Disrupt and Deny

Transcript

hello everybody good afternoon and welcome to the latest in our series of online discussions uh on our friday insights online uh the national museum we're running thanks very much for joining us hello i'm looking with interest about everyone chipping in with where they're from kevin you're still winning being the furthest away but one of these days someone will beat you we'll probably get someone i don't know from either the very southern tip of otago or something like that or even further actually you know what's even further away maybe fiji you crossed the date line by the time you're in fiji maybe but anyway kia ora to you kevin uh always good to have you with us uh everybody else thank you it's so nice to see you we're a real treat today there's something really exciting about this that's something slightly different from our usual sort of pure military history fair but something's gonna be fascinating all name uh i can see how many people have joined how many questions are coming already that you guys all feel the same i'm really pleased that today we are being joined by professor rory cormack who's an intelligence specialist who's written a fantastic hopefully some of you guys saw the documentary that was out over the weekend as well if you haven't it's still available on catch-up on channel four so please do so um and obviously as we as we go through please ask with question function keep things going in the chat and for those who are absolutely inspired by what we're talking about and want to learn more if you look at the green bar directly below me here you will see that if you click through on that link and use that unique code you will get 30 off rory's book which i i absolutely recommend that you do but not until we finish speaking of course uh you can wait that until the end uh to go through and do that just as a little bit of housekeeping um please bear with us if we do have any technical issues we are doing our best but we're doing this from home uh and so it might not be quite as smooth as we'd really liked it to be but we are we think we're going to get there um for those of you who are maybe joining in or or come a little bit late or watching this back if you follow the exact same link you used to get here um after the broadcast has ended it's converted into a replay and you'll be able to watch it pretty much instantly so you'll be able to enjoy this again and again do also feel free to flip back through some of the back catalogue as well as some of the other talks too if you've got a moment or you're having a cup of coffee later on this afternoon but without further ado i think we'll jump into things because we've got a lot we've got a lot of stuff to talk about uh a lot of questions coming up um and there's some really fascinating stuff to get into so rory thank you so much for joining us it's great to welcome you um and i think what i'll kick off with with the first question which i'm sure a lot of people share as well is can we talk about the sources that you use you know because obviously when you're talking about when you do like secret things and it always sounds counter-intuitive to talk about secrecy when you're reading things that are being published uh or being hidden in archives but if we talk about the sources that you use you know how do you find them um are you the first person to look at some of these uh yeah tell us a little bit about your research process of course and thanks for having me and hello everybody never broadcasted from my from my spare bedroom before but here we go the the sources is is it's interesting because on the downside as many of you will know um sis gchq special forces records are all classified some sis ones from the war in the very very early cold war um but generally it's a it's a blanket bat so therefore as historians we have to be quite creative and we know that there are much there's much more out there than people realize if you start to dig around a little bit you start to look at what we might call parallel files then you can trace a little bit of little breadcrumb trails you can start to see well if i can't get the mi6 report who else might have wanted to read the mi6 report who might not be under such scrutiny from the government leaders and so you can start to put little fragments together and i'll i'll give you an example there was some really interesting stuff that i found out about a super top secret mi6 slush fund essentially which they used to bribe middle eastern leaders in the 1950s incredibly secret and arnold had written or stumbled upon this before in fact it was so secret even the prime minister did not know about it even the um foreign secretary didn't know about it even the mi6 financial director did not know about this particular slash front and i stumbled upon these these files in treasury papers because when the uh wartime chief of sis student is retired in 1952 he left a quite a dramatic inheritance he says by the way i've got this super secret slush fund which i've been using to bribe middle eastern leaders and it's got about a million pounds in it and this this was uncovered i uncovered it in in treasury files you can see that the trail of all the different ministers reacting with shock and a bit of glee britain's very skinned and to have a an unofficial fund was was quite welcome and in those same treasury papers we get discussions of covert operations which are classified elsewhere um and their cost but it's still very fragmented and the job of the historian it's a challenge but it's also great fun is to stitch these fragments together so for example in in those treasury papers there was one one reference to something called operation razzle which i'd never heard of before i've never seen it written down before um cost 500 000 pounds or whatever and next to it someone had written in very faint pencil marks four words they'd written yemen imam dying and friends yemen is obvious the imam of yemen um was a adversary of us at the time uh because he opposed british position in aidan um his health we weren't sure about his health there were question marks about it friends many of you will know is a euphemism for mi6 in the british and the british establishments um and that's all we had to go on so you get these little snippets and it's great fun trying to try to stitch them together it's still quite quite mysterious the second the second area where we can turn to to try and find some of this stuff is the private papers of people involved because a lot of this material is redacted in the national archives but there are some absolute gems lying in the private papers of former soe people or former diplomats and i'll just give a brief example here as well there are some the private papers of evelyn shukra who was the foreign office um middle east supremo in the 1950s are lying in birmingham in the cabaret library in birmingham and in it there is a discussion that you have with with the queen about covert operations which is something you would never in a million years find in the national archives down at queue and chakra is at the palace he's just finished having lunch um with the queen and they're talking about jordan they're talking about they're alluding to a british propaganda campaign in jordan and they're worried about the malicious influence of the young king's uncle and shaka records in his in his papers but the queen says and i quote that she was surprised nobody had found means of putting something in his coffee it was it was a joke um but you never you would never see that written down the national archives and shakur replies to the queen he replies um he thinks it's a good idea your majesty which ought to be applied to a number of people across the middle east and he then he then recalls that he wanted he wanted to tell her that her comment was dangerously like a remark famously made by her predecessor uh king henry ii when when he famously said well no one ridden me of this medical priest um but but but chakra bottled it essentially and um nodded instead as as uh as his cigarette that he was hiding behind his back was burning smaller and smaller and started to burn his hand so you can get these very these great little snippets and insights in in private papers as well so even though there's a blanket ban on sis and special forces there's still loads of material for entrepreneurial historians to go and track down i mean that's amazing is it i mean it must be so much fun to discover like the real human personalities behind some of this stuff as well you know to actually find out what made these people tick they found funny they would crack jokes about yeah it's great and the the national archives stuff only gives you a but it's brilliant what we what we are able to find but it only kind of gives you the the skeleton of what was going on the committees now i'm a massive committee nerd and i won't bore everyone with various committees to cover action but that's what you get in the national archives you then have to move away to private papers and to talking to people to get a sense of who these people are i think when we write books um based purely on redacted material particularly which is held centrally there's a danger of overplaying committees and forgetting about the personalities and there were some quite frankly maverick personalities at play here there was um an old boy's network of um special operations executive veterans who frankly didn't want to retire at the end of the second world war and every single um british operation covert operation from 1945 until until the mid-1970s really the same names were popping up most famously among them was was julian amory obviously served in albania um during world war ii and was then almost by the 1950s a kind of unofficial minister for covert action flying around the globe doing dodgy deals and meeting various rebel groups um so you see this this small network and and those those characters i think are really really interesting i mean i've got to ask as well was there anything that you know you you weren't allowed to write about that you weren't allowed to look at that maybe you you looked at and then someone sort of said well you really can't say these sorts of things i guess a question is a great way to actually get around someone put an embargo on you writing something um the the book is based on on declassified sources so uh we don't we we don't have that problem of uh i've never wanted to be a be an official historian because then you can access the closed stuff which i think sounds really exciting i desperate to see this close stuff but then once you've seen the closed stuff it's difficult to then go back again and have to go through legal classification reviews approval from the authorities um so i've deliberately kept it all very declassified that said we do uh do um interviews with people as well off the record interviews which which helps to helps me interpret the declassified archival records um but there were one or two things which the um the very thorough lawyers for the unit for the press um insisted that i take now which i don't i don't think i should probably repeat here and in terms of sports i mean you mentioned that local uh you know the local papers and the local archives and that's what i mean i mean how far-ranging did you go i mean did you did you find yourself in a you know in a tiny archive and you know buried in uh i don't know small town usa or something like that uh which you never thought you might get to or you know you talked about queue obviously but you know how far how far did you range in finding the sources for this i have some fantastic memories of um driving down tornado alley in the us with tornado warnings coming over the the radio as i was fleeing one of the small presidential archives one of the great um sorts of frustration but it's also um a great opportunity is that the american presidential archives are decentralized across the whole of the states so instead of just rocking up to your archival supermarket essentially you have to go to small town kansas you have to go to small town missouri um you have to and then slightly more exciting end of the scale the um the reagan archive which i consulted is in california just outside um so it is a hard life the archive will the historian the historians archival trail is a source of great adventure yeah i bet i bet so i've noticed in the chat that anthony's written moscow with an experience and i bet there's a cracking story behind that so perhaps we should be talking to him but a little bit later on um looking back to the you know moving back to the book and you know your story begins in 1945 and the aftermath of the second world war um can you mean can you tell us a little bit more about you know the battle between the foreign office and the military you know when it came to this evolving cold war there were ever freezing relations between the the british and the soviets you know what kind of conflicts were going on there about idea of covert action there was so much tension between the military and the foreign office in the aftermath of world war ii and as the cold war starts to um become more solidified because after world war ii there's a almost two or three year period where the cold war hasn't really started yet and russia we should remember was was an ally during world war ii and so there are certain people in the foreign office saying are we sure it's going to be quite so bad um and the military in this sense were right it did become bad but they were they were bruised because they wanted to take control of combat operations at the end of world war ii and they saw the virgin cold war as still a form of conflict even though there was no shooting um they they they saw it as a form of conflict um they didn't like the idea that the foreign office had managed to win the white hole battle and secure a veto over covert operations and they saw that foreign officers being very wet and timid when it came to coarth operations abroad and they were pushing pushing pushing for a global political warfare plan from as early as 46 1947 the chiefs of staff were arguing that britain should be doing bribery kidnapping the quotes from one of the chiefs of staff was we should be doing anything short of assassination frankly and the foreign office replied by creating um what was called the information research department which many of many of you will know was britain's propaganda wing essentially out of the foreign office and the military so this is very well and good but it's just a bit of grey propaganda it's a bit wet it's a bit timid where's the bribery where's the sabotage and they're pushing pushing pushing for more stuff and eventually under great pressure from the military the foreign office asked the the chief of mi6 to come up with a almost a list of things that mi6 could do and i mean they called it c's list and it was one of the most dramatic documents i've ever had the pleasure of reading in the british archives and it gives it it gives a list which starts off with with black propaganda and lies um it then talks about potentially using stink bombs to disrupt communist party meetings um it then moves through to sabotage to kidnapping to arson and eventually you see the word liquidation now believe me you very very rarely see the word liquidation written down in the uh the british state archives now mingers and sis weren't recommending liquidation they were trying in a sense to appease the military and give the military a sense that the foreign officers were taking this seriously and you see covert action developing um almost through a compromise of military pressure and foreign office hesitance and what we see over the next 20 years or so is a really fascinating and quite farcical pattern where the foreign office will cr create some sort of mechanism to scrutinize and authorize combat action they'll keep it secret from the military because they don't want the military involved somehow the military get wind of these super secret committees and insist on a seat the foreign officers say okay you can have a seat let's talk about overthrowing albania or whatever and then the foreign office creates another committee and committee one becomes a front almost like a front committee whether the chief of staff can can round and rave and vet their frustrations and feel like they're having an input into britain's cable operations meanwhile the diplomats through fancy bureaucratic footwork are next door um making the real decisions and then when when um the military find out about that committee the pattern repeats itself over about 20 years and it's great fun seeing the bureaucratic intrigue down the corridors of whitehall as the foreign office tries to outmaneuver the much more hawkish military there was um there was only one example that i came across where the foreign office were much more keen to launch a covert operation than the military and actually had to lobby the mod to um to agree to it and that was 1970 and the the coup in oman where um the the foreign office wanted to overthrow the leader in favor of his son because the leader was waging a council insurgency against against uh rebels very very poorly and britain thought that his son would be better and the military um were very worried about this because a lot of the the forces inside oman was a conduit from the uk and the villagers were very concerned that if second military personnel were using a coup it was almost fatally undermined the standing of other seconded forces around the world and the foreign officers had to lobby the military very hard to allow british citizens to to um to become engaged in this coup uh and promised that um promised that it would be utterly deniable and not at all uh traceable back to britain but apart from that it was very much a pattern of the military lobbying for covert action in the foreign office doing it a little bit more cautiously i mean i mean with all that it sounds amazing that anyone have any you know effort or strength or even time left to to fight the cold war or anything else if they're trying to dodge the military um i mean with their flash points like i'm thinking about you know with philby and burgess and stuff where the military really you know sort of tried to seize back control this element of saying well you actually you're always not working or anything like that the military they didn't just use the the cambridge five stuff they use anything to try and seize about control um as late as this um second half of the 60s if i remember correctly they're still trying to come up with schemes to bring special operations back inside the ministry of defense the philby stuff was actually more impactful on the american relationship because obviously we can't understand british covert action without understanding american combat action because quite often they work together sometimes they competed actually there was a lot of there was a lot of competition that the the the relationship was was very pragmatic more pragmatic people realized there's a lot of covert competition between the two sides and philby was a flash points where the americans were used as an excuse to cut the brits out of various playwright operations even as early as the albania operation in the late 1940s the americans are not letting mi6 into some of the planning meetings because they've heard rumors about cambridge 5 after burgess after mclean and that that did have quite an important impact on the us uk covert action relationship um just on the subject of the of the us there obviously there's a the cia is is quite a different beast uh to mi6 and that sort of thing can you can we talk a little bit about the relationship between mi6 special forces and how that compares to to some of the american organizations you're right it's completely different because mi6 has never had any kind of comparable um kinetic capability like like a cia or even like the french there's no paramilitary wing to to sis and therefore since the end of the second world war they've had to work very closely with special forces and in america you have this very rigid distinction between covert action which is done by the cia including bias by his paramilitary wing versus special military operations uh which are done in in wartime or armpit or anticipated wartime and they're different they're distinct they have different authorization different oversight procedures britain is much more flexible much more blurred and that's partly because mi6 doesn't has to work very has to work very closely with special forces so from the late 1940s mi6 used a lot of ex-soe personnel in places like iran and the first iranian covert operation which was 1946 seven if i remember correctly and more famously in albania you've seen the xsoe types who were leading a charge here and this pattern continued um through until the war on terror really where nowadays there is a special forces team embedded inside mi6hq working closely together and able to act very quickly on on intelligence it's because it's a close relationship the problem arises the problem arises when the covert action becomes bigger than just i say just um a power military special operation it's when it starts to become a secret a secret war if that's not too much of an oxymoron because then it needs broader military planning and you can't just co-op special forces and that's when the the biggest fights between the military and the and sis and the foreign office broke out when in places like indonesia in the 1960s in yemen in the 1960s in oman in the 1970s when these are big operations requiring big logistics and planning um that's when the tension really starts to kick in i mean in the book you you really didn't pull any punches when it comes to some of the more controversial operations that the british have been involved in i mean can you describe some of the ways in which the uk sort of justified this some of this underhand activity uh and you know explained why they were doing it or even you know justify both to themselves but then also perhaps to the public or later generations of historians well yeah the book i tried to to not pass judgments on on these operations i tried to tell the stories uncover new stuff and then let people make up their own minds and some of the feedback's been great some people think it's absolutely outrageous that britain's doing this kind of stuff other people think it's way too timid and we should be doing um a lot more of it generally the uk has been relatively cautious in his approach to coat action but there have been some very controversial operations and i'm fascinated to read how britain as a liberal democracy self justifies or moralizes these these operations um one of the first ones which is particularly controversial was something called operation embarrass in 1947 1948 and the aim here was to stem the the flow of illegal immigration to palestine uh many uh jewish immigrants coming from refugee camps in places like italy and britain was worried that this immigration was fueling an insurgency and launched covert operations to uh for example sabotage ships um not with anyone on them wasn't was not um that that hardcore but sabotaging single ships before the refugees could get on it now looking back with hindsight um so close after the horrors of the second world war that was that was that's that's a very controversial um thing for britain to have done um more recently the controversy comes in northern ireland where what seems seemed acceptable to many brits inside government in places like malaya colonial malaya or aidan or somewhere suddenly we're talking about doing this stuff on the streets of the united kingdom and this therefore becomes really controversial so you see them sometimes doing linguistics and ethical gymnastics to try and justify um what they're doing here most famously perhaps is what critics call hit squads operating on the on the streets of belfast particularly in 1972 when we see armed plainclothes units whose entire purpose really was to quote the chief of general staff at the time to mystify mislead and destroy terrorists their job was to try and draw these terrorists into the open which would often end up in a in a fire fight and the justification here because on one hand it looks very underhand you'll just your disguise disguise themselves as locals to try and confuse and then destroy the the ira the the justification and people couldn't can think of this what they like um is that these were not hit squads um they would only shoot in self-defense but it's a very fine line because they're trying to provoke firefights so self-defense comes very very quickly they're trying to draw terrorists out to the open and what does the government think is going to happen what an armed unit draws a terrorist into the open there's going to be a firefight so the justification was it's only self-defense there's a slightly uh people people can make their own mind the um the other area in northern ireland and and and beyond was black propaganda and the question for the british is is it appropriate for a liberal democracy to spread lies effectively this is the kind of thing that soviets do and britain would always justify their role in this as being defensive we are only ever exposing the other side's lies we're not spreading our own lives that was that was the justification but it was still very controversial to be doing black propaganda in um places like northern ireland and most one of the most famous black propaganda operations in ireland involved a campaign to try and accuse the ira of engaging in witchcraft and black magic to try and discredit them discredit them amongst um catholic uh audiences and the foreign office explicitly discussed how we can justify doing this stuff in northern ireland and they came up with two uh two two justifications again audiences can make their own minds up the first was that even though it's in northern ireland there's still an international dimension to this uh and therefore that enables foreign office um propaganda specialists to get involved i mean actually they linked to they said islands involved here so it's international and maybe clutching its straws a bit too much they said um it's also got a vatican dimension as well they tried to play on the catholic holy see angle to justify foreign office involvement and the second uh the second option was emphasizing the ira's subversive activity in communist links which they thought justified a covert propaganda campaign but more broadly britain justified a large campaign of spreading forgeries across africa across southeast asia of um creating fake groups to spread propaganda they justified this um as saying well all we're doing here is creating a false source whether that is a forgery of a soviet front organization for example or whether we are creating um a fake african nationalist group all we're doing is creating a full source we're then using that full source to spread what britain would call was the truth and these truths were often selectively edited but checking them out most of them were broadly accurate so that was justification and they'd say we have to create a full source because otherwise no one would believe the message the false source makes it credible and that was always the justification but what um we're finding this is what i'm working on at the moment is the nature of the fake source actually to be credible means unnecessates certain tone certain emotions certain language which actually encourages the audience to to reinterpret the facts in a different way i'll give you an example um when britain used britain created a fake think tank to to discredit communism and that it was very dull very dry had lots of think tank reports and people would read it and not really do much on the other end of the scale they forged some muslim brotherhood documents and to make it credible which i thought was what on one level is farcical i mean can you imagine a bunch of aging middle-aged white men sitting in the foreign office writing these um very uh very emotive in the name of allah the merciful type letters and this is this is dodgy stuff here and they are forging muslim brotherhood letters to try and encourage a rebellion against nasa and egypt to get to khanna and indonesia and even though what they're saying is technically true the way they're saying it to maintain credibility they end up um saying for example they criticize nasa's policy in yemen you nasa have been using chemical weapons in yemen and britain wanted the world to know this so they forged a muslim brotherhood document written in supposedly in the name of of allah merciful and this document said nasa is is a non-believer he's been using chemical weapons and i mean they can't almost get carried away and saying um and saying um nasa should have um the amount of the amount of um weapons that nasa used in yemen would have been enough to to to kill israel 10 times over or something like that which is obviously very ethically dubious but they justify it by saying the source was fake but the content was true and and that distinction i think is is a bit too simplistic i mean that's fascinating i mean it begs the question you know did did any of these these people who were who were sort of operating uh in and amongst you know in in this secret world any of them sort of wildly exceed their remit and have to you know what kind of discipline structure was in place to watch what these guys were doing and to make sure that there were no sort of very public mistakes made or anything like that well interesting on the on the forgery side of things um britain was very keen to do this and there was one lovely document from lebanon i think in the in the mid 60s when the the the ir the local propaganda office in in lebanon was getting a bit carried away it was going a little bit too far and the foreign officers have to write to them and there's this great um british phrase of something like we don't want to curb your enthusiasm in this domain but would you mind terribly just just reining it in slightly there are there aren't many examples of this because one of the things that i've found and if this this applies to british approach to intelligence more generally is this all comes down from number 10 and from foreign secretaries mi6 are not and were not rogue elephants rampaging around the world bumping people off doing crazy stuff without any authorization the vast majority of this was authorized through proper bureaucratic channels even the more outlandish things around um president nasa and egypt and suez and the plans to assassinate i mean that still did come from the prime minister so we don't see we don't see the need for much disciplinary action because a lot of them were doing doing what they were told to do in the first place quite frankly um can i ask you about um i mean you talked about some actually amazing operations there i mean was there anything you know are there any spectacular failures uh of the british efforts in this that we should talk about you know we get very talk about british successes and ingenuity and that sort of thing does anything go like spectacularly wrong um the operation albania is probably the most famous of the the british failures when um they supposedly wanted to detach albania from the from the soviet bloc in the late 1940s and trained up some dissidents infiltrated them back in by boat from malta into albania and the soviets and the albanian authorities knew and knew exactly what was coming and um it didn't end well shall we say for the for the poor um dissidents infiltrated back in and it's very difficult to claim success because not to judge success and failure because that's that's the most famous um big british failure but even after then the british involved were desperately trying to claim as a success they were saying well we never actually wanted to detach albania that was always that kind of end goal um we were just trying to see if conditions were ripe for an insurrection and it turns out conditions are not right for interaction therefore we've answered our question therefore we were kind of successful which is very very brutal way of looking at it but you can see these debates um debates going on um there was one half failure half success which i thought was worth sharing because it's it's also quite ridiculous which was early 1970s when in latin america there were a wave of kidnappings of western diplomats by various armed leftist groups and they they ended up kidnapping the uk ambassador to uruguay and this caused um consternation in the foreign office as you'd expect the propagandists sprung into action um started to spread disinformation uh forgeries to convince the kidnappers that the local population did not approve of the kidnapping and to let the ambassador to go that failed miserably um so then they tried to do something which i've never seen before and just strikes me as a slightly odd um they turned to psychics they turned to what they called experts in extra sensory perception psychics to you to you and me and to try and find out where where um where this kidnapped ambassador was and weirdly enough they opened the foreign office address book and it had not one not two but three psychics listed um who could be used in this operation um the first they ruled out because apparently this particular psychic was and i quote not respectable the the second sidekick um they ruled out on the grounds that they were unwilling to share classified information with this psychic and then they got a bit worried that the poor diplomat's wife might be distressed the idea that they're resorting to psychics to try and find her kidnapped husband um but but the psychic number three they thought might be a goer uh and so they started to do um a vetting process and the recommendation for this particular psychic interestingly enough came from britain's britain britain's ambassador to the united nations who had this had this psychic in his address book um ultimately the black propaganda failed the psychic failed and it turned out that ted heath the prime minister was covertly negotiating a ransom payment to get him back um so the covert side of things failed there and related to where we really needed more um discrete prime ministerial involvement but i just i just when i saw those files i just thought it was utterly utterly bonkers that's absolutely fantastic um i think maybe just one final question from me and i shall throw open to the floor because they are uh questions are racking up um i mean i'm a military historian we're joined by the military historians in the audience and you know we're very used to sort of walking the ground of some of the the subject matter that we cover and i just wonder you know is there an equivalent place like a spiritual home if you will of uh of british covert operations where you know if you if you can't necessarily see the safe houses where any of this stuff happened you can still sort of get a feel for it you know i guess well unless it trips up and down whitehall which is maybe less glamorous you say that but i i do genuinely thoroughly enjoy a little spy tour around around london it's great fun um but the the best place that i like to go when when when thinking about these things is berlin which as everyone knows was a den of spies and covert operations on all sides during the the early cold war in particular and just spending time soaking up the atmosphere in berlin is is really really enjoyable you don't find new things out by doing this but it helps make sense sometimes of the the skeletal record that's available in the archives and the same goes for washington dc as well dc was a big uh den of again a bit of intriguing spies and it's great fun so to walk those streets and see where philby was hanging out with angleton except essentially we're all just enthusiasts at the end of the day absolutely absolutely how fantastic um right let's let let's get some of the questions uh which are uh coming up um richard o'shea has asked about um sis activity in argentina in the lead up to the falklands war uh and sort of what was cut out from there and um and how that was being passed back to the relevant reverend bodies in london well there wasn't a great deal um going on as far as we know in the in the lead up to the default war through secret channels um most of the good stuff coming out of argentina was coming out through open sources and going back up to the um the foreign office with those open rather than closed channels and the the failure uh around intelligence and the the inability to predict the start of the falcons war came from britain's intelligence assessment machinery the joint intelligence committee um over emphasizing the secret stuff the weak secret stuff at the expense of the open stuff there's they made this classic intelligence mistake of assuming the top secret meant true and the declassified meant not true or boring when actually there was a lot of really interesting and quite accurate material coming out of the argentinian press coming out of military attaches those kind of semi-open sources um but britain ignored them essentially and that was that became quite costly sis sprung into action though um once the car once the war was underway and there was a very dramatic operation which sis conducted alongside uh french intelligence where essentially they were tracing tracking tracing and hunting down arms dealers who were selling exercise missiles um to the argentinians and some of it got um there were there were some quite aggressive um means of dealing with those armed dealers shall we say yeah yeah it's not all the uh people he was always referred to john not just allowing people to bid on the open market but then that more covert stuff that was going on as well wasn't there absolutely um graham uh walker's actually asked just going back to what you said about berlin about mi6's activity obviously in 1961 when the wall was going up you know about how you know how i i guess how much did they know um how they responded to that um what was being passed back or were they caught you know was this one of these these times when the the secret the sis were really caught on the hot by world events and it made a it made a big difference to sis's capabilities because this the free movement around berlin prior to the war was what made berlin such an important city not just in intelligence gathering but in disseminating propaganda in trying to recruit defectors um all of these these types of things and then suddenly overnight that stops and i think one of the consequences of that albert berlin of course remained a um an important uh cold war city for intelligence terms but from the 60s onwards when that route is a lot less um easy we see that kind of diversification of of covert action and intelligence gathering um capabilities we see things start to move towards africa there's more it's more and southeast asia mi6 are looking at proxies they're looking at the battle for post-colonial influence in africa they're looking at um president sakano in indonesia they're even in the 1960s turning their attention quite dramatically to latin america a place where traditionally sis had little role in covert action and i think that's one of the consequences of of cold war europe the war of the war going up is we start to see a more global approach to the cold war and mi6 diversifying what it's what it's trying to do i mean that's very interesting james uh has asked a question about british attitudes towards north korea uh and the korean war of 50 to 1950 to 53. so you know what was going on there but also after that what you were saying about the berlin wall going up and and forcing everything on a more global scale are there any real sort of dead spots that remain in british intelligence capabilities or they manage to spread themselves pretty effectively i think uh intelligence is one of the very few areas where britain has gen genuinely managed to maintain a reasonably global outlook because as britain's global role declines and continues to decline um intelligence is one of those few areas where we have a global presence and it's because successive governments have seen intelligence as being a forced multiplier so whereas you can retreat uh diplomatically or in terms of military deployment from certain theaters if you leave behind intelligence capabilities it you get more bang for your buck essentially that said britain was never able to spread itself around the world entirely and there are always um blacks dead spots um latin america was never a was never a prime target apart from this period period in the 1960s when britain thought that american influence might be declining in latin america and the latin american countries and south american countries were opening up trade wise there was a big mi6 drive to um capitalize on that but that was quite short-lived generally latin and south america has been more of an american field than british um and the other the other dead spot i would love if anyone knows the answer to this i'd love to know it was there's a great document where they're talking about american areas of influence and british areas of influence and britain says and of course we don't do any intelligence or covert operations work in antarctica we leave that the us so to answer your question antarctica is another dead spot for british intelligence although quite what the americans are doing or did i would love to know the answer that's fantastic um you and grant has asked about sort of what lessons you think your research has for sort of modern day cross-agency cooperation you know uh we've been pretty terrible historians we think you've learned a lot from the past so i mean what do you think you know looking back at uh the the the history and the legacy of some of this stuff that you know what can modern day cross-agency cooperation be um as the emphasis shifts from from counter insurgency to anti-terrorist work or or peer and near peer cooperation anything like that i think we can draw it draw lessons from the constant tension between different whitehall actors during the cold war and britain never quite knew how to properly coordinate because if if the foreign office takes the chat takes charge in what the technical is called a vertical approach um which excludes the military minister of defense um it's it's quicker um it's closely aligned to foreign policy um it could be you could be more nimble but there's less scrutiny and it's there's not very it's pretty poor interagency coordination so the other option is what we call a horizontal approach which is uh which involves foreign office and ministry of defense there's better scrutiny there's better coordination but it's slow it's cumbersome because you have to bring in more whitehall actors and that tension is really relevant today and this i think is where the national security council set that up in 2010 um is really good because it coordinates so it kind of combines those two those two approaches quite neatly is it solves that uh riddle which which um which plagued british coat action for a good 20 30 years because the nsc it provides a forum for scrutiny and accountability and coordination but at the same time cover operations which can just go up through the foreign office do just work for the foreign office and it gets that balance right i think between military between scrutiny and coordination versus speed uh nimbleness and policy integration so i think that how we manage that is is one is one lesson i think another lesson is about what how we should approach code operations in a liberal democracy and how we justify some of these things and i think when we are talking about countering russian disinformation a lot of the debate obvious reasons focuses on exposing that this information focuses on how we can increase the public's ability to spot this information the debate does not focus on british covert responses now history tells us that britain will at least be debating um the prospect of covert operations to counter russian disinformation and what we can learn from history includes well under what conditions should britain be doing this and what are some of the consequences and impacts of britain doing this because history tells us that um covert propaganda for example is much more complex than just something which has to stay secret and which changes minds that's that's that's almost a receive wisdom of what private propaganda should look like but history tells us well actually exposure can counter-intuitively have benefits um even if the propaganda never reaches the intended audience it can tie down your adversary's intelligence services as they try to work out who is behind it if the adversary denounces something as a forgery that can actually sometimes be more useful than if they didn't because that that denunciation ends up reaching more people than the original forgery would have done so i think looking at the history shows us or breaks down um consequences of covert action in quite a nuanced and sophisticated way many and many of these trade-offs many of these impacts consequences are still relevant today i think it's really important to to demythologize covert action to think about um to treat it almost like any other form of policy so that we can unpack how it works how it's authorized trade-offs what happens there's a danger if we just mythologize it as james bond's stuff then you miss a lot of this um really important nuance fantastic um i think maybe just from the final question and and francesca's asked a little bit about it sort of brings us back to the very beginning when we were talking about sources uh and francesca's asked about uk archives intelligence records and the chances that more may be made available in future or if things are actually going to start being closed for longer and things actually becoming more you know less accessible and perhaps you know what you feel as a historian in the field what you think might the future landscape of the field might be well they're moving obviously moving the 30-year rule to a 20-year-old which is great um on the downside a lot of the intelligent material is outside of those of those changes and one thing i i've noticed is that the freedom of information request system is seems to be getting a lot worse over the last five or so years and i don't know if this is because of cuts in whitehall i don't know if it's anything ideological not gonna uh offer any conspiracies but this this is problematic um for intelligence historians i've got some really good stuff um through fois for this book around something called the joint action committee which sounds terribly boring but it was britain's um uh body to coordinate covert action the big covert actions and that was all classified i got some great stuff throughout fyi i got some other great stuff through fy about um uh middle eastern operations unfortunately it's just it's just dried up uh i've had no successes in for at least three years um so i think that's that's the trend that i've noticed and i don't see it getting any better for as long as um government are making severe severe cuts across the board right fantastic i think sadly we uh we we've just about run out of time there um thank you so much for for sharing uh all of your knowledge with us and talking about so many wonderful and varied things you know i i think this this idea about the forgeries of the muslim brotherhood and the psychics will certainly uh stay with me for quite a long time that was absolutely brilliant um for those of you again who join us a little bit late and i want to watch back there will be a replay available pretty much immediately by the same link also please do look at this green bar underneath me here which will allow you to get 30 rory's book um we've only absolutely scratched the surface of some of the amazing stuff that's in there and you can get far more out of there but by all means please do follow through use that code you'll get 30 off so that really is a bargain on a rather rather soggy today um and likewise again on a sloggy friday afternoon he clicks on to do a ducat documentary uh that feature over the weekend too it's available on channel 4 um all about iran uh and and some of the coup there's actually brilliant ladies and gentlemen please join me in giving a huge virtual round of applause uh for rory for for joining us it's been absolutely fantastic thank you join me also as well has given a round of applause virtual round of applause to my colleagues nicola isabel who continue to do so much amazing stuff in the background of all of this and keeping everything ticking over uh i keep everything um i just get to stand up here and talk about stuff that i find really interesting but they're what guys who do all the legwork so um let's give them a thanks without them none of this stuff will be happening so thank you to them um really hope you guys can can join us next week um please do look ahead for what we've got in the rest of the programme um and in the meantime thank you very much rory thank you everybody for joining us uh i hope you guys stay safe and have a great weekend thank you goodbye you