The Strange History of American-British Intelligence Relations

if we could begin I'm built I'm an editor at Yale University crest I'm very proud to present our speaker Christopher angry about the most distinguished speaker on a secret intelligence because possibly have he's a professor of modern and contemporary history at Cambridge former chair of the history department there and chairman of the Cambridge intelligence seminars he's the Dean of a very recent field the first academic journal of intelligence intelligence in that patch of 30 was founded only in 1985 co-edited by Professor Andrew and Michael handle his many books include histories of British intelligence of US intelligence in the presidency CIA several was on a TV and an authorized history of the British domestic intelligence service mi5 yesterday is absolutely fascinating lectura was how to lead in secret intelligence past from Asia to the West today he'll speak on the strange history of American British intelligence relations from George Washington to Donald J Trump the format is the same as yesterday's professor Andrew will speak for an hour and then we'll have half an hour for questions please welcome professor Christopher [Applause] well what I'm talking about my voice William improve there's somebody who gave me some wonderful third Lausanne juices at the back and I know we'll be able to provide some nor should they be necessary which won't I say what I'm about to talk about is I think just about the the biggest gap until very recently in the history not merely of British American relations but also international relations there we are two powers they were both great powers that at that point will pass over what has happened to one of them since then who had shared more secrets than any two independent powers had ever shared before and whose intelligence services had cooperated in a way that intelligence services had never cooperated before so that's a subject which is still somewhat new and which I think there's a lot of worthwhile material having worth having a look at now why was it so difficult to research well the key agreement which is this one at the 1946 a Kucera greement idea I know the man no longer around Sir Harry Hensley who invented the term Kucera those days it was brucer because he said my boy he called everybody at my boy whether or not they were boys or an irrespective of gender so he said my boy to me and he he said I knew the Americans like acronyms so I thought I did invent one but then just as I arrived at Washington I thought oh hell I've got him put the up before the osa about two anyway so it Sarasota's ruined so here is this key document I mean I'm really finding very difficult to imagine that anybody nowadays would even attempt to write a history of the the Cold War or for that matter British American relations without mentioning it but he even that was a 1946 it wasn't Declassified until 2010 so what I'm talking about is only I think being possible to write about in detail comparatively recently so it ends up with cooperation or perfect cooperation which doesn't exist but nonetheless unprecedented cooperation but it all of course begins in conflict and it begins in a conflict in which the United States surpasses its main adversary with about a spectacularly adds it's possible to imagine George Washington the greatest practitioner of intelligence certainly in the first second half of the 18th century and probably the whole of the 18th century but of course the irony is that he learnt the techniques that he used against the British against the French first of all and then of course the French became his his allies so what he has to say looks platitudinous now but the fact is that planted he has only become platitudes if they're true and people did not say this beforehand finding anyone who said something as obvious and does truancies there is nothing more necessary than good intelligence to frustrate a designing enemy and nothing that requires greater pains to obtain and and then another extraordinary statement which is one of course of the many many treasures of the Sterling library other places have reproductions it's only the Sterling library in the full-timer collection I knew well Terfel so I'm pretty well and I remember handling this document the necessity of procuring god intelligence is apparent and need not be further argued all that remains for me to add is if you keep the whole matter as secret as possible now of course Washington wasn't perfect he didn't have very much staff and he had quite a number of agents so one has to forgive him because he was fighting war at the same time that he couldn't remember their names in a moment - one name that he could remember so writing to one of his agents it runs in my head that I was the corresponding about fictitious name if so I have forgotten the name and must be reminded of it again it's possible I think to be extremely sympathetic about that dilemma so now we're back with you I mean it's extraordinary isn't it that it's pretty difficult thinking of any American spy I was a single statue and this man who died too early to actually be a significant spire told us got five there may be more than five but this is the this is this is the the best-known won't taken during the First World War and this is an imitation at CIA headquarters one of the budding conspiracy theories that were generated of course is that the CIA actually stole the statue imitate it did then put it back no they're not that good so it all has a happy ending at least happy ending this side of the Atlantic cool well actually on the other side of the Atlantic as well because really looking after the United States is beyond British capacity well it's beyond British capacity then but it's unimaginable now 1781 core Cornwallis surrenders to Washington so this is a spectacular intelligence victory as by the way there are one or two seats at the front end in in in other places and it's it's a victory not simply for world in the jargon is human to human intelligence it's also victory for code-breaking and Washington knows it he personally congratulate his crypt analyst James Lowell on his success before and after Yorktown so to continue a theme that I was renting in late 16th century and early seventies century code Briggs is written in the United States got a public recognition as I chances were getting in the 20th and 21st century now Louisville didn't get quite the same level of recognition but that follows the same theme so was he the best that the president were the best grasp of intelligence until eisenhower well I can answer that question perfectly straight forwardly yes now though one of the armed and to me interesting things about the intelligence history is that it is not linear you cannot start from the assumption that intelligence chief or still more policymaking using intelligence in the 20th century is going to be better than in the 18th century no intelligence to the handling of intelligence is more likely to degenerate over a period of hundred or 200 years than any other and there's a very simple explanation for that it's extremely difficult to learn from experience but if you don't even know what the experience was you have no chance at all so what happens nowadays is that how because other examples later on is it's extraordinary phenomenon of things that they were regarded as totally new but actually you know they were in some ways more shocking 100 or 200 years back so WikiLeaks now the only reason well I don't think we need WikiLeaks but the only reason that WikiLeaks found any kind of role was that you can no longer depend on the State Department to publish all embarrassing dispatches sent by ambassadors but of course um in the second half there were little the last generation from the 19th century you could so have a look at this the annual message of the President and produced every year with the annual report of the Secretary of State now this is distributed in December at 9:00 to 1896 the documents go out to that but it's printed in 1897 so it is no exaggeration at all to say that u.s. ambassadors beginning terrified about what the State Department was going to publish so there are just two examples you could see he looks extremely displeased George Perkins Marsh ambassador to Italy for about 20 years in his record he was just about to have dinner there's a detailed description with the Italian and for Minister one evening when his valet brought him up of the newspaper and it had the headline was his denunciation of Italian vacillation turd jubilation and duplicitous and now now we move on to Yale Eugene Schueller the first or the equal first Yale PhD oh I see in 1961 that was even before that it was 1861 he claims in 1886 ministers do not feel free to express to the secretary of state their real opinions for they always have in view the possibility that their dispatches may be published so it's only because the statement problems stopped wicked leaking that WikiLeaks started wiki leaking instead the State Department used to do far far better right so now now I've delivered I could have chosen all kinds of examples but we are at the centenary of the First World War and in a few days time it's going to be the the centenary of the the armistice now at the beginning of the First World War the British leaders the British M Prime Minister and the American president have two things in common they're probably the best educated president and Prime Minister certainly in the American case that ever had I mean it's really not terribly likely that the president of a major university is in the foreseeable future going to become president of the and of the United States Henry asketh or have a task with he didn't like being called Herbert so he called himself HH after a little while he got a good Fleance class honors at Oxford and a prize fellowship but paleo so these people are extremely intelligent understand politics and political history very well and nowhere near as good and I don't think I exaggerate in the handling of intelligence as their predecessors have been in the 18th century so let's take HHS quests and first his handling of intelligence and their various examples in my boat not in the same class as Pitt the elder and Pitt the Younger what does he use intelligence for well as a way of impressing his mistress Venetia Stanley then in her mid-twenties he was in her mid-60s as you can see from her expression she wasn't all that impressed really but there is in their correspondence whose authenticity I do not think has been challenged for one moment the typical afternoon he wouldn't write to her by the way at least once every day sometimes three times a day and sometimes in the middle of a cabinet meeting then if he could get away he'd like to have them think she quite liked to have a nice ride in his coach and they used to go down to row Hampton and the south of London then he would show her the latest intelligence and then he would say I read it and she would say yes and then I'm making none of this up he would they were common papers as they used to be cold he would get them he would tell them into shreds make little paper balls and flick them absolutely and she was saying that they shouldn't do that but of course he was trying to impress her then here is a letter it appears that the police because the police came with a cardboard box which had all these paper balls and unraveled the police have discovered fragments of top-secret papers they have reasonably ously collected and the pieces came around in a box this morning with a severe admonition from Sir Edward grey he was the foreign secretary at the time as to the dangers to which the Foreign Office cipher was exposed from such loose handling of the secret matters and what he says is that he was not guilty but he goes on to say what damning evidence you might have given well the mere idea that Pitt the Younger OPP elder would have behaved like that just beyond imagination I know their views within the United States now I'm just being the most recent president doesn't necessarily mean that you understand more than let's say people two or three hundred years ago that that is provably true now in in the case of Woodrow Wilson not a figure of speech its I think you know just very difficult to challenge the evidence his grasp of intelligence was much worse than Washington's and indeed once the war had been safely won he joked about how bad it was so here he says after World War one let me testify to this my fellow citizens I not only did not know it until we got into this war but I did not believe it when I was told that it was true the German he was not the only country that maintained a secret service well no tried telling that to George Washington so but he did attach some importance I have two secret correspondence particularly with Colonel house his foreign policy advisor to the the quarter of Europe and he would only allow three people had two and though these ciphers which meant it was pretty boring for him and his wife and Colonel house to spend quote many hours of many nights there decrypting not decrypting the security cycles were decoding and and encoding the happiest hours spent by British codebreakers during the first world one must exaggerate the happiest minutes spent by British codebreakers during the first world war but secretly the correspondence of the President of the United States who as you can see from his expression is entirely unaware of this although mrs. Wilson doesn't look as if he has a suspicion that something is important so they are it never occurred to the British the Wilsons of the British would do anything like that and we are very sincerely sorry and so there's Samaras hanky the first cabinet secretary which was not somebody who makes the team it actually more or less runs the country in the last 22 years he calls the u.s. decrypt in valuable now for the first time there is a brilliant and I use a brilliant advice early by dr. Dan Larsen's Cambridge PhD he comes from Nebraska and lives extraordinary combination of the two place the first I mean the idea that after all these years after the 70 volumes of Arthur link alpha s link somebody can say something these revolutionary new is pretty extraordinary now what is it why we able to get away with it well Walter Hines page who's the US ambassador in London is I'm happy to say an Anglophile and an extraordinary attempt to cultivate him is made by this man who was the most influential intelligent chief of first world war no question he was director of Naval Intelligence the trace of naval intelligence aren't always the most influential 30 years he's called blinker because when he got excited which is most of the time his eyes blinked at page writes to Wilson thank you it's pretty much sounds he's fallen in love and he begins neither in fiction or in fact can you find any such man to match him well I defy anybody in the room to find another dispatch for an American ambassador that says that about a Brit of any condition whatever and then what he goes on at all the man is a genius a clear case of genius all other Secret Service men are amateurs by comparison all can look for you and see the very muscular movements of your Mobile's own American diplomats don't write like that anymore and I don't blame them now what they didn't realize of course though well Tim Hall was getting a lot of fun out this is the Admiralty old building it's where it and it's still where it was you know Whitehall and that's where room 40 where the code-breaking where the set was going on so he would stop by to have a quick look at a broken American code and then go on and be nice to Walter Hines page so I mean there's a interesting mixture of genuineness and deception so what the Brits are extremely delighted about is the fact that the Germans play into their hands how do they play into their hands by really memorably incompetent sabotage operations which begin to make you know those that have been recently done by the giu in Salisbury look moderately competent so even a Wilson knows that something is amiss I am sure the country's honeycombed with German art rege and infested with German spies the evidences of these things are multiplying every day that's on the first anniversary of Britain entering the First World War so I mean you can tell from just a quick look at this man that this is not the kind of man that he would choose to be put in charge of sabotage so the Front's von papen becomes military attache in Washington in July 1914 it's simply amazing that he's not peeing heat until December 1915 his career afterwards was completely predictable that is to say he becomes German Chancellor in 1932 and Hitler's Vice Chancellor in 1933 to 1934 and you can see how much each admires the other in in that photograph so the biggest explosion in New York before 9/11 is this in 1916 in New York Harbor that this is an episode that's so well known the one I can't leave it out and secondly I'm not going to say very much about it the intellectually challenged German Foreign Minister Alfred Zimmerman thought that it would be a jolly good idea if the Germany did get Walt in the United States to get the Mexicans on side and he believed that all he had to do was offer them you know some of the swing states in the midterm the midterm elections the Foreign Secretary of the Bava calls the moment when he hands the decrypted telegram to page the most dramatic in all my life now of course didn't bring the United States into the war but it helps to insure the weather Stasia came into the war was indicted nation and because nobody could say anything very nice about the germans after that and here is wilson telling Congress that the telegram is eloquent evidence that Germany quotes mean to stir up enemies that their very doors Lloyd George who understands these things far better than Asquith but hasn't learned elementary discretion he becomes Prime Minister in December 1960 and he really likes Walter Hines page and he likes the American ambassadors so much that he tells him he really enjoys reading his dispatches to Washington but of course Walter Hines page is not falling for that what's going on is that the State Department is leaking the mid watching because the Brits would no never do anything like that now FDR is a wonderful individual but you're very good look at the faith he was a very naive individual when he was a system secretary for the for the Navy and actually in charge of naval in intelligence so no sooner had blinker hall looked if FDR in the eyes that he thought I think I got a fool him as well and so he did when Roosevelt subsequently decided he comes into the Admiralty and blinking all blinking furiously points to a twenty-something that barely something-year-old of the other side of the room and said I'd like it what to ask boy where he was this morning and so Roosevelt asks him and he says silt sir and I'm being told where silt was which is an island the German Danish border Roosevelt was extremely impressed so brink of all explained that every night a British spy would cross as a border there and find this rather unwholesome looking for a boat waiting to bring them to Harrods nothing the really remarkable thing is that this made such a huge impression on Roosevelt that at the beginning of the second well war he repeats it to the then director of Naval Intelligence Admiral John Godfrey now I got for him very rarely biddies tongue but he realized him immediately what nonsense he was but he also realized that FDR still absolutely believed it and it would help if he carried on believing it blinker Hall had dicovered deployed some fantastic cover FDR not only believed in 1918 but remembered to recounted his words to halt success at twenty four years later so there we are everything's about to turn out right there is Churchill who decides he decides that the best thing to do we can't possibly survive without the American so why not just give them the best intelligence we've got the ultra intelligence make sure the President sees this but meanwhile major parts of British intelligence think that we can need to carry on deceiving the United States in order to form an alliance so this is the exact words on 27th of October 1941 that Navy and total defense day that Roosevelt broadcast the American people quote I have in my possession a secret map made in Germany by Hitler's government by planners of the New World Order and it's this one he goes on to say they have divided South America into five vassal states bringing the whole continent under their domination this map my friends makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States as well well not quite because it was a British forgery and this is men who we do regret it very much this is about the poor Teresa William Stephenson little will Stephenson the head of British security coordination which was responsible for human not SIGINT liaison in the United States and he got away with it I mean the man who had lien for an intelligence officer who had done more to fool American intelligence than anybody else in the entire history of American intelligence as you say at the end of the Second World War there's Wild Bill Donovan I'm pitting on his chest the u.s. middle for merit which is the first non-american to receive sorry and so now things of course world history begins to change it changes on the 7th of December 1941 talked about Pearl Harbor in another context yesterday now Churchill hears the news of Pearl Harbor at checkers the country home of British Prime Minister's we're Theresa May has been up to some very odd things recently and it so happens that that night Roosevelt special envoy Averell Harriman the u.s. Ambassador John violent are there but they a chattering so whoops to a good back one they are chattering so much that even though the home services used to be called rating for is is gonna the the the news is on in the background they just hear some vague reference to Hawaii so they have to call in the butler and the butler Sawyer says it is quite true sir the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor now it's I think only in a British country house that the news of world war can be delivered by the butler I regret to say that this may well be the last occasion which it really happened now I mean the people who really change things the relationship between Churchill and Eisenhower is just so extraordinary that I don't think it's commonly realized quite how extraordinary it was it's not Roosevelt who persuades Eisenhower of the importance of Ultra it's during his first briefing with with Churchill then Eisenhower did something which the best of mine perfect knowledge no commander in chief had ever done before he insists that his G to his intelligence chief is a foreign nationality so there we are brief experience another one but this is a man whose name is retained general as he became a certain kind of strong Kenneth's strong was brought up to a British stiff upper lip they really exist nowadays but he was an absolutely prime example but when people started to talk to him about the special relationship after the Second World War they noticed his upper lip quivering I mean it was that that that extraordinary but Eisenhower insisted on having him when he became commander and Allied commander in chief the war of his trying to move him up he wasn't going to stand for that so Kenneth strong remained now I talked about Blakely yesterday but one of the most extraordinary things to my mind should there are people here who've been into Fort Meade NSA headquarters going down the corridor and seeing notices which say you KL o United Kingdom liaison office that is a pretty extraordinary sensation and being at Bletchley Park and seeing these people there was against something well it actually had happened before in world history but it hadn't happened very much but it's also the case that the other biggest secret intelligence secret and the other most successful intelligence operation in which Britain is engaged during the Second World War the double cross system which I think most people understand but is essentially not simply by double agents but largely by double agents persuading the Germans they were getting extraordinarily good intelligence whereas in fact it was only made up by am pretty and also the United States now the man who first of all I mean OSS could could scarcely believe that British intelligence was prepared to take this but there were good reasons from the point of view of British intelligence so this is after all at a time when 42 of the Yale class of 1943 joined OSS to a significant degree but not wholly the Yale story for even an ally to be admitted to a full access to all secret files and knowledge of their sources was beyond precedent or expectation but the British did it and no need to give one feather back no man who agrees on the American side is J Edgar Hoover and the man who he puts in charge of cooperation has an interesting subsequent career in I think party to people though it already but it's been relatively recently revealed so here is Mark felt um well-known from liking to pose with a gun once which distinguishes him from most of my former colleagues in mi5 look what not pose quite like that so he's the case office of her world war two double agent peasant who is a Dutch double agent who filled the Germans but of course he has a really distinguished career ahead of him so when Hoover who's in position after all for longer than any career in American history is have been top of anything official after the verdice he becomes number two and we now know that he becomes something else as well he becomes arguably the most influential whistleblower in US history he is deep Frank as he admits in on in 2005 so as an intelligence career going from the double cross system so far as the Germans are concerned to the double cross system of the Nixon administration not many comparisons that one can make of their I'm the guy they called deep throat now the main peacetime consequence of well military intelligence collaboration because it depends on such a simple document hasn't the best by imperfect knowledge got in yet still got into a single biography of Truman so what happens on the 12 September 1945 Truman who's seen in the last months of the war what's again collaboration can do approves his continuation in peacetime in a one-sentence memorandum the Secretary of War and the secretary hereby authorized to continued collaboration in the field of communication intelligence Segen slide interview between the US Army and Navy and the British and to extend modify or discontinue this collaboration as determined to be in the best efforts of the United States this has been available in the Truman archives for 25 years I know I looked at to verify but it's so this was a period in when people were looking at great power relations they didn't look at sickened and of course that's the key document which it leads to and which I've already mentioned which remains top-secret until 2010 but as soon as it begins operating it changes a lot of things and it changes history of Cambridge University amongst other things because in 1951 the UK USA code breakers with actual Americans in the lead identified this man the Soviet agent codenamed Homer as a high-flying British diplomat formerly stationed in Washington Donald MacLean and there you see in these slightly convoluted language there's no there's no H in Russian language so Homer becomes a coma from the moment that MacLean has been identified it is only a matter of time but actually quite some time before filled in the others identified as well but that's how it begins but we there is a tendency I detected myself as well to take so much for granted Intel is collaboration between Britain and the United States and some of the most critical amendments of the of the Cold War that it's worth I think remembering just how an extraordinary it was at a personal level not simply a Segen so here we are the most dangerous moment probably in the history of the world Cuban Missile Crisis the only crisis which could well have ended in thermonuclear warfare and that's one of the initial photographs we Shem shows a Soviet missile base under construction but unless there was an agent who was providing plans for the construction of Soviet missile bases you couldn't tell how close they were to being operational but you could because it was one and he was this man and they the way that he was jointly run by Britain and the United States I think is actually unique in British American relations so there is recruited by the the Brits run jointly with the CIA until there's a missile crisis and when he's it means interrogated in London where he's managed to get as senior member of a delegation and there're them there are the four people two Brits to Americans who interrogate him and the the leading Brit Harry Shergold whose control of Soviet bloc has used to be called in Esaias he's the one looking at him now again I I have not come across a photograph remotely like this what on that evening Penkovsky has asked the Brits and the Americans the CIA and sis to do he is a soviet colonel well he explains his real loyalty is to London and Washington so he insists on being able to dress up as a u.s. colonel on the left and a British Colonel on the on the right as an episode in intelligence collaboration and well and the second greatest Western agent - I have a great good fortune of knowing extremely well then when I was working with him there was a lot that we couldn't say that Ben McIntyre's excellent recent book is able to say so there he is the Brits can't believe their luck he'd been working for sis since 1976 1974 a big apartment but then he's posted to London in 1982 and this is an mi5 surveillance photograph is the the mi5 team that takes the photo and the slightest idea that the fact Britain's most important agents and not working for the Russians at all so what do we get out of him there's this combination of strategic and operational material which is is quite extraordinary this is and this is one of the documents that he brought out initially on both sides of granting people couldn't really believe but they'd always underestimated the role of conspiracy theory in determining Soviet intelligence objectives so here we are the belief that Reagan is planning a nuclear first strike I've gone over the most recent evidence in my book and that qualifies as a strategic intelligence document of the highest importance but what it goes along with is a better insight than ever been provided before into the operational my new CI and you can't have an operation unless you have operational my new CI so where was the KGB's favorite dead letterbox in London well I had more than one but they liked Catholic churches dozen of them quite attractive and they'll tend to be du mal it than Anglican churches so most of this is it tells agents who are new to London how to find the Brompton Oratory which is the biggest Catholic Church not not the yep not the biggest Catholic place of birth which is because of Westminster Cathedral Westminster Abbey so the typist is allowed to type most of it but then if you you go four lines down you see it says Harod now how did is of course Harrods because KGB illegals were great shoppers and they they knew that they could find their way to to Harrods so the standard instructions would be first go to Harrods and then there's some further instructions including the Victoria and Albert Museum so anyway by night all day finding Harrods was was not difficult and the dead letter box which you find because we publish these these documents is just to the left you can see one of the side altars there's the Pieta copy of Michael enters celebrated statue in in Rome then at the the same level as the inscription which you can't see consul Martinez it is finished Christ last words from the cross just behind that pillar which is partly set into the wall there there's the dead letter box where messages were well have been recovered I recalled that this is 20 years ago it's been doing an article with their like in the Sunday Times and we we gave them this is a picture which I would like to say was taken by my daughter after Oleg gave over the the the details and somebody from The Sunday Times it was naive enough to think that if he sat there all day somebody would come either deposit a secret document or collect well they never did so as a man admitted he don't really fell out and went into the confession box and instead of saying forgive me Father for I have sinned he said forgive me father you realize you've been giving confession next to okay to be dead letter officer last 20 years and it turned out that he didn't so where are we yes and then also standard stuff but the way of indicating you've left something can Brompton Oratory is straightforward you find the correct Ballabh this one was codenamed Quran you put a bit of chalk on it you collect your stuff and then you rub out the that there the chocolate from the moment that you know this is how operating in London it becomes strategically much simpler to follow what they're doing and here is Oleg after his unique escape from Moscow being congratulated by Ronald Reagan I think the first time that American president has publicly congratulated one of the leading agents of an allied Tim power right now it looks an awful lot different now doesn't it well why our code is gonna be not that different from what used to be going on so anyway our this is Edward Snowden I can't allow the US government to destroy privacy and basic liberties and there is again thank you Edward Snowden and to both the Guardian and The Washington Post win Pulitzer Prizes but are the best of my knowledge not a single of the huge number of articles online articles in print and talk about the impact that Snowden's revelations had realized that they weren't remotely on the scale of what had happened in the early Victorian period I'm about to reveal those what's this consequence of well it's a consequence I'll forgive me I don't invent many acronyms but this is what I'm sticking with historical attention span deficit disorder has anyway that's fine and so what happens Snowden easy it's Matt Cellini maxine he was past his best supposing he'd ever had a best but he was he was an italian latch to his revolutionary not nice man but not pretty very good at being either a nationalist or a revolutionary and he came to london he had a really nice time but he started complaining that his letters were being opened now the whole of the media and also a huge majority in parliament was so outraged by Mancini's letters being opened that they force the closing down of britain's SIGINT agency this is thomas carlyle practice near of kin to picking men's pockets and so so it's all closed it's all closed down and the effect of snowden it could be argued in in britain as in the united states has been ultimen the extent that governments have been forced to be straighter about what they do and put some justification for it but the suggestion that snowden comes anywhere close to having the the effect that Matt Xenia when he made his complaints is absurd so what do you get you get this extraordinary moment they fall the first threat of war the two leading French diplomats at the time poor combo Yugi combo Paul for better part of 20 years French ambassador in London Jude Kanban for rather lesser time French ambassador in in Berlin they have a correspondence between each other but obviously they don't use the French diplomatic bag because the Cato sayin opens interesting letters so they correspond by the only method they know to be completely beyond suspicion that is to say the British diplomatic bag how times have changed so there is a good consequence to all this because the Brits are forced to improvise at the beginning of the First World War they've got knock off an established SIGINT agency so they get some people who are so eccentric that nobody has to my knowledge recruited such people before so here is the King's College Cambridge classicists dilly dilly Knox now he breaks some codes it's a really very sensible way which had never been done before to the best of my knowledge in an official organization he's in room 40 but when faced with a difficult cypher and by the way the evidence for this is beyond them a dispute he retires to room 53 because that's where the parties and one of the things I worry for about students nowadays I don't know Richard were at Yale but in the old days I mean we used to tell our students who were looking at a blank sheet of paper and not able to write something or a blank screen now stuff all that go and have a good bath and relax yourself and you'll write something really interesting giving them showers how am I supposed to think with all that water pounding I looked over their heads I've been very uninfluential I regret to say and trying to book that right so the sailor in room 53 years never it's true been to sea but they're not in a boat he has yet sort of float in a bath in the Admiralty they do it's not very good point but that's the best they could do at that period now well the greatest discoveries in British intelligence archaeology is only three years ago Bletchley Park found the very bath on the left-hand side there is John Scarlett it was former head of chief of mi6 sis and there was a royal person in the middle and now the Duke of Kent doesn't do a lot but he normally presents the prizes at Wimbledon what look it is his expression and makes you realise that he's not quite clear what's and what's going on but once the Americans had been introduced to Dilli Knox they took a real interest in Hammond cheering an extraordinary individual who's been a tense to fashionable cause is perfectly reasonably but he was a bit Asperger's amongst many other things but when he sent over to the United States forgetting his identity documents in November in 1942 and he stays until March 1943 that is a turning point in British American intelligence collaboration now his papers are in King's College Cambridge this is done by his his mother and shows its individual approach to the towards life I mean the standard entry tests for Yale and British intelligence will probably exclude somebody who behaved like this in a hockey match so as you see other people are playing a really fierce and game of field hockey but Allen's attention has been seized by a group of daisies and then a sample wholesome story at the beginning of the second world war when he moves to Bletchley Park he transfers his life savings into silver ingots he realizes paper money is going to depreciate during the-- the world you got by Goulding and so silver infants and he buries his life savings and silver ingots in the black awards and he was a tragic figure at weekends after the Second World War as he went around Bletchley Woods trying to work out what the hell it put them well I predict that star in the King's College fundraising magazine and delighted to say that there was somebody who had actually been with him while he was doing that so there is cooperation for the story now if this is the very last point that I'm about to make and the United States says I don't think that's me that it might be my place makers sometimes does all things so intelligence is the only profession in which a fictional character is many times better known than any real professional alive or dead and you see the individual that I have in mind but this is due to American as well as British influence it's difficult now to remember that Ian Fleming was thinking of giving up bond but when John F Kennedy is or his advisors are asked to name his ten favorite books he mentions From Russia With Love and so a bond success in the United States it's that which persuades Ian Fleming to continue the novels and it's it give us one I mean talk about toning and cheek I mean this is rather deplorable really so bond is given in several of the film's a CIA ally Felix Leiter God knows why he's looking through cheerful because bond of course emerges unscathed for everything whereas Felix Leiter comes fairly close to a luminous ex-serviceman although he does have one arm and one leg left at the left at the end and then then of course only I think Buckingham Palace could have last time I gave the example of the way the Queen Elizabeth the first favorite final frock celebrated the successes of British intelligence now the way that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the second used the opening of the ceremony of the Olympic Games where the most optimistic moment in British history over the last decade and not going to arrive a the the mood now so what happens she summons bond there he is in Buckingham Palace god bless her at the age of 87 she's about to do with her first parachute jump and who's she going to do it with him now I know that there are people that say that he was a body double but ladies and gentlemen that's what Republicans say in person they refuse to accept that their majesty did it and they're not necessarily wrong but it's deeply unpatriotic there we are you can tell it's her first parachute jump she hadn't got a lot of English experience but it all ends happily so there's the Royal Box now I'm going to reveal a source which has never previously been revealed in university immediately behind her you can see there there is a gent with a snowy beard and the certain amount of hair who's clapping as well he is the outer Bishop of Canterbury he's now after having done that an impossible job absolutely brilliant for 10 years he's been given a compassionate leave and it's now a master of one of the colleges at Cambridge University mortal in modelling college the Queen liked him very much but I mean if you compare his haircut which actually was less respectable than it normally was she said to a wandering bishop who wandered through Corpus Christi College I can't mention who he was there was the Bishop of Ely and she she said the bishop he knew and that she was gracious and pleased to be graciously pleased with Rowan Williams but her Majesty added I do sometimes wonder if I should lend him a comb but no he never did he's completely unspoiled but what he tells me is that Her Majesty's parachute jump was unknown to the whole of the royal family including her husband who looks a bit bemused and so there we are Oh only Britain I think with rigid help from John F Kennedy has been quite as creative in the some fictional image but this is an important part of real intelligence because the majority of the world's population have seen Bond films you know increasingly of 35,000 feet rather than that at ground level and they nearly always enjoy them so it means that when we recruit people from other countries they're more likely to say yes to a British request than to a number of other countries that come to mind right no it's just time to end as synthesis in the midterms with continuity and change what the over the last year we've seen two things that have never happened and never come close to happening in US intelligence which affect the special relationship than the first days all those years and I talked about this last last time all those years after Stella Remington in 1992 became the first female head of any of the world's major intelligence agencies under the trump presidency of all presidencies the first female CIA director at Gina Haspel is is promoted and then you know again something that has not happened in any major intelligence service that I could think of the denunciation mutual denunciation between the the president and former intelligence chiefs and all that within it well the calling people bad persons went on for quite some time beforehand but so at one at the same time we're in a situation so far as British American intelligence relations are concerned which can only be explained in the extreme long term but we're also seeing short term deviations which were unimaginable even a few years ago thank you [Applause] Russia next time by the way in that case you've already given professor Andrew yes I mean my understanding which I'm happy to have amended a nuance by anybody here that it's extremely good and the the problem for any intelligence agency is that they need to have people with whom they can test their conclusions so the United States is not about to find other intelligence agencies which can do this is absolutely central I mean any scholar for example most of the people in this room unable to test their conclusions on fellow scholars they're suffering from a real handicap intelligence agencies and intelligence analysts have less opportunity to do that than any other profession I don't know that he wants the the best pie but he was sadly the best codebreaker I mean there were not many people and trying their hand to me fits a number of the criteria one he's a very good mathematician and secondly he has the the ear of Washington as we can tell from the correspondence [Music] well I think I'm putting the second point that you made as to what the president tweets at 5:00 a.m. in the morning it's a source which is unfortunate beyond me and I do have difficulty in in interpreting what of of course is the case is that necessarily a lot of signal Persians combined operations so for example we had Hong Kong and the Americans did not so a lot of the operations were run and by the way one of the the documents that Gordievsky and i published in was it instructions in the center or more instructions the center is the KGB's take on american british collaboration there and it's because you have this extraordinary phenomenon of not an allied intelligence service that are fully integrated one in both Cheltenham and and and and for Fort Meade it's very difficult sometimes to carve off not difficult in some parts of the world but where there is an agreed target which is approached from a number of different directions and Libya under Gaddafi there's pretty good example of that so as I think I had to he explained the reason that he could have been yesterday which seems a long time ago but yes I think it was yesterday the reason that Reagan becomes the first American president to visit NSA headquarters at Fort Meade is that you had to go along to apologize for having quoted some of Gaddafi's intercepts after the Lebel discotheque bombing in in in Berlin but of course some of the stuff that he was quoting was actually British SIGINT so I would really start from the fact that because the the American operation was far far bigger the British could ever be but because they're fully integrated the idea that against major targets you can completely separate one out from the others I think it's a difficult concept too difficult for me anyway I would think I will have to remind some people who Anthony K Brown was he was I mean he was the first person to reveal ultra in the the early 1970s he was also a traditional British bounder you know the kind of person who would get expelled from his London club but who would not behaved disgracefully at a level beyond that and I am I remember who the same generation you will recall that there was a man called Fred Winterbottom and Fred Winterbottom who had some background in what I mean intelligence wrote really the the first firsthand book explaining how it was done and he kept going along to the we're now back to Anthony tape around kept going along to Winterbottom's home but what he wished to do was contact private research and his archives while Kay brown while Winterbotham was was away so all I can tell you what Winterbottom told me and broadly speaking if he was truthful he was returning with his wife from divine service one Sunday when he noticed the ample form of an to decay Brown stuck in the scullery window absolutely took another I mean he was a proper bounder and you don't get that kind of thing now that is it just so nasty antisocial people a lot of traditional villains sorry you know I mean it's it was almost immediately it's simply that it was mainly an American British agreement and then the others were added on but it's an example of let me give a Canadian example of just how close the relationship is GCHQ is publishing next year it's official history it's going to be pretty limited in what it says about interception and decryption methods for the Cold War but nonetheless it will be well done and it will be a real advance and who have they chosen to do it a Canadian historian and this is you know the most secret activity in which Canada REM engages and for one of their people to be living in to the British end it's as with all special relationships whether they are friendships between individuals or collaboration between organizations the thing that takes years to to build up is that kind of confidence but throughout the five eyes you can find those extraordinary kinds of relationship which it's almost impossible to replicate outside them once you know once you I mean the the simplest way I'm not going to attempt it but from if I were to to ask all those here who you share most personal secrets with you to give me a checklist of your closest friends and the same is true at an international level in the organisation particularly in the intelligence organization the people whom is closest other peope with whom it says more secrets than any other yes yes yes well because it was necessary to have a scapegoat I mean there were stuff that did require somebody to fall on their the salt and the Bay of Pigs is of course the example but it's interesting least to me but when Kennedy sacked him he said is this with the United Kingdom I would be resigning but this is the United States and you're resigning yes I think initially it was not Tim so much won't feel be revealed as it's the the the the the breach of trust and that the same is true after all of individuals if you have your a really good friend over a period of years and then you can no longer trust them that's not something which those individuals who suffer and I think always completely recover from and the the the case that I have in mind in the American case is filled with just about America and best American friend was James Angleton who for some reason is nowadays called James Jesus ankles and I don't believe till his lifetime we use the the middle initial very very much but I don't think angleton ever recovered and the people in this room the bread sauce the literature he became a conspiracy theorist and that that was the damage that was done once Trust is is completely breached putting it back together at least with the main individuals concerned is very very difficult well the this is this is a real conundrum first them some of the the evidence Gordievsky had been in the immediate aftermath of his success during Gorbachev's first visit to Britain he was the heir apparent and Chernenko have been terminally ill for as long as anybody could remember was not yet certified debt and it's perfectly clear that Ghana shelf was going to take over so he did a terrific job and he was really good at briefing Margaret Thatcher although he did that through written and briefing gavotte off at the at the same time so at that at that point he's appointed as the resident designate and then he's also allowed to go back you obviously know a good deal of this Pacific is probably essential contact for anyone who doesn't he's invited back to Russia and as he said to me you know I just felt there was something wrong about it but I told myself you know you're nervous beginning to crack so he he went now the difficulty is the following one that Ames did betray a Philby and he's lied about when he behaved he betrayed filthy but it looks as if it was April 1985 and by that time Philly Gordievsky has already been portrayed now and I have a theory which I'll pass on which I don't attach huge importance to but which nonetheless might turn out to be right when Gordievsky they finally gave him such things as truth drugs but anyway when they put the stuff in the Armenian brandy and he found himself talking umpteenth to the Dozen when it was all over the man who would have been interrogating he said you know you will never guess the way that we discovered what you're what you've been up to now even the slightest thought that gaudy ASCII whatever escaped because no intelligence officer not simply intelligence officers from the Soviet Union while they were under KGB surveillance had never got away before so my feeling is that is actually as very frequently happens in discoveries of all kinds of combination of a bit here and a bit there one of the crucial things that he's probably that the senior deputy at the time when in the London residency the senior deputy at the time when Gordievsky is given the job is the head of the Caroline counterespionage and it seems to me quite likely the what he was attempting to do was build up a case to damage Goulding ev Sookie so just to summarize the Amos explanation doesn't do it because I think the timing doesn't quite work since the the man who told Gordievsky that it was extremely complicated never work it out no just assumed that he'd be executed this would never be used to mislead the West I think that formula is the is the right one so I think a variety of material was put together and the mailing was critical in doing it was a head of the kettle on [Applause] you [Music]

Channel: YaleUniversity

Views: 7,484

Rating: 4.7058825 out of 5

Keywords: Christopher Andrew, The Lost History of Global Intelligence—and Why It Matters, Henry L. Stimson Lectures on World Affairs, the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, Yale, The MacMillan Center, The Secret Word, The History of Intelligence, MI5, MI6

Id: lwAVHPkrcfA

Length: 69min 56sec (4196 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 09 2018