Review: Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets

It took me a long time to read this 350 + page book. It's not a gripping tale, but the outcome of an academic engagement with the history of British intelligence begun at the University of Cambridge under the (doctoral) supervision of Christopher Andrew. (In the past Cambridge bred spies; now it studies them).

There is a focus - the role of British intelligence agencies (MI5, MI6 / SIS, GCHQ and so on) in the final decades of the British Empire when colonies turned into independent states. There is a thesis - those agencies often enough smoothed the path to independence and, despite everything (in some cases a Lot of everything), helped create at least a semblance of working relations between the United Kingdom and former colonies - working relations symbolised by the fact that most colonies on leaving the Empire chose to join the Commonwealth. But this does not create a single narrative. Rather, we are presented with a large number of thumbnails from which we don't get a feel for what the day to day operations of the Intelligence agencies involved. I feel I ended up knowing a little about a lot of colonial histories, including lots that I certainly did not know before.

In a couple of cases the thumbnails are quite expanded, as in discussions of the end of the Palestinian Mandate and the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya and these were the most interesting sections of the book.

Walton takes some trouble to explain what distinguishes the Intelligence agencies of the UK from a secret police. The core criterion is the fact that our agencies do not have powers of arrest and imprisonment. Their job is to collect and analyse intelligence and pass it on - and in good time, if it concerns specific threats. MI5 which took the lead role in intelligence work in the colonies, worked very hard to get this model adopted in colonies becoming independent.

It helped that in several instances MI5 regarded local Nationalist leaders,like Kwame Nkrumah in the Gold Coast and Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, as less threatening than did British politicians who in the 1950s saw Communists behind every instance of colonial unrest. This was not without bad faith: if Communists were to blame, then the United States would be more likely to accept repression as necessary in the Cold War context than regard it as an instance of outmoded colonialism.

In one important case, both American and British politicians convinced themselves - and despite Intelligence to the contrary - that a local Nationalist leader did pose a Communist threat. This was Cheddi Jagan who had the misfortune to be working for the independence of a colony - British Guiana - in America's backyard. So with  the help of CIA money and dirty tricks (and,basically, the CIA in the 1950s wasn't about much more than money and dirty tricks), Jagan was ousted from government and replaced with the puppet figure of Forbes Burnham - who went on to wreck his country's democracy and economy. (A bit like Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, who was seen by Britain as the "Best Bet" for a post-independence leader) .

Walton deals with the question of interrogation techniques and torture in British colonies, using documents which have only recently been allowed into the public domain. This provides a context, for example, to understand the recent court cases in London brought by former Mau Mau detainees. He also has some damning quotations ( Page 344) documenting  the British government's simultaneously racist and servile behaviour in clearing the inhabitants of Diego Garcia from their Indian Ocean  island home in order to make way for a giant  military base demanded by the Americans. In related discussions, he explain why in pre-Internet days Britain hung on to territorial outposts not only as places where warships could refuel or war planes could land and take off, but also as listening posts from which one could eavesdrop on other people's radio traffic. Cyprus provides a notable example and explains why we still claim the Freehold of part of the island  which in consequence is divided in three,not two as is usually thought.

Well, it took me a long time to read but I find I have had quite a bit to say about this book. And that does tend to support its claim to offer a study of topics previously little studied.

Review: Oliver Bullough, The Last Man in Russia

When I saw this book on the table at Waterstones, I bought it at once: I had read Oliver Bullough's Let Our Fame Be Great , an impressive, very well-written combination of reportage and research about the Russian Caucasus. 

But though still well-written and once again a combination of reportage and research, this is a broken backed book. It tries to do two things and they don't quite come together.

First, as the cover suggests it is a book about Russia's core problems: a shrinking and ageing population, falling life expectancy, high levels of crime and violence. Bullough identifies alcohol and alcoholism as the driver of all three. He is probably right but he doesn't really develop the case he opens up. Too many things are mentioned in passing, like Gorbachev's anti-alcohol programme and Putin's more limited initiatives.  There is no reportage from the cities or suburbs where homelessness and crime are driven by drugs as well as alcohol. And, surprisingly, Bullough misses a trick when he fails to make any mention of Russian Brides.

Young women want to leave Russia for many reasons, but a major one is to escape the possibility (even the  probability) that they will end up married to an alcoholic whose life style will depress their standard of living and make for domestic misery. And the fact that many women of child-bearing age do succeed in leaving ensures that the birth rate will continue to fall. That is why Russian Brides is a subject which has excited the Russian Parliament, with proposals (for example) to strip women who leave of their citizenship. Bullough mentions none of this.

Instead, he pursues another story, the biography of the Russian Orthodox priest, Dmitry Dudko (1922 - 2004). I think this is just the wrong story to follow.  Though it allows a narrative to develop about despair and distrust - to which Dudko the priest responded - and to the role of both state and state church in creating such hopelessness, it does not really connect enough to the narrative about alcohol.

Father Dmitry was once a Soviet dissident but - without support from his own heavily compromised Russian Orthodox church - broke under pressure from the KGB and after the fall of Communism was known simply as a Russian nationalist and anti-semite. It's all rather unsavoury, but no more so than the Russian Orthodox church itself. (Though to be fair, it is not alone among Orthodox churches in its lack of humanity: if you ran the 20th century history of the Greek Orthodox church alongside that of the Russian Orthodox, it would be hard to know which one would come out worst).  

Bullough has nothing to say about other religious movements in Russia which have placed themselves outside the state church. I felt this was another weakness of his book.

Because Bullough writes well and knows how to interleave personal reportage and historical narrative, it's easy to go through this book in a few hours. But it's not in the same league as his first book.  

Review: Emil Draitser, Agent Dmitri - The Secret History of Russia's Most Daring Spy

I like Spy books but the first half of this one left me uneasy. I took me some time to work out why but I think the problem is this. We have two unreliable narrators: Agent Dmitri and his biographer, Emil Draitser.

Dmitri Bystrolyotov (1901 - 1975) wrote prolifically about his 1920s and 1930s career as a Soviet undercover agent working across Europe and even in Africa. But he wrote in the Soviet Union (mostly) in the 1960s and hoped to see at least some of his work published there. As a result, he tries not to give away too many secrets and also to depict his career in politically correct (and 1960s Soviet prudish) terms. But Spying, Political Correctness and Prudishness simply don't go together and Dmitri ends up as an unreliable narrator of his own life. 

Emil Draitser has had access to all Dmitri's manuscripts and tries to correct their unreliability using other sources, interpretations, decodings and more candid parts of Bystrolytov's writings. But he adds in his own rather simplistic psychoanalytic interpretations and it may be these which made me think that Draitser is also an unreliable narrator. The publishing history of this book is also rather odd: it was first published by an American academic publisher (the reputable Northwestern University Press) but with a lurid title Russia's Romeo Spy. There is a dead website with the same title. In the UK it has been published by the reputable academically-oriented publisher, Duckworth, but with the down-market cover shown above. Clearly, we are also dealing with unreliable publishers who can't make up their minds what kind of book they are publishing.

The book only comes together in the second half which takes us through Dmitri's arrest in 1937, his interrogation under torture, his imprisonment in the Gulag (1938 - 1954), his rehabilitation in 1956 and his later life. Here the narrative is more assured - and often harrowing. Dmitri experienced the worst the Gulag could offer - Norilsk, war time hunger rations, false hopes of early release - and almost certainly owed his survival not only to his previous career as a spy but his medical qualifications, which allowed him to function for much of his Gulag sentence as a Camp medical assistant or doctor.

I think a better book could be written. Draitser argues that recent KGB / FSB authorised biographies of Dmitri - which (for example) fail to mention the torture -  are not in this category - and about that, I am sure he is right.

____________

One small detail aroused my interest. In the 1930s Dmitri was sent on a mission to French colonial Africa with a brief to check out French claims that, in the event of a European war, they could raise large forces of troops / mercenaries from among their black African colonial subjects. Dmitri's assessment was negative. But  it was the case (this is not mentioned in the book) that later on Free French Forces did include troops recruited from the African colonies - and they are on record as behaving badly (rape, looting) in at least two instances: in Syria where they were used to suppress Nationalist uprisings against French rule and in the liberation of Germany. And it occurs to me that if you want to understand why post-colonial armies and militias in former French Africa behave badly, then you may have to go back to this earlier period when black troops were first deployed by their colonial masters.

Review:Christopher de Bellaigue, Patriot of Persia - Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup

The title is surprisingly misleading: it was an American coup, directed by Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt dispensing an awful lot of dollars. The British were no longer up to the task of toppling governments unaided, though they still hoped to be the main beneficiaries of the 1953 coup which toppled Mossadegh. The British wanted back Anglo-Iranian Oil, nationalised by Mossadegh's government. They didn't get it, though they did get to share the post-coup oil concessions with the American companies - the big winners. Roosevelt got good value for his dollars.

The British still regarded the Middle East as theirs to control and in Iran they had only recently been - along with the Soviet Union - joint military occupiers for the duration of World War Two. But they were now on their way down. They had been kicked out of Palestine in 1948 - see my immediately preceding review on this Blog - and in 1956 the refusal of the Americans to support them meant that they were kicked out of Suez.

To this day, the Brits still want to intervene in the Middle East at every available opportunity, but they can now only do so on American coat tails. Mr Blair would not have got his war in Iraq if President Bush hadn't wanted one.

De Bellaigue's book is a bit awkward in structure, rather like the man who is its central character. It isn't a hagiography and the author is quite clear that Mossadegh could have avoided his fate. He did not see how much in his favour were the formulas crafted by a Truman Administration, sympathetic to Iranian aspirations to free themselves from quasi-colonial dependence but trying at the same time to save British face. De Bellaigue is equally clear that both the British and Americans failed to appreciate that Mossadegh's ideals were much more aligned with liberal democratic values than with Soviet ones or those of the Shah's supporters. The eventual  obsession with Soviet expansion meant that  the Shah's regime after Mossadegh became unpleasantly authoritarian with a vicious security apparatus, the Savak, as its American- and Israeli-trained guardian. ( In those days, Private Eye always referred to the Shah as the Shit of Persia).

Mossadegh emerges as an eccentric character who found his mission as a champion of national self-determination. His roots were in the old ruling class; his education partly Western and secular; his values liberal ( opponents usually got off very lightly by Iranian standards); and his politics veering between the democratic and - later in life - the populist or Messianic.

I liked this book because of its complexity. De Bellaigue has some straightforward Bad Guys - the arrogant and stupid British executives at Anglo Iranian oil, notably - but the rest of the cast are in shades of grey rather than black and white.

Review: James Barr, A Line In The Sand

I am shocked. From the time in 1918 - when they were granted League of Nations mandates to run the former Ottoman Middle East -  until 1948 - when Britain abandoned Palestine - France and Britain fought like ferrets in a sack to extend their areas of effective control in the Levant. The Second World War did not even cause a blip in the struggle. No Method to advance their respective causes was ruled out - and when I say "No Method", I mean that. Terrorists proved useful to both sides, who supplied them with money and machine guns.

The First World War was in many ways an "Eastern" war, fought for future control of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Russia, for example, wanted Constantinople and ports on the coast of northern Turkey so that it had full control over the Black Sea routes from Odessa and Batum to the Mediterranean.

Britain wanted - and at the end of the War, received from the League of Nations - Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine. There were two reasons. First, to provide a protective buffer to the east of British - controlled Egypt and the Suez Canal. Second, for Oil.

In 1912, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, followed Naval advice and committed to switch the Royal Navy - the most powerful fleet in the world - from coal to oil. That entailed establishing fuel security and back then, fuel security meant owning the source of supply: it wasn't thought acceptable to rely on America (or its goodwill). So casting around for oil supplies, the British decided they just had to have oil-rich  Iraq with a southern outlet to the sea; and then they had to have Transjordan and Palestine to the west, so that they could run and control pipelines across to the Mediterranean.

So Oil is nothing new in determining foreign policy and Churchill's fuelling decision in 1912 has claims to be a Major Fact of British History which all school children should know.

The French wanted Syria and Lebanon (and a big chunk of Turkey, which they didn't get). Their reasons are a little less clear-cut. They wanted oil, for sure, but they also wanted to be a Great Power in the Middle East - and woe betide anyone who injured French amour propre. In 1943, de Gaulle's forces were unleashed on a War Crimes spree against the mandated populations of Lebanon and Syria, who had spent the War initially under Vichy French and then under Free French control. It didn't make much difference and the personnel were often the same. And the personnel often had little interest in the fate of Europe, only in French standing in the Middle East. And standing often meant a boot crushed in an Arab's face.

The French, the British, Arab Nationalists - and then the Zionists, who became increasingly important players in the Middle East conflict as Hitler expanded his power and his territories and America closed its doors to new migrants. By the end of Barr's story, Zionist terror groups - the Irgun and the Stern Gang - are being funded and equipped by the French to drive the British out of Palestine.

 Back in 1940, Stern himself - the Stern Gang takes its name from him - had seen Hitler as a possible ally:

in 1940 Stern had passed a message into Vichy Syria, offering to fight for Germany if Hitler would support the "re-establishment of the Jewish state in its historic borders, on a national and totalitarian basis, allied to the German Reich" (page 268)

The emergence of the State of Israel out of a planned partition by the United Nations ( and no Plebiscites or Referendums among the inhabitants) appears in Barr's book as just another grubby episode in thirty grubby years of Anglo-French control of the Middle East, not least because Israel provided the victorious Allies with a convenient solution to their Jewish Problem - what to do with all the unwanted survivors of the Holocaust. Why, just make the Arabs make way for them.

Since 1948, America has joined in the struggle for control of the Middle East but the French and the British are still there, meddling as best they can. The history is no less grubby.

This is an excellent book, full of surprising and genuinely shocking material extracted from archives now open to the historian. I thought I knew a bit about this period of history; reading this book, I felt that I didn't.

Review: William Dalrymple, Return of a King

I hesitated over buying this book: Would I really commit to reading 500 pages on the first British Invasion of Afghanistan, way back in 1839. But then I remembered Dalrymple as a fine writer from one of his previous books, From the Holy Mountain, and I remembered that the Taliban remember all our Invasions. They provide the context in which the Taliban view our current stupidities, such as the deployment of a spare Princeling Harry - a move we make without thinking or caring that it will immediately revive memories of the past inglories of our ruling classte.

Dalrymple's book is about the first of those inglories. We invaded Afghanistan in 1839 to overthrow a ruler, Dost Mohammad, perfectly well disposed towards us. But a paranoid fear of Russian Designs on Afghanistan clouded our judgement. At great expense in men and treasure, we re-installed his predecessor, Shah Shuja, who had been our pensioner for decades. But though he was at least reasonably capable of ruling in his own right, we made him appear a mere puppet. At the same time, we failed to get our own act together militarily (Elphinstone) and politically (Macnaghten, Burnes, Auckland). Right at the outset, the rape of a young Afghan girl by a drunken soldier (pp 172 - 73) concentrated the minds of Afghans on what it means to live under Foreign occupation and, in due course and after other affronts, the clergy sanctioned a jihad for the defence of Islam. Dost Mohammad's son, Akbar Khan, proved a capable military leader and within a short space of time Shah Shuja, Burnes and Macnaghten were murdered and the Army of Occupation forced into a harrowing winter Retreat which few survived.

Unwilling to accept humiliation,  we started again in 1842 and sent in an Army of Retribution under Sir George Pollock with a mission to loot, rape and kill - and, as if that was not enough to satisfy our need for Retribution, cut rings around Afghan fruit trees. We had no intention to stay and occupy, but the new Governor General of India, Lord Ellenborough, gave Pollock's Army and that of General Knott, based in Kandahar,  permission to "withdraw via Kabul" (page 440). By the time they got there, most of the Afghan population had left to hide in the hills. So the Armies had to take their vengeance on the city itself, burning it to the ground; they also attacked the few hundred  pro-British Indian traders who had remained in the city, foolishly thinking that it was their Friends who were arriving.

Having ensured that the fruit trees would die, we left - and in due course, allowed Dost Mohammad to resume his interrupted rule. He reigned successfully until his death in 1863, securing what are more or less the boundaries of modern Afghanistan. 

Dalrymple tells his story both from the well-known letters, diaries and historical narratives of the British (basically, English and Scottish) participants in the disaster but also from Afghan narratives, which he claims to be the first to utilise fully (see the "Author;'s Note" at pp.489 - 502). Quotations from these sources - often written in the form of epic poems - form a significant part of the book and throw into relief the lack of understanding, competence and clarity of purpose shown by the British leadership. 

In the end, it was not difficult to read these 500 pages, sobering as many of them are. At the end, Dalrymple lightly sketches their connection to the failure of the latest invasion of Afghanistan.

Dalrymple has done a terrific amount of research to write this book, has written it well, and deserves to have a wide readership.

Review: Trevor Pateman, Language in Mind and Language in Society

This is a book about Nature and Culture - and about the Mind as the place where both can be found.  It's focussed through a close engagement with language development in individuals and language change in their societies. It seeks to defend a specifically Chomskyan project and a broader cognitivist project against philosophical objections - such as  those of the Wittgensteinians - which dispute the very possibility, the coherence or intelligibility, of such projects. It's an academic work, short (174 pages of text) and at times so compressed that you probably need to have beside you whatever book or article is under discussion: quite often, not much more than page references are given - the author rather assuming that you will know what he is talking about. At worst, there are footnotes which should be chapters.

I wrote this book starting in 1978, included some of it (along with other material on Pragmatics) in a doctoral thesis accepted in 1983, and finalised it in 1986. Oxford University Press published it in 1987 in an edition of 1000 copies. There were quite long reviews at the time, mostly positive, but there was never a need for a second print run.

It's the most academic of my book-form publications and, I guess, very academic even if it reaches out towards some very general claims. Writing it exhausted me, mentally and emotionally. I kept this stuff in my head for eight or nine years, expanding and revising, draft after draft. I read into subjects where I had no previous background, some of the material more technical than I was equipped to cope with. The Bibliography is pretty impressive.

The overarching theory developed takes its start from Heraclitus, "All things change" [ Panta rei]. However hard those entrusted with the task may seek to stop change in a society's culture - and specifically its language if it has one - they cannot succeed. That is a consequence, really, of just one thing: the way the Mind works.

New entrants to a society - children - develop a language before they know what they are doing. It just happens and the mental course it takes is partly ring-fenced against (premature) attempts at teaching and training. As far as a young child is concerned, the plural of sheep is sheeps and for a long time you will try to correct in vain. Language grows in the child and the mental resources which make that possible also determine that every language grown is at the same time broadly similar to others in local use - enough so that the child can be understood - but also at least a little different, so that adults can feel that there are things to be corrected. (Such correction is not offered in the interest of understanding; you can only offer to correct that which you have already perfectly well understood).

But even if the child could pay attention to advice and correction and wasn't programmed simply to disregard such well-meaning stuff, the mind of adults is simply not up to the full magnitude of the task of correction. They simply cannot formulate, articulate and hold in their heads the rules of the system they are trying to protect from error and change. On some fronts, maybe they are quite good. On others, such as the sound system of their language, they are hopeless. The way words are pronounced, the intonation pattern of utterances - these are things which change all the time and generally below the threshold of awareness. Even when noticed, changes are impossible to characterise and manage as they are happening. Time passes, children find their way into roughly the right ball park quite effortlessly and - as far as sound patterns are concerned - what they develop lasts a life time. But their own children will in turn find their way  into a slightly shifted ball park, and so it goes on.

If our Minds were less powerful, our Cultures would be less rich - indeed, utterly impoverished if minds worked the way Jesuits, behaviourists and Wittgensteinians have imagined. Because our minds are so powerful, our cultures constantly change. Over a long enough period of time, a continuous chain of transmission - generation to generation - yields a population which could not understand its ancestors even if they could speak to them. Cultural transmission is always a game of Chinese Whispers. All things change.

But it is not Mere Anarchy which the Mind looses upon the world. True, the evidence a beginner encounters underdetermines the conclusions to be drawn from it - just as philosophy of science has taught us (Peirce, Goodman, Quine, Kuhn ...). But the beginner is not open to all possibilities logically compatible with the evidence. This is fortunate. We are born with a bent to understand the actual world in which we find ourselves. It was Charles Sanders Peirce who seems first to have said that and realised its importance. Give us a limited amount of evidence and an inference is triggered which lands us in more or less the right place.. The child gets the hang of the language being used around it very quickly, really without trial and error and certainly without an exploration of logical possibilities. Whatever it is that children do, most of the time it isn't learning from their mistakes.

And if there is no language around, the child has enough mental capacity to generate one: this is the evidence from creolization (Derek Bickerton) and from the home sign-systems deployed by the deaf children of hearing parents (Goldin-Meadow and others). Mind as part of our Nature is a formidable device. It allows us to find a way of expanding our communication with people who haven't found much of a way of communicating with us. Tough - for Wittgenstein and his High Church followers, seeking only the child's Obedience to the Rules of which they are the Masters - but true.

But is Mind as part of our Nature more formidable than our encultured Mind, the Mind into which Culture (and, on some accounts, only Culture) has entered?

That question is premature. First, we have to do the science. And we can only do the science domain by domain. If you want to look at a domain other than language, then a good one is drawing. Here it is wonderfully easy to show cross-cultural universals in the development of children's drawing which for some considerable developmental period goes its own (charming) way independently of the adult cultures practised around it. In order to draw, children draw on their Natures. All Culture has to supply at this point is a crayon and a sheet of paper. You can give them to blind children and (as I understand it) the results are not very different. That blind children can't see doesn't mean they can't draw - anymore than it means they can't play football.

In contrast, if you want to look at a domain more favourable to the claims of the Enculturists - people who believe that our Minds are filled with Cultural stuff and nothing but Cultural stuff - then Arithmetic might be a good choice; it is the one which Saul Kripke used in order to mount his Wittgensteinian critique of Chomsky and cognitivism.

But even here it seems that children cotton on to the idea of counting well before anyone sits them down to learn their tables. Recently, I was playing a little game with my granddaughter, aged 15 months. I said "Beep", she smiled and replied "Beep", and I smiled and replied "Beep". As you can imagine, this can go on. Then it occurred to me to say, "Beep Beep". She hesitated a bit but came back with "Beep Beep". Do you count that as counting?

The science will get better as we find more precise ways of describing "higher" level mental activities, open to introspection and reflection, and "lower" level activities or processses which go on below the level of conscious awareness and are known (indexically, symptomatically) by their consequences. Sometimes the two levels come into conflict: even when we have been told that the Müller-Lyer lines are of equal length, well, they still look unequal. Being told makes no difference ; it's that thing teachers fear most, water off a duck's back.

Finding the right way to theorise all this is hard - my book reviews some fairly technical discussions in the Philosophy of Mind (Fodor, Burge, Stich, Kripke and others) which grapple with the problems which arise when you try to ascribe mental states to an individual without making essential reference to the community, the culture, in which they live.

"All things change". Children bear the burden of my argument in support of this claim. So it's perhaps not surprising that the Epigraph for the whole book is a (heretical) remark of Walter Benjamin's, "Children are Representatives of Paradise".