowledge that once war ended, so would Lend-Lease, removing a key source of financial support. Anxiety over the future of British commercial interests in mainland China and in Japan, and about the future of Hong Kong. Above all, anxiety about Britain’s future significance within the counsels of the Big Three.

The Attlee government, in office only a few weeks, soon found Britain’s global position had diminished, certainly in respect of the Far East. The evidence lay in Potsdam, in the final stages of war against Japan, and in arrangements to accept the Emperor’s surrender. It lay in Macarthur’s dismissal of the involvement of British or Commonwealth forces in the pacification of the region, despite Australian protests. The Far East could

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not be a priority in British policy in the early postwar years, but that did not make marginalisation by the Americans, in particular, any more palatable.

Celebration and remembrance Of course VJ Day was a cause for celebrating the end of the war. But the way it ended, and in particular the use of the atomic bomb, meant that the legacy of the war against Japan would remain complex and contested. Ever since 1945, the memorialising of VJ Day has been the trigger for controversy, guilt and sadness, as well as for grateful recognition of the service of those who fought.1

Notes 1. Printed in Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series I, Vol. I, No. 281.

2. Suggestions for further reading include: Christopher Baxter, The Great Power Struggle in East Asia 1944-50 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Akika Hashimoto, The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory and Identity in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Rana Mitter, China’s War with Japan 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival (Penguin, 2014). British policy at Potsdam and the early post-war period is documented in Series I of Documents on British Policy Overseas.

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Signing the Anglo-American Financial Agreement: 6 December 1945 Posted on: 7 December 2020

Signing the Anglo-American Financial Agreement. Front row from the left: John Maynard Keynes, Lord Halifax, James Byrnes, Fred Vinson. Back row: RH Brand, Sir Henry Self, Sir Edward Bridges, Professor Robbins, Sir Percivale Liesching, Dean Acheson, William L Clayton, Thomas B McCabe (The National Archives)

The American Congress and the American people have never accepted any literal principle of equal sacrifice, financial or otherwise, between all the allied participants.

Indeed, have we ourselves?

Lord Keynes, defending the Agreement in the House of Lords, 18 December 1945

Seventy five years ago, an agreement was signed in Washington for a US loan to the UK government of $3.75 billion repayable over 50 years.1 The UK’s final payments on this, and a loan from Canada agreed in March 1946, would not be made until December 2006.

Though the terms of the US loan were not ungenerous, the British government found them hard to swallow. Nevertheless, in December 1945 most people in the government thought the agreement an essential lifeline. Some ministers and officials opposed it, with its attached conditions requiring radical changes to UK commercial arrangements.

Others favoured refusal, confident the US would improve its offer if the UK held out long enough.

But for Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, who successfully urged the Cabinet to agree to the deal, the main arguments were geopolitical as much as financial. In his view, the agreement was essential to emphasise Britain’s key position as a bridge between East and West, to revive trade with Europe, and above all to keep on close terms with the US. The Anglo-American Financial Agreement must be seen in that wider context.

The end of the ‘Big Three’ The end of the Second World War in August 1945 brought not just peace but profound global shock. The victorious Grand Alliance dissolved, leaving two Superpowers—USA and USSR—with a bankrupt and exhausted UK in third place. The ideological gulf between Soviet communism and American capitalist democracy, sublimated during

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wartime alliance, now threatened an already unstable international situation. The atomic bomb, employed to devastating effect against Japan, cast a global shadow.

In some territories, like Greece or mainland China, internal conflict raged. In others, anticolonial sentiment gathered pace. In mainland Europe, including the defeated and divided Germany, large numbers of refugees and displaced persons exacerbated widespread shortages of food, fuel and shelter.

The new ‘world organisation’, the United Nations, was planned but not up and running.

Peacemaking machinery, including the new Council of Foreign Ministers, soon exposed dangerous cracks in international cooperation. The world was being reshaped, not just by conquest and physical devastation, but by shifting balances of economic power and political rivalry.

The Financial Agreement was negotiated against this backdrop between September and December 1945.

Seeking justice and finding temptation The US decision to cut off wartime Lend-Lease arrangements abruptly after VJ-Day in August 1945 was a shock to Britain’s newly elected Labour government, committed to a massive and expensive programme of domestic legislation. Abroad, it faced heavy and underfunded global commitments, including providing food for colonial territories, coal to liberated Europe and responsibility for the British zone in Germany (plus a vast machinery of military government).

The economist JM Keynes, who had been warning of a ‘Financial Dunkirk’ since March 1945, led the negotiating team to Washington in early September. Keynes and his team were seeking a grant in aid or at least an interest-free loan, seen as ‘justice’ in recompense for Britain’s wartime sacrifices.

It soon became clear that only a commercial arrangement—the ‘temptation’ of borrowing with interest—was on offer. What is more, the Americans sought ‘sweeteners’ for the loan, including extended leases on military bases in British territory and preferential access for US corporations to civil aviation routes and telecommunications networks.

The United States was emerging enriched and industrially powerful from war. The US desire to leave the rest of the world to sort out their own problems was matched by ambitious plans for economic expansion and the attractions of exerting political leadership.

Though there was much goodwill towards the UK, US negotiators harboured a perennial suspicion that the British were trying to outsmart them. They distrusted Attlee’s socialist government. In return for financial help Britain must abandon imperial preference, make sterling convertible, and effectively accept client status.

The suspicions of Josef Stalin Bevin understood the need for concessions to the US, and was convinced that strong Anglo-American ties trumped most objections. But he was worried that US determination was to control atomic secrets and raw materials, and to conclude security arrangements before the UN Security Council had even met. He thought this would give the Russians ‘gratuitous and justifiable cause for suspicion’.2 He was right.

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The Soviet Union had expended enormous economic and human resource in pursuit of Allied victory. Its determination to secure acknowledgement of, and recompense for, the scale of its sacrifice was underpinned by deep suspicion that the USSR would be frozen out of postwar spoils and atomic know-how. The extensive Soviet espionage machinery in the UK and US, partly exposed by the defection of Gouzenko in Canada in September,3 confirmed Stalin’s suspicions and coloured Soviet diplomatic tactics.

In these first postwar months, hopes of continuing east-west cooperation were not dead but were fading, with each side blaming the other. If there were trouble ahead, Britain was on the side of the US, as their increasingly close intelligence relationship showed.

The Financial Agreement tightened the bond.

Commenting on the Financial Agreement, Keynes told the House of Lords that "Our American friends were interested not in our wounds . . . but in our convalescence. They wanted . . . to be told that we intended to walk without bandages as soon as possible." In fact, a great deal more help would be needed from the US, not just for Britain but for Western Europe as well. The Financial Agreement of December 1945 was an early indicator of American commitment to European post-war reconstruction.

Notes 1. For the Agreement, and British documentation on the negotiations that led up to it, see Documents on British Policy Overseas (DBPO), Series I, Vol. III. A detailed account can also be found in Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 3, Fighting for Britain 1937-1946, Chapter 12.

2. Memo by Bevin, 29 November 1945, printed DBPO, Series I, Vol. III, No. 135.

3. On the defection, which revealed details of Soviet spy networks in Canada and the US, and the existence of a British atomic spy, Alan Nunn May, see ‘The CORBY case: the defection of Igor Gouzenko, September 1945’, in From World War to Cold War: Records of the Foreign Office Permanent Under-Secretary's Department, 1939-51; also documentation in FCDO Historians, Britain and the Making of the Post-War world: the Potsdam Conference and Beyond.

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