American History Hit - The CIA & MI6: The Real Special Relationship?

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

Behind the handshakes of leading politicians, beyond the trade deals and beneath mutually beneficial military deals, how has the 'special relationship' between the United States and the United Kingdom extended to intelligence and covert operations?Don is joined by Michael Smith, who has drawn on his own service in the British Army's Intelligence Corps to explore how the intelligence agencies of the US and the UK have worked together - or not - since the Second World War.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Ella Blaxill. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribeYou can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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With the secretive nature of their war duties, many spend yet another evening fabricating cover stories for their friends and families, what they did today at work. Back here at Bletchley, only a few people remain, the regular night staff. But there is a luminary among them. Commander Alistair Deniston recently recovered from a bladder stone late last year. Now back on duty, tonight, he scans the rainy darkness outside the window for visitors. Even while their appointed arrival is expected and imminent, Deniston is unclear how exactly he should act,

how freely he should share with these visitors, these Americans he's never met before. Can they really be trusted with valuable British intelligence? Hello, friends, this is American History Hit, and I'm Don Wildman. Nice to have you. The United States and Great Britain have long claimed a special relationship, a uniquely collaborative cooperation seemingly based on shared cultural identities, a friendly bond between nations with a common past. But this simplistic attribution belies a more complex interdependent relationship based on a long-term military alliance

and perhaps most importantly on shared intelligence gathering and code breaking, a history that began, as so much has in our modern era, with World War II. The CIA and the U.S. launched in 1947 and MI6 in Great Britain, officially titled the Secret Intelligence Service, SIS, founded in 1909, are both tasked with essentially the same responsibility, secret collection of human intelligence in foreign lands that may pose a threat to their nations. But throughout the last 80 years, through wars both hot and cold, the CIA and MI6 have joined forces numerous times to improve their capacity and reach, on some occasions more successfully than others. But it is the special ongoing relationship between these covert government agencies so frequently depicted in

spy novels and James Bond movies that has provided the spine that still stands this alliance up. It's a history covered in a new book soon to be released entitled The Real Special Relationship from the prolific author Michael Smith, who joins us today. Greetings, Michael. Congratulations on your new book. It's great to be here, Don. Thanks very much. The tale of two agencies begins, as I mentioned, in the early days of World War II at none other than Bletchley Park, code-breaking headquarters of the British military effort. Four American officers come to the British

with a proposition, am I right? Yeah, well, the bartering about this had been going on for a while and was still in some ways in process. The British had broken the German enigma machine cipher, and America was not yet in the war, so it was a difficult thing to set up. And the US Navy actually opposed it originally, believing that it was just a sneaky way of the British getting to know how to break American ciphers, in US Navy ciphers.

But Roosevelt and Churchill had rubber stamped it, so it came down from the Navy Secretary. And once the Navy Secretary told you to do something in the Navy, the US Navy did it. There were four of them, two army officers and two Navy officers. They were in uniform. It was dead of night. They'd come across the Atlantic on a UK destroyer, and they landed at Sheerness in Kent during the day, and they came with a couple of big packages,

which they bought with them, and that was a special gift from the Americans, because while we had broken Enigma, the Americans being a Pacific nation, had been concentrating very much on Japanese codes and ciphers, and they had managed to break the main cipher used by the Japanese ambassadors around the world. And that was particularly important, of course, because you wanted to know what the Japanese ambassador in Berlin was saying back to Tokyo about what Hitler was saying to him. He was very close to Hitler.

So much trouble was brewing in those days, and we weren't sure which direction things were heading out there. This was called Code Purple, am I right? That was the term. That's right, the purple cipher. And what year are we talking about here exactly? We are talking February the 8th, 1941, so we're still 10 months away from Pearl Harbor. And to be clear, this is a decade or more before the CIA comes along. This is OSS times, and even before that, right? I mean, this is a...

Yeah, yeah, the OSS hadn't really been set up properly at that stage. I mean, it was in the process of being looked at. So much of this is about the seeds being planted to what grows later into this formal relationship between these larger agencies and that just grows and grows over the decades to come. But they are planting seeds based on what need exactly? Why do they need to develop this relationship? Because the British and Roosevelt as well famously, but the British believed that they needed America to win the war. They knew they would need America to win the war. Of course, the First World War was pretty much won when the Americans came in in 1918,

but the power of America and the fact that America had all this money to, new money to throw, the Germans in the First World War in 1918 persuaded the Germans that the thing was up. And Churchill's hope was certainly that the Americans would come in and they would be the main power, as indeed they were in the West, to destroy the Germans. Was one side better at this than the other? For some reason, I think of the British as really, you know, quite natural at breaking codes versus the Americans who are just kind of figuring it out. Yeah. The purple break, the break into the Japanese purple cipher was, it wasn't fortunate that it was pretty much the main cipher they were looking at and the only one they were really working towards breaking.

The U.S. Army and Navy were bedeviled by rivalry. the US Navy in particular and the compromise was that the US Navy wanted to break purple, the US Army wanted to break purple, everyone wanted to break it and be the person that broke it and there was

a compromise worked out with the Navy that the Navy would be allowed to break the messages on one day and the army on the next day and the alternate days the army eventually broke it and it was a machine that deciphered the messages that

they built on that basis. And that was a tremendous gift to Bletchley. And it eased the path to sharing Enigma with the Americans. But the question you're asking, yeah, were the British better? The British had been doing it since the First World War. The Americans really hadn't got into much co-breaking. U.S. Navy had their own co-breaking operation. The U.S. Army had their own co-breaking operation, but they were very small. Well, there was this old idea. The gentlemen don't read other people's mail. You know, we don't. We don't. We don't lower ourselves to get into that kind of thing that the Europeans have been doing for generations all the way back to the revolutionary times for us and before. Once World War II is one, we have set the precedent for the cooperation between these two parties.

I mean, two heads are better than one, especially as the challenge shifts from Nazi attackers to the Soviet spies and the iron curtain drawn across Europe. It's always a big question to me, why the U.S. decides to become the superpower. It does, but that's for another conversation. It certainly requires planting themselves in Europe and finding friends who know the lay of the land. And that's the British for what becomes the CIA, right? Yeah, it certainly is. In terms of intelligence collection and human intelligence collection and agent running, America's capabilities were actually worse than their co-breaking capabilities.

This cooperation, I mean, we're using that world, it's really a rivalry still. I mean, there's a lot of suspicion on both sides as to how much to share and how fair is this relationship going to be. Yeah, a lot of concern. But there was a guy called John Tiltman, who was the main co-breaker at Bletchley Park in this period. And he took the Americans in hand. He was the guy allocated to pick them up at Sheerness. They knew press courier. One of them recalls driving through the night with blacked out headlights.

because obviously England was being bombed by the Germans and that threat from the air, and arriving at Bletchley Park shortly before midnight. He described how the secretary of Alastair Denniston, the head of Bletchley Park, came in and served them sherry. It was very limited alcohol in those days during the war in Britain. There was resistance from the head of MI6, Stuart Mingis, who was in overall charge of foreign intelligence, including Bletchley Park, and Alastair Deniston himself, the head of Bletchley Park,

to the idea of giving the Americans news that we'd broken anigma because it wouldn't have taken much effort for the Germans to upgrade the Enigma cipher, and that would have stopped us breaking it completely. So they were very protective of it. They also thought that the Americans tended to talk more widely about things than the Brits did. And so the country's not a war. Obviously, Germany still has agents inside America and indeed diplomats inside America who could easily find out if anigua was broken. So there was huge resistance to letting the Americans even know that we had broken anigma. But the huts at Bletchley were all separated off and it would have become very obvious. to the Americans as they went round that there were three or four huts

they weren't allowed into and something was going on there that was top secret. So Tiltman persuaded Stuart Mingis, the head of MI6, that it would be ridiculous and we just needed to trust them and tell them that they couldn't tell anyone

outside of their own units when they got back to America. So that's what happened and he shared everything. Press Courier said that every detail was shared with them. there was nothing hidden from at all. So the Brits and the Americans have just formed what is really the basis for this special relationship you were talking about when you opened up. The tightness of it

begins then. When they finally give in and everyone decides it's in their best interest to trust the other side. Yeah, well, one American code breaker said when they first met it was like two mongrels circling each other, trying to work out each other. Were the British spying on America. I imagine they must have had a lot of agents in America prior to the war, right? The Brits did have a lot of agents in America. I mean, we obviously weren't spying on America itself. Obviously, we would have been collecting intelligence on those people who were opposed to the war or backing the Nazis, but we were spying on the Germans that were operating in America as well. One way for this relationship to solidify is victory. It had a lot to do with this becoming a good

idea. We win the war together and with others. And so apparently this relationship worked out for everybody. And so that ends up being the key point in this development. How do things change as we move into the Cold War times? Again, the British are well-schooled on the Russians, you know, tied at the hip in many eras. And we need their guidance in understanding this new world that we've just shoved ourselves into. Well, the Bletchley Park had set up a little detachment in London, separate from the park itself, to work out how to break Russian codes and ciphers. Tiltman himself had been working very closely with the Estonian Baltic Republics and Finland to find ways of breaking and sharing breaks into Russian ciphers. And the Germans have been doing it very successfully

as well and at the end of the war we sent teams in our joint American British teams from Bletchley Park and from the American co-breaking organisations to go and find stuff that the German co-breakers have been working on and they got from that the ability to break into some of the Russian ciphers that the Germans have been working on so it's a it's a joint exercise from the very beginning I mean policymakers generals admirals had all been receiving top top intelligence because of Bletchley Park. Eisenhower knows this, for example. Eisenhower knows that he's been receiving all his top intelligence. Roosevelt knows, but of course he sadly dies, but they don't want to lose it. That's the point I'm trying to make. They don't

want to lose this intelligence they have. So everyone says, yeah, go ahead. Let's work against the Russians. Everyone knows the Russians and the new threat. They are taking over Eastern Europe. and there'll be the next big enemy. So in this moment between these two military challenges, let's take a moment. I found this very refreshing as I was prepping for this interview, finally understanding what these acronyms mean. MI6, Military Intelligence Section 6.

That infers that there's a lot of other sections, right? Yeah, it does, and there were. You guys name a lot of things, MI something. It goes from one all the way to what? It goes up into the 20s now. Oh, my God. So right smack in the middle somewhere is MI6, which is the equivalent of CIA. It specializes in foreign human intelligence, right?

Yes, it does. And then you have MI5, which is kind of a domestic-oriented agency in the realm of the FBI and so forth. As we move into the Cold War, we run right into something like the Korean War for us. The domino theory is begun to take hold, and the Cold War really becomes about trying to figure this out. You know, where is this all heading? What are the Russians really want? How do we stop them? How much did the British subscribe to that domino theory?

How much were they in cahoots with us? They were very much in cahoots with the Americans. They also realized very early on, the Labor government that came in realized very early on that they needed to back the Americans very strong. strongly. The new power resided with the Americans, not with the British, as it had been before the war. So, you know, incoming governments, far from bemoaning the fact that they were no longer a worldwide empire, the post-war governments of Britain accepted America was the new super state. I've always wondered if there's another side to that story as far as England seeing the advantages of stepping back. You know, if these yanks want to take it over, let them have it.

especially with nuclear weapons involved and all the rest of that. That's for another conversation, but it's a very interesting tipping point of the world, isn't it? Yeah, I think so. You know, Macmillan, Harold McMillan and Kennedy got on very well. And McMillan said to Kennedy that what he really Britain wanted was interdependence, not independence from the Americans or necessarily, or indeed, you know, some sort of equality. we wanted to be interdependent.

That made sense, and that was the way that certainly the Attlee government saw it when they came to power in the immediate wake of the war, and the way that the Macmillan government also saw it. It was just a belief that America was the strong power. America shared many of our values, democracy, a belief in freedom of the individual, obviously the same type of economics, capitalist economic. rather than communism. And there was a real belief in the West that communists wanted to take over the entire world. And, you know, there was nothing that the communists had done that would suggest that wasn't the truth. I'll be right back after this short break. Meantime, if you'd like us to cover

anything specifically, if you have any ideas of subject matter we should be looking at, send us an email at a-h-h-h-h-h-historyhit.com. We'd love to hear from you. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and throughout June on not just the Tudors from his hit, I'm marking the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare's first folio. It would be hard to think of Shakespeare without plays like Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Anthony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, as you like it, and a winter's tale. But without the first folio, none of these would have survived. This is not a book designed to be carried around.

This is a book which establishes itself in the library, in the study, and that physicality tells us something about how the plays are being rebranded. it reframed for a new generation. Throughout this month, I'm delving deep into the first folio, how it was produced, who made it, and to what extent it has ensured Shakespeare's enduring legacy. So do join me on not just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. The Cuban Missile Crisis rises up as the beginning of the most intense period of the Cold War, obviously. I want to spend some time on this.

This is an amazing story of a Russian military figure. named Oleg Pankowski, who I'd never heard of before I started reading about this in your book. Incredible backstory to what brings the Cuban Missa Crisis to a peak, isn't it? It is. And what I wanted to do in the book was to demonstrate how intelligence works together. So that how, you know, the co-breaking works with the human intelligence stuff and how, you know, they fit in, how the aerial photography, which was very important alongside Pankowski, fits in, how, signals intelligence fitted in and all of those feature very highly and from both sides of the

Atlantic as well so that you do see the alliance coming together gcchq picks up the most important early signals of what's going on from intercepting Soviet merchant shipping that are taking all this stuff to Cuba the Americans build up their co-breaking facilities and intercept facilities in the areas around Cuba, including setting up a ship, a spy ship, which was used to intercept Cuban intelligence, which they hadn't had before. People on the ground, individual agents, were reporting movements of stuff, obviously in the docks, but also out in the country. They were reporting back to the CIA. British embassy was collecting intelligence for the Americans, because obviously the Americans didn't have an embassy themselves in Cuba. They don't

have diplomatic relations with Castro's Cuba. So the British embassy was collecting intelligence on the ground. Lots of Cubans, of course, coming to Florida and getting away from Cuba, were debriefed at the special CIA location in Miami. The most important intelligence of all comes from this guy, Oleg Penkovsky. He had been a member, he was a colonel in Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. His task had been to collect technology from the West and particularly missile technology. During the war, his commanding officer had been badly wounded and taken back to Moscow and Penkovsky had looked after the general's wife and daughter. And when another daughter from a previous marriage died while he was in hospital, Penkovsky went and made

sure she was buried properly. Penkovsky therefore has this very strong relationship with this guy, who is then made head of the Soviet missile program, basically, and put in charge of all the Soviet military's missiles. And he briefs Penkovsky on the situation. So Penkovsky had been turned by the Brits, right, by MI6? His mentor, this guy who regarded himself very much as Penkovsky's father and Penkovsky's son, they used to meet up at the weekend and discuss the missile problems because obviously for this general,

he knew that Penkovsky's job was about missile technology, so he would have been thinking he's helping the program to get Penkovsky knowledge of what they need. But Penkovsky, of course, is noting this all down, copying it all down. He gets hold of all these different missile handbooks and stuff, and he's feeding it. He wants to feed it to the Americans. He actually tries to get in contact with the Americans. He gets in touch with a group of students, American students, who are over there, asked them to put him in touch with the embassy.

The CIA can't get hold of him for whatever reason. So he goes to the bridge and the bridge run him and they call in the Americans. And it is a remarkable joint operation. It's not the sort of thing you would normally do. It can be very difficult running an operation together. How did they meet with him? How was it done? The US ambassador in Moscow would not allow any spying operations on the ground in Moscow.

So the British were running him in Moscow. And the wife of the head of station, the MI6 head of station in Moscow. His wife, they had a young child, and she used to take the child out in a pram with her other child, and she would walk for a park in Moscow, and Penkovsky would casually pass by just admiring the baby and dropping in the intelligence into the pram, as ostensibly as sweets for the kids. It really is spy, spy movie stuff, isn't it? Penkovsky ends up being incredibly important to the effort in terms of identifying what we see in the aerial photographs, right? I mean, all that is corroborated through his intelligence.

It is indeed. Originally what was seen was air defense missiles installations being put up. That ostensibly could simply be defense. But the way those missiles were being set up, as the head of CIA, it said, actually said at the time, they must be there to defend something. And they were set up in a certain array. And then the nuclear missile launches came in, and they were set up.

And the Americans, the CI guys looking at the aerial photography, could not be sure of which missiles they were. And that's important, of course, because it tells you how far their ranges and how far they could reach. But the actual documents that Penkovsky had got included the layout for the standard launch sites for the SSM-4s and SS4 and SS5 missile launchers and they were different if it was an SS4 you know the array would be one way if it was an SS5

the array would be another and the handbooks that Penkovsky had got hold of showed that what the array should look like and so from that you could work out are right that's an SS4 that's got a certain range. This is an SS5 site. It's a sad ending for Penkovsky. He is eventually arrested by the Soviets and he is a faces a firing squad and and dies that way. He's in a lot of popular fiction. Tom Clancy novels and so forth sort of refer to this guy in this way. And I have to stop for a silly moment here. I'm so sorry. I'm dying to ask you. How true was Ian Fleming to the whole efforts of MI6 with James Bond in the novels? I don't mean in the movies. It isn't, you know, that whole thing with the wearing evening dress and stuff

and flashing a gun around the streets of London. No, that's nothing like reality. But if you need a gun, you can get a gun. And people who are going to go abroad to dangerous places are taught how to use guns at MI6 training centre. There is an ex-S special forces guy there who does that training for them. But Fleming is not some idiot. during the war in naval intelligence.

He is Naval Intelligence liaison with MI6, with SOE, and therefore with OSS, and also with Bletchley Park at times as well. But his main liaison was with MI6, so yes, he knew all about how MI6 operated,

and he was a key figure actually in helping Bill Donovan set up the OSS. I should mention for those who don't realize, Ian Fleming worked in this world, old. He then becomes the author of James Bond books, which are then made into the movie. So there's at least some peek behind the curtain with this guy, and they're totally different vibe than the movies. It's very interesting to read those old Bond novels. Okay, back to serious business here. The Suez Canal ends up being a very gnarly business we don't need to get into. I just want to

explain that there have been these chapters when things got a little rough between us and the Americans had to kind of flex their muscle, which of course Eisenhower does by holding them back from all of what was happening with the Suez Canal. This forces the issue that they have to make a more formal document between them, which is the declaration of common purpose, right? Yeah, Suez was a mistake, clearly. And the way it was done of effectively cutting out the American politicians was a huge mistake. But that's not the only time it's happened. Kissinger and Nixon and got very angry on a couple of occasions with the British and tried to cut off intelligence.

And NSA and GCHQ are so tightly tied together that neither in 1956 the British was sending the Americans intercepted French diplomatic telegrams talking about the Suez operation. There was no split at all between the British and the Americans and the Americans, NSA kept GCA, Q completely in the loop on everything that they were doing. They were so tightly put together that you have, you go to NSA.

There will be Brits working there. And you won't know their Brits until they open their mouths and you hear their accents. And alongside their American colleagues, of course both sides have areas that they don't like the other side going in. But by and large, they're very, very close. They were very close then. and the official NSA history says that Suez did not make a jot a difference to the exchange between GCHQ and NSA. And when Kissinger says in the 70s, in a fit of peak, I want you to stop the Brits getting intelligence for 48 hours, make them realise what they get from us.

NSA didn't do it because actually NSA knew that if there was a breaking intelligence, they would lose just as much as the Brits. It's a relationship that's had to morph, adjust itself, completely shift, not unlike the military itself in terms of adjusting to its challenges. As we move into the 80s and the 90s, certainly into the war against terrorism, how are the differences apparent now between their styles? Or are they working as one? I mean, what's the relationship at this point?

There were very different things going on, of course, in the war on. and George Bush authorized all sorts of things to happen, which subsequently came out, were exposed in the American media. The British have very much more rigid structures in terms of what they can intercept, what MI6 and MI5 can do in terms of interrogating people and the way they can do it. The Brits obviously can't use torture, which was obviously used by, the Americans during the war on terror waterboarding would just not be acceptable and any British official who used it would be hauled up but in front of the courts. So it's been a difficult

thing and there have been problems. Clearly in the UK people have been able to use the courts to try and get more information out about what's going on. But the Brits didn't have any involvement with the black sites. They had none whatsoever. That's actually in the book from a very senior former CIA officer who was in charge of all those things. It's been a problem. There's no doubt about it, but it's not been a killer in terms of the relationship. The relationship remains as tight as ever. That is very heartening to hear in a world that needs a very sophisticated view. I enjoyed your book so much. I've read a lot about these sorts of things. And yet I move through your book and understood so much more. You know, it was one of these wonderful connect the dots with

experiences of going through this. I invite people to take a look at this and to immerse themselves into the exhaustive list of books that you have written in your career. You are a remarkably achieved author. Incredible. In this particular book, the real special relationship you're drawing on your own military experience as well as a lot of research you've done over the time and I'm sure a lot of connections you have. Thank you so much for joining us in American History. Michael, I really appreciate it. Don, it's been fascinating. for me as well. I enjoyed it. Take care of yourself. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review and

subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.