(c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 42)  | |||
| Winter 2001/2 |
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Issue 42 | |
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The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence
Richard J. Aldrich
London: John Murray, 2001, £25
Another huge book, 645 pages of text and 70 pages of index, bibliographies and notes. How do you review something this size? I simply don't know. Short of doing a London Review of Books-sized job and working through it chapter by chapter, all I can really do is give a hint as to what's in it.
It has had excellent reviews in the broadsheets and they have all been deserved. This is a tremendous piece of research and though there are half a dozen of the 27 chapters which I didn't find of much interest - the technical side of intelligence gathering, chiefly; and some of the espionage stuff - for the most part the book is dotted with fascinating bits and pieces. Large chunks of it were new to me; and, to judge by the reviews, new to everybody else, too. I could fill a page with these snippets. But here's just one: on p. 453 he tells us that by 1953 the various US information services - what we would now call psy-ops - had 93 (!) people working out of the London Embassy. Doing what?
There are new accounts here of some of the major landmarks of British post-war decolonisation, Malaya and Cyprus; but, oddly, nothing on Kenya. The two chapters on IRD and the one on the covert support of the post-war European unity movement, contain both succinct and comprehensive syntheses of the extant material and a lot of striking new information.
The most startling chapter is probably 15, 'The struggle to contain liberation', on the work by British diplomats and intelligence personnel to prevent the United States launching a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union in the early 1950s when the US still had massive military superiority. On the account here, this was much closer to happening than has previously been admitted and this chapter hints at another study that could be made of the struggle of the military and intelligence organisations with the politicians for control of US foreign policy.
Aldrich is Professor of Politics at the University of Nottingham and for a mainstream academic this is a striking piece of work. No other academic historian working in this field that I can think of has been willing to acknowledge that so much of the post-war Anglo-American world has been so influenced by 'the hidden hand'.
This is a wonderful book which anyone interested in post-WW2 British history ought to read.
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