In August 1947, Britain hauled down the Union Jack and departed from South Asia. At the Lucknow Residency, in Uttar Pradesh, a site revered by the Raj as a symbol of imperial resolve following the events of 1857, elaborate precautions were taken to ensure that the transfer of power passed off without incident. The Residency was the only building in the British Empire where the Union Flag was never lowered. In the run-up to independence some Indians called for the Union Jack to be replaced by India’s tricolour. Instead, a day before India celebrated swaraj, or self-rule, the British flag was lowered under the strictest secrecy and its flagpole removed. Press photographers were banned from the ceremony, and in its aftermath a temporary police post was established to discourage public celebration.¹ The careful stage management of events at Lucknow underscored the value Britain placed on formal displays of imperial sovereignty to mediate the realities of local power. Projection of influence through the manipulation of images of authority had, by and large, served the British well in India.² However, by the end of the Second World War a resurgence in Indian nationalism exposed British overdependence on reputation and esteem as levers of statecraft. The previous December, the Viceroy, Archibald Wavell, confided to his diary that, ‘the administration [in India] has declined, and the machine in the Centre is hardly working at all now … while the British are still legally and morally responsible for what happens in India, we have lost nearly all power to control events; we are simply running on the momentum of our previous prestige.’³

In contrast to the progressive, if troubled, transfer of political power in the subcontinent, the handover of intelligence and security responsibilities was precipitate and problematic. The British left India without bequeathing the newly independent state an intelligence apparatus that was fit for purpose. India’s leaders had assumed greater authority over internal policy once the post-war Labour administration of Clement Attlee had accepted that, in South Asia at least, Britain lacked the means to suppress the forces of nationalism. In the intelligence arena, the reassignment of authority from British to Indian hands occurred on a shorter timescale and a more limited basis. To a degree, this was unsurprising, given that the colonial intelligence effort in South Asia had largely been directed at manipulating nationalists prominent in India’s pre-independence transitional governments.⁴ It was not until March 1946, when a Cabinet Mission led by the British ministers Stafford Cripps, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, and A. V. Alexander arrived in the subcontinent, that Whitehall’s secret agencies recognised that an Indian Home Minister with responsibility for intelligence could be appointed at any moment.⁵ That summer, the Viceroy’s secretary reminded British officials to screen their files for documents that an incoming nationalist administration might find useful, ‘as material for anti-British propaganda’.⁶ Residents of New Delhi were treated to the spectacle of thick black clouds swirling high into the sky for weeks on end as reams of records were torched in the courtyard of the IB’s registry building in the La Qila, or Red Fort. A systematic destruction of decades of information saw much of the operational history of the Intelligence Bureau go up in smoke.⁷

Exposure to the power of the secret colonial state coloured the attitudes of Indian politicians towards intelligence agencies. Jawaharlal Nehru’s aversion to intelligence was commonly attributed to the harassment and oppressive surveillance that Britain’s imperial security apparatus had brought to bear on Nehru and his family.⁸ Alex Kellar, MI5’s resident expert on colonial matters, reasoned that, ‘Nehru’s critical views on “our [Britain’s] intelligence organization” are doubtless due in considerable measure to his own personal experience as a political agitator … ’⁹ Once installed as India’s prime minister, Nehru expressed reservations that, ‘Indian Intelligence was still dependent on the British and was following old British methods taught to the Indian Officers in pre-independence days, and was also dishing out intelligence which the British continued to supply to it.’¹⁰ Into the 1950s, Nehru complained to his friend, and India’s last Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, about the product that he received from India’s Intelligence Bureau. ‘I always read our Intelligence reports very critically and I am not prepared to accept them as they are’, Nehru confided. ‘I have had a good deal of experience of the police and of Intelligence from the other side to be easily taken in by the reports we get.’¹¹

That said, Nehru acknowledged India’s need to develop an effective intelligence service of its own. In November 1947, reflecting on a series of pressing national security challenges, the Indian leader emphasised to his chief ministers:

The intelligence vacuum that developed in India from 1946 was especially acute given the profusion of urgent problems confronted by Nehru and his ministers. India’s political leaders were anxious to curtail communal tension and to reassure the country’s substantial Muslim minority that they could keep a lid on Hindu nationalism.¹³ The wrenching effect of Partition, mass migration, the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of the subcontinent’s citizens, and the enervating territorial disputes that ensued between India and Pakistan, not least over the former princely state of Kashmir, led policymakers to seek timely and accurate intelligence.¹⁴ In addition, Indian officials were concerned to negate a subversive threat posed by a large and well-supported Communist Party of India (CPI). In the political tumult that accompanied Britain’s retreat from South Asia, communist support threatened to gain traction beyond urban centres that accommodated the industrial working class and evolve into a broader peasant insurgency. A proliferation of red flags in Indian villages alarmed the British and their nationalist partners in the Congress Party.¹⁵ Moreover, despite assurances provided to Attlee’s Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, by the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, that Moscow would not interfere in India’s internal affairs, the British obtained evidence that financial aid was being directed by Moscow to the CPI.¹⁶

Once Attlee’s government responded to dwindling British authority in India by bringing forward the timetable for independence from June 1948 to August 1947, the flow of intelligence reaching London from the subcontinent dried up. A month after Wavell’s lament that Britain had lost its capacity to dictate events on the ground, the Joint Intelligence Committee in London noted that it was, ‘no longer able to advise the Chiefs of Staff fully on the implications of future developments in that country [India]’.¹⁷ Whitehall planned to retain independent India as a close international ally of the United Kingdom. The subcontinent’s access to the Middle East’s oilfields, its proximity to both the Soviet Union and China, its reserves of labour, and its untapped potential as an industrial base, made it imperative, in the minds of British military planners, ‘that India should remain closely allied to the Commonwealth’.¹⁸ With the end of British colonialism in India coalescing with the advent of the Cold War, London came to regard the maintenance of friendly relations with a nationalist government in New Delhi as sine qua non to the containment of Soviet power in Asia.

India did not figure as prominently on other nations’ lists of global priorities. In the aftermath of Indian independence, while Britain’s press gave blanket coverage to the political drama and social trauma unfolding in the subcontinent, reports in Soviet newspapers focused on crop yields in the Ukraine, an upcoming Latvian theatre season, and fawning eulogies of Stalin. The Soviet newspaper of record, Izvestia, made one brief reference, on its back page, to India’s transition to independence.¹⁹ Under Stalin’s regime, the USSR’s relationship with India was informed by the Soviet dictator’s conviction that post-colonial states functioned as imperialist puppets. In 1950, one Indian official bemoaned that the state-controlled Soviet media was determined to represent India as, ‘a stronghold of reaction, a persecutor of democratic forces, a hanger-on of the Anglo-American bloc, and the harbinger of a new Imperialism in the East’.²⁰ In the United States, American broadsheets reflected upon the termination of Britain’s 200-year presence in South Asia only after discussing soaring domestic food prices, Soviet meddling in the Greek civil war, the Italian economy, and a heatwave sweeping the Atlantic seaboard.²¹ President Harry Truman evidenced little interest in the momentous events taking place in India. At the time, Truman, and his Secretary of State, George Marshall, were preoccupied by developments in Western Europe, where post-war economic and social tensions appeared set to sweep communist regimes to power in Italy, France, and across the Mediterranean littoral. Chester Bowles, who Truman appointed ambassador to India in 1951, chaffed at the disinterest senior US officials manifested towards South Asia. Washington’s perceptions of the subcontinent, Bowles griped, were filtered through a distorted and ‘Kiplingesque’ prism. To Americans, the ambassador bemoaned, India appeared, ‘an ancient land of cobras, maharajahs, monkeys, famines, [and] polo players, [that was] over-crowded with cows and babies’.²²

Absent superpower interest in India, Whitehall was free to leverage its experience of managing intelligence systems in the subcontinent to influence the evolution of India’s national security state. Another, and secret transfer of power, occurred in 1947. Its origins lay in plans hatched by MI5 and SIS to retain a British intelligence foothold in India. It came to encompass a protracted struggle for operational paramountcy between Britain’s Security and Secret Intelligence Services. Bureaucratic turf wars inside Whitehall’s secret world stirred debates at the highest levels of government over whether the United Kingdom should undertake covert action in India and, if so, how it should be conducted, and to what purpose? Decisions taken in London to employ Britain’s intelligence services to uphold UK national interests in the subcontinent, and advance the West’s wider anti-communist Cold War agenda, dovetailed with an Indian requirement for external support in the domestic security arena. A mutual dependency helped to forge and sustain close relations between the intelligence and security services of Britain and India during, and after, the transfer of power in South Asia. In the shadowy realm of secret intelligence, the transition of authority in India from the coloniser to the colonised was more complex and contested than has hitherto been acknowledged.

The Other Transfer of Power: The Indianisation of the Intelligence Bureau

In the autumn of 1946, the impending Indianisation of intelligence in South Asia unnerved MI5. As the nationalist push for independence gathered momentum, Guy Liddell, Deputy Director-General of the Security Service, ruminated on the prospect that, ‘At any moment we might be faced with an Indian D.I.B. [Director Intelligence Bureau] and an Indian War Minister through whom any communications on Intelligence matters might pass.’ ‘What struck me’, a concerned Liddell recorded, ‘ … was that we should anticipate the worst, namely, a completely chaotic situation over a period of months, if not years, when all communications [with India] would have broken down and the Government here would have very little idea about what was going on’.²³ Before the end of the year, MI5’s anxiety that intelligence from India would dry up appeared all too real. In November, Liddell noted that the flow of material reaching the Joint Intelligence Committee from India had slowed to a trickle and Britain’s Chiefs of Staff were no longer receiving meaningful reports on the security situation in South Asia.²⁴

Apprehension in MI5 that its ability to monitor and react to events unfolding in India was rapidly diminishing was amplified by the uncertain fate of Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), or the Security Services ‘Indian branch’. While IPI remained nominally under the control of the Secretary of State for India, from 1923 it had worked closely with MI5. At the direction of IPI’s chief, Philip Vickery, MI5 officers kept leading Indian nationalists in the United Kingdom under surveillance and, on occasions, placed intercepts on their mail and telephone communications. In return, Vickery’s organisation maintained intimate relations with the IB and acted as a de facto British clearing house for the collection, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence related to India from across the globe.²⁵ Once an interim Indian government took office in New Delhi, on 2 September 1946, IPI’s days were numbered. Crucially, the Home Ministry, to whom the IB reported, passed from British control and into the hands of the nationalist leader, Vallabhbhai Patel. Patel wasted no time in stamping his authority on India’s intelligence services. Norman Smith, the last British DIB, was summoned to see India’s new Home Minister and told that the IB’s operational mandate had changed. Surveillance operations against Congress Party officials were prohibited, although those targeting radical left-wing Indian politicians and suspected communists were allowed to continue. Significantly, Patel removed Smith’s prerogative of direct access to the Viceroy. Moving forward, all IB reporting was channelled through the Home Ministry. At a stroke, the British government were cut out of the intelligence loop in their own colony. In Patel’s mind, it was essential that the colonial security apparatus was placed in nationalist hands prior to a transfer of constitutional power. Once stripped of their eyes and ears in India, any last-minute change of heart on the part of the British would be rendered futile.²⁶

The following spring, as Whitehall began to shut IPI down, British colonial intelligence officers packed up en masse and either departed for home or took up positions in alternative imperial outposts. Old Indian hands found that securing new jobs was problematic. Back in London, a young Enoch Powell, then working in the Conservative Party’s central office, was approached by anxious colonial officials for assistance. Gordon Thompson, commander of the British Indian army in Calcutta, asked Powell for help in securing employment with SIS. Powell effected an introduction, but Thompson was left disappointed by SIS’s ‘remarkably unenthusiastic’ response. With the Ministry of Supply also turning him down, Thompson was reduced to soliciting work from the Tory Party.²⁷ Others proved more fortunate. By 1950, SIS had found room for three former British Indian officials on permanent, pensionable terms, and a further 12 on temporary or contract agreements.²⁸ Treasury objections that SIS’s Indian recruits had been employed on more generous financial terms than existing officers, subsequently forced the Service’s chief, Stewart Menzies, to discharge three of their number and commit to taking ‘on no more new men from this [Indian] source’.²⁹ Such a regrettable step, SIS grumbled, represented ‘a wicked waster of good potential’.³⁰ The Security Service found less trouble accommodating British colonial policemen and intelligence officers. Between the wars, MI5 absorbed several British officials who had served in the subcontinent. Institutional connections forged between MI5 and the IB that were rooted in imperial security drew colonial officials into the Security Service. In March 1947, Guy Liddell, Deputy Director-General of MI5, undertook a talent spotting mission in the subcontinent. With Norman Smith’s assistance, Liddell interviewed promising British officers in the IB, some of whom were taken on by the Security Service.³¹ By 1965, the process of British decolonisation saw almost two-thirds of MI5’s officers with résumés that included a form of imperial service.³²

Shortly after Liddell’s visit to India, Smith was replaced by the first Indian Director of the IB, Tirupattur Gangadharam (T. G.) Sanjeevi Pillai. A forty-nine-year-old policeman from Madras, Sanjeevi had joined the Indian Police Service in September 1922 and made steady, if unspectacular, progress through its ranks as the nationalist campaign for swaraj, or independence, gained impetus. In 1946, following stints in the Madras Special Branch and CID, Sanjeevi was promoted to the post of Deputy Inspector General of Police. Within a year, he was posted to New Delhi and, in April 1947, was made chief of the IB. Writing to Omandur Ramasamy Reddy, premier of the Madras presidency, Vallabhbhai Patel apologized for ordering Sanjeevi north at a time, ‘ … that you can ill-afford to spare him, but it is of paramount necessity that we should have a first-class officer as Director’.³³ Sanjeevi’s colleagues in the IB found their new boss to be a distant and difficult character. K. Sankaran Nair, who enjoyed a long and distinguished career in Indian intelligence, admired Sanjeevi for his intellect and the high professional standards that he demanded from IB officers. Nair was less impressed by Sanjeevi’s prickly temperament and an abrasive self-confidence that bordered on hubris.³⁴ A propensity to lapse into fits of pique would, ultimately, lead Sanjeevi to fall foul of his political masters and bring his tenure as DIB to an abrupt and premature end. Guy Liddell questioned Patel’s wisdom in appointing Sanjeevi, ‘a Hindu policeman from Madras without intelligence experience’. A highly competent Muslim intelligence officer of long standing, Liddell noted, had been passed over by Patel. ‘This [Sanjeevi’s appointment] and other incidents’, Liddell mused, ‘showed a tendency on the part of the [Intelligence] Bureau to degenerate into a Hindu Gestapo, whose principal target would be the Moslem League’. Such an unwelcome development, were it to materialise, Liddell reflected, was likely to restrict his Service’s interaction with the IB, ‘except on the subject of Communism, in which the Congress Party were showing particular interest’.³⁵

The formidable set of challenges, and the inadequate resources, that Sanjeevi inherited when he assumed charge of the IB would have tested the capabilities of the most accomplished intelligence officer. In Sanjeevi’s case, his relative inexperience was quickly and brutally exposed. The IB Director erred in alienating senior politicians by seeking broad executive powers for his organisation. Powerful figures in the governing Congress Party, Patel included, considered that Sanjeevi’s grab for power threatened to place the IB beyond a level of legislative scrutiny appropriate in a democracy. Sanjeevi argued that his role managing, ‘a very vast intelligence organization with centres flung far and wide in the country and outside it’, demanded that he should be designated primes inter pares within India’s intelligence community. In doing so, Sanjeevi exaggerated his own importance and overplayed his hand.³⁶ A suggestion by Sanjeevi that his title should be amended from ‘Director, Intelligence Bureau’, to, ‘Director-General of Intelligence’, met with a frosty response from Indian civil servants. Rejecting Sanjeevi’s proposal, R. N. Banerjee, the administrative head of the Home Ministry, observed disapprovingly, ‘I am rather surprised that such an unsound proposal should have been put up seriously by the Director, Intelligence Bureau.’³⁷ Sanjeevi’s bid to secure control over all intelligence matters, civil and military, received an equally firm rebuff from India’s armed forces. Thomas Elmhirst observed that Sanjeevi had courted ‘a certain amount of trouble’ by seeking to impose his authority over the country’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). Having proposed to his military colleagues that he should not only chair the JIC but, ‘control all Intelligence–internal, external, military, naval and air’, Sanjeevi was left in no doubt that such an idea was unthinkable, and that instead he should ‘concern himself with internal security and with the running of a certain number of agents into adjacent territory’.³⁸

The struggle for power in India’s intelligence establishment was mirrored by a concurrent post-war battle between MI5 and SIS over their respective roles and responsibilities. At the beginning of 1947, representatives of SIS, MI5, and IPI held a series of discussions on how to ‘maintain the future flow of intelligence relating to India’. The outcome was distilled into a single joint report, in which the three secret organisations put forward several recommendations. As an interim measure, it was suggested that IPI should be incorporated into the Security Service. A temporary dispensation was also proposed that allowed for IPI to continue running covert operations in foreign territories. The latter ran counter to a directive that Clement Attlee had issued in April 1946, which prohibited the Security Service from engaging in such activity. Authorising MI5/IPI to mount covert operations abroad was justified as a necessary short-term expedient, given the exceptional nature of the security situation unfolding in India. Whitehall endorsed the recommendations and, on 1 August 1947, IPI was officially incorporated into MI5. To assuage concern in SIS that the Security Service’s charter risked becoming unduly expansive, it was agreed that IPI activity conducted on foreign soil would only be undertaken in partnership with SIS.³⁹

In addition, the joint report called for SIS to be granted an operational remit in India. Attlee’s directive of April 1946 had included a clause prohibiting SIS activity in British territory overseas, including India. Or, in other words, Attlee instructed the Security Service to keep out of foreign countries, unless invited in by a host government, and SIS to stay away from the British Empire. The three secret services rationalised extending SIS’s mandate to incorporate India on the basis that, ‘India may be a foreign country before long [and] it seems justified as an experimental measure.’ Even were a new independent Indian government willing to exchange security and intelligence information, the joint report argued, it seemed unlikely that, for reasons of inefficiency or policy, such an arrangement could furnish all the material required by customers in Whitehall. In a memorandum sent by Menzies to William Hayter, who oversaw intelligence matters at the Foreign Office, the SIS chief made plain that whatever the nature of the future relationship between the United Kingdom and India, his organisation could only pick up the slack left by the Indianisation of the IB by placing its officers on the ground in South Asia. For SIS to supply Whitehall with intelligence on Indian and foreign nationals in the subcontinent; to keep abreast of Indian links to individuals and organisations of interest further afield; and to advise on intelligence matters in countries adjacent to India; the Service needed an active office or station in the subcontinent.⁴⁰ An Indian nationalist government, one FO official underlined, was certain to be ‘wholly unreliable’ when it came to intelligence sharing, and could, ‘never be in quite the same category as Canada or Australia’.⁴¹ As an addendum, the joint report recommended the dispatch of a resident MI5 officer to the British High Commission in New Delhi. Patel had previously indicated that he would be receptive to an exchange of security liaison officers following the transfer of power, and Whitehall embraced the opportunity this presented to maintain strong links with the IB.⁴²

The spirit of collective goodwill displayed by Britain’s secret world in respect of India proved to be short-lived. By early February 1947, senior figures in the Foreign Office began pressing for a revision of the terms set out in the joint report, and for SIS to assume primacy in the subcontinent. Writing to MI5’s Director General, Sir Percy Sillitoe, on 7 February, Sir Orme Sargent, Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, declared, ‘ … we feel very strongly that it is undesirable to have two organisations [SIS and MI5] engaged in covert activities in a foreign country.’ The activities of MI5, Sargent insisted, ‘can in the nature of things never be fully overt’. Allowing two British intelligence services to run side-by-side in India, the FO mandarin insisted, risked duplication, confusion, and the unwelcome exposure of clandestine activity. One solution, Sargent ventured, would be to offer SIS officers posted to India training in MI5 work, and enable them to take on counterintelligence and security responsibilities.⁴³ At the same time, Sargent approached Sir Terence Shone, the British High Commissioner in New Delhi, to canvass support for the establishment of a local SIS station. Given the fluidity and uncertainty of the political situation in India, Shone was advised that, from an intelligence standpoint, the Foreign Office ‘thought it best to take two bites at the cherry’. This, Shone was told, involved planning both to implement an interim intelligence structure in India, along the lines of that envisaged by the MI5-SIS-IPI joint report, and, concurrently, preparing the ground for a more permanent arrangement under which SIS would exercise exclusive jurisdiction in the subcontinent. Acknowledging that SIS had been excluded by Attlee from operating in Commonwealth territory, Sargent brushed the restriction aside and expressed confidence that India would soon come to represent foreign intelligence terrain, making SIS ‘the natural collectors of covert intelligence’. Accordingly, Shone was asked by Sargent to accommodate an SIS officer in the British High Commission and to extend the intelligence officer diplomatic cover.⁴⁴ Weeks later, in March 1947, Attlee approved the relaxation of restrictions on covert action undertaken by MI5 and SIS that had been set out in the joint report on intelligence in India.⁴⁵ The scene was now set for a bureaucratic tussle between MI5 and SIS that, over the coming months, would see the subcontinent turned into a test case for the post-war delineation of Britain’s global intelligence responsibilities.

Staying On: British Intelligence and Post-Independent India

Within MI5, Guy Liddell enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to establish an MI5 liaison office in New Delhi. Liddell’s intention was to broker a reciprocal arrangement with the Indian government. This envisaged that MI5 would station one of its officers in Shone’s High Commission and, in return, Sanjeevi and the IB would attach one of their men to the Indian High Commission in London.⁴⁶ During his visit to India, in March 1947, a delighted Liddell obtained Patel’s agreement to exchange security liaison officers. The Deputy Director of MI5 was less pleased when Norman Smith suggested to Patel that, to avoid undue suspicion about the nature of the proposed security liaison arrangement, MI5’s man in India should have no prior connection to the IB, Indian Police, or colonial civil service. Appointing an outsider with limited knowledge of India’s security landscape, Liddell fumed, would be a mistake and needed to be overturned.⁴⁷

The individual MI5 selected as its first Security Liaison Officer (SLO) in India was Lieutenant Kenneth Bourne. A former Chief of Shanghai Police, Bourne served in India with the Intelligence Corps during the war. Under the codename BRISTOL, he had run a counter-intelligence unit that functioned as a Chinese section of the Intelligence Bureau. Bourne’s operation was bankrolled by the Special Operations Executive, but he reported to the IB, and his remit encompassed domestic Indian security duties that included monitoring local Chinese agents and watching over the political and criminal activities of Calcutta’s large Chinese community.⁴⁸ Bourne’s background contravened Smith’s recommendation that MI5’s SLO should have no prior association with the IB. Liddell pressed ahead with the appointment regardless, and Patel acquiesced. Bourne left London on 29 July 1947 to take up his new post in India.⁴⁹ Bourne operated from an office in Eastern House, a building occupied by British information and publicity staff and detached from the main High Commission. He remained in New Delhi for just six months before being replaced by Bill U’ren, another former British Indian police officer who had clocked up twenty years of service in the subcontinent. The experiment posting of an MI5 SLO to India proved successful and it was soon replicated in neighbouring Pakistan and, as the Cold War expanded, across the Empire and Commonwealth.⁵⁰ Over time, the SLO innovation came to play an important part in the history of British decolonisation. In more parochial terms, it also ensured that for decades to come relations between MI5 and the IB were more intimate and interdependent than those between any other departments of the British and Indian governments.⁵¹

Over at SIS, Stewart Menzies followed the Security Service’s lead and recruited an ex-Indian policeman of his own to look after the Service’s interests in the subcontinent. Vernon Thomas Bayley was born in October 1908 in Ferozepore, Bengalc, to a family steeped in the history of the British Raj. As far back as the sixteenth century, his relatives had acted as directors of the East India Company, worked for the Bengal civil service, sat on the subcontinent’s judiciary, and served as commissioned officers in the British Indian Army. Bayley’s grandfather, Sir Steuart Bayley, worked closely with British intelligence while acting as Secretary of the Political and Secret Department at the India Office. After joining the Indian Police in 1928, Bayley was posted to the North-West Frontier. In 1937, he relocated to New Delhi and took up a position with the IB. Bayley was recruited into SIS in 1946. He was married to the author Viola Powles. Powles enjoyed a successful career writing children’s adventure stories under her married name, the locations of which frequently corresponded with Bayley’s SIS postings. As a junior IB officer, the often cash-strapped Bayley made ends meet by cultivating his own public audience and moonlighting as a newsreader on Delhi Radio.⁵²

On 17 September 1947, Bayley arrived in India in the company of two SIS secretaries. A second SIS officer, and Bayley’s assistant, John Peter May, followed in mid-December.⁵³ May was captured by the Japanese following the fall of Singapore in 1942, and languished for the remainder of the war in a prison camp in Malaya. Patel and the Intelligence Bureau were not informed of Whitehall’s decision to reactivate a covert British intelligence presence in India and the small SIS station operated on an undeclared basis. A requirement to build-up obsolete agent networks from scratch required Bayley to travel widely throughout the subcontinent. Accordingly, Menzies asked Shone to provide his SIS officer with a roving cover role within the UK high commission and suggested that a nominal designation of Information Officer or Trade Commissioner would be appropriate.⁵⁴ Bayley was eventually given the more amorphous title of ‘Secretary’, primarily out of concern that his ignorance of economics and public relations might be exposed and attract unwanted attention. The SIS station was housed in a large, single room in the High Commission, directly beneath Shone’s private office.⁵⁵ The High Commissioner wanted to keep a close eye on his guests.

Shone had opposed an SIS presence in India. In particular, the High Commissioner expressed reservations that Bayley’s links with the subcontinent were too conspicuous, and that the SIS officer would be viewed with misgiving by locals. William Hayter agreed, and cautioned Menzies that Bayley’s employment seemed, ‘… an unnecessary risk for you to take’.⁵⁶ Menzies thought otherwise. Bayley, the Chief of SIS insisted, ‘himself is convinced of his ability to work in India without detection’. While acknowledging that ‘naturally some suspicion may attach to him when he first arrives’, Menzies maintained, ‘this suspicion will die down when Bayley carefully lives his cover’. Moreover, Menzies vouched that Bayley would, ‘confine his activities, when they start, entirely to handling first-class, trustworthy British head agents’. It was essential, Menzies submitted, that he was able to utilise an officer in India with extensive experience of the subcontinent. ‘[N]o-one who has not had experience of handling Indian agents could possibly direct the British head agents in such a difficult task’, Menzies informed the Foreign Office. ‘Unpleasant repercussions are far more likely if we put in an inexperienced officer for this job.’ Whitehall officials remained sceptical that Menzies insistence on appointing Bayley was entirely sound. ‘In short’, one mandarin summarised, ‘the proposal is to “bluff it out”’.⁵⁷ In an effort to placate Shone, the High Commissioner was made aware that Bayley would not be permitted to run Indian agents directly. In addition, the local SIS station was instructed to recruit no more than five European cut-outs, or intermediaries, who would, ‘collect … information from “unconscious” Indians’. Such ‘unconscious’ Indian contacts were not to know, or were supposed not to know, that they were ‘being pumped’ for ‘information about Soviet-inspired or Communist activities in the Dominion’.⁵⁸ Bayley’s function, Shone was reassured, ‘would be that of an organiser, the contact with the agents being made by others under his general direction and guidance’.⁵⁹ With Menzies refusing to give further ground, SIS was allowed to have its way and Bayley’s Indian posting was confirmed.⁶⁰ In response, a disgruntled Shone fired off a brusque one-line note to the Foreign Office that stated simply, ‘I am still not happy about this.’⁶¹

Shone’s concern over Bayley’s appointment was amplified after the SIS officer approached High Commission staff about the availability of modern air conditioning units; solicited advice on purchasing a car, preferably an American Chevrolet or Ford; and asked to be accommodated in the Cecil Hotel, in the heart of Old Delhi. The requests were met with dismay and deemed entirely contrary to the anonymity which Shone had been assured Bayley would cultivate. It was pointed out to Bayley that air conditioning units were in notably short supply in the Indian capital; that an imported British vehicle might provide a less ostentatious form of transport; and that it would seem odd for the SIS officer and his staff to lodge in Old Delhi, when other High Commission officials resided in the city’s diplomatic quarter.⁶² Worse still, Bayley blotted his copybook with Shone by corresponding with High Commission staff in his own name rather than a work name or pseudonym. ‘This was noted by a locally recruited [Indian] member of staff who is the wife of one of the European Deputy Directors of the Intelligence Bureau’, Shone complained to the Foreign Office. ‘She promptly asked if the letter was from [Bayley] who her husband had heard (and told her) was coming out soon to join the staff of the Trade Commissioner.’ ‘Although this is a large country, people in the higher strata know one another (and what they are doing) from one end to the other’, Shone made clear to Whitehall. ‘We feel that whatever cover we might provide Bayley it will be virtually impossible to remove suspicion from the minds of the large number of intelligent Indians (who are bound to know his background).’ Pressing the Foreign Office to reconsider a change of tack before it was too late, Shone implored bluntly that, ‘they [SIS] may wish to reconsider the question of Bayley’s appointment’.⁶³ The High Commissioner was overruled. Before landing in India, Bayley had quipped to British diplomats that, ‘The next year or two should certainly not be dull.’⁶⁴ The SIS officer’s words were to prove prescient, but for reasons other than he intended.

Covert Cold War

In part, the urgency surrounding SIS’s efforts to get a station up and running in India was informed by the perception that post-war Soviet subversive activity was shifting focus from Europe to Asia. Fragile post-colonial governments, beset by pressing social and economic problems, it seemed, had been identified by Moscow as highly susceptible to the lure of communism. In 1948, SIS watched intently as Calcutta, long a hot bed of radical politics in the subcontinent, played host to a conference of the progressive Youth of Asia and the Congress of the Communist Party of India.⁶⁵ In the wake of the Calcutta meetings, the tactics of communist groups across Asia switched from support for a united front approach and collaboration with non-communist nationalists, to a more militant and often violent opposition to state power. Jawaharlal Nehru’s interim government was itself embroiled in suppressing an armed communist insurgency centred on the Telangana region of southern India. In this context, Lenin’s dictum that the decisive battle for world revolution would be fought and won on the banks of the river Ganges, appeared troublingly prophetic to SIS officers pondering the inception of the Cold War back at the Service’s Broadway headquarters.⁶⁶

Under pressure from customers in Whitehall to demonstrate its utility in blunting communism’s appeal, SIS implemented a wide range of covert action. Most of the clandestine activity undertaken by the Service, espionage aside, centred on black propaganda operations that were combined, when needed, with the liberal use of bribery or blackmail.⁶⁷ Black propaganda was designed to give the impression that it originated with the target it was intended to discredit. Such propaganda was unattributable and did not identify its source. The working assumption of Menzies’ organisation was that, in conjunction with a new Foreign Office propaganda unit, the Information Research Department (IRD), it would spearhead ‘a comprehensive worldwide political warfare plan’.⁶⁸ This envisaged SIS exerting control over news agencies; covertly controlling newspapers and periodicals, ‘by general subsidy and/or by bribery of owners and editors’; secretly running broadcast stations; and facilitating, ‘the dissemination of rumours, distorted or untrue reports, etc. either through selected news channels or by pamphlets, posters, etc. or orally’.⁶⁹

India was amongst the first countries that SIS targeted in its ‘clandestine propaganda effort’. One estimate, for the years 1948 and 1949, calculated that SIS expended £350,000 on covert propaganda in India and the Middle East. The bulk of this money was spent on printing and publishing propaganda material; bankrolling ‘whispering campaigns’ that aimed to expose local politicians as being ‘directed’ by the Soviet Union; and operations designed to sow dissension within local communist parties by planting real or manufactured evidence pointing to the duplicity or dishonesty of their leaders. More exuberant, but much less common, were operations that sought to effect the ‘framing’ of foreign diplomats ‘in order to effect their removal and possible liquidation’; the penetration of factories and trade unions; acts of minor sabotage and intimidation (including the use of stink bombs and microphone interference to disrupt meetings); the kidnapping of communist leaders or Russian nationals to give the appearance of defection; and assassination.⁷⁰ In March 1948, when pressed by the Chiefs of Staff to ramp up information warfare activities, the Foreign Office defended the effectiveness of its black propaganda operations by pointing to an assertion made by Menzies that, ‘He [Menzies] had evidence of the usefulness of his machinery in India.’⁷¹

Precisely what covert action Vernon Bayley and the SIS station in India had undertaken remains unclear. However, in October 1947, Kenneth Bourne warned MI5 headquarters back in London that Indian colleagues in the IB had become concerned by the actions of his ‘friends’ in SIS.⁷² The following March, with gossip swirling around New Delhi about Bayley’s background and the nature of his mission in India, SIS deemed it prudent to order his recall to London. Such a drastic step, it was acknowledged, raised ‘the distinct possibility of his [Bayley] not returning’ to India and the local SIS station being closed.⁷³ As an interim measure, Orme Sargent recommended that SIS cease all activity in India and ‘remain entirely inactive’.⁷⁴ The appointment of Archibald Nye to replace Terence Shone as High Commissioner later that year, increased the pressure on SIS to reconsider the merits of retaining an operational presence in India. On 15 October, Menzies briefed a meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee that Nye, in common with his predecessor, ‘had taken exception to even an embryo organisation of S.I.S. being set up in India and had so informed the Prime Minister’.⁷⁵

From Menzies perspective, Nye’s conviction that an SIS station was neither needed nor desirable in India was especially unfortunate. Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Nye was stationed in the subcontinent as a young regimental officer and had risen to serve as Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff under Sir Alan Brooke during the war. A favourite of Winston Churchill, and a loyal and efficient deputy to Alanbrooke, Nye was lauded by the latter for having, ‘a first-class brain, great character, courage in his own convictions, [and being a] quick worker with great vision’.⁷⁶ In 1946, on retiring from the Army, Nye returned to India to become Governor of Madras. In the autumn of 1948, when Nye’s term in Madras came to an end, he received plaudits from Indian officials for his adroit handling of the transfer of power in southern India, and his success in quelling labour unrest and a communist-backed peasant uprising. Significantly, Nye enjoyed the respect and friendship of Jawaharlal Nehru. ‘It may interest you to know what your premier [of Madras] told me about you’, Nehru wrote to Nye, in August 1948. ‘He was loud in praise of you and when I asked him if he had any suggestions about your successor, he said “send us someone like Nye.” That is praise enough. Unfortunately, we cannot find Nyes easily.’⁷⁷ In Archibald Nye, Menzies was confronted with a powerful and well-connected adversary.

Nye’s objection to SIS activity in India did not reflect a conviction on the High Commissioner’s part that the subcontinent was peripheral to Britain’s strategic Cold War interests, or that South Asia was in any way impervious to communist subversion. Far from it. ‘The importance of a stable India from the point of resisting Communist infiltration in all that part of the world [Asia] could not be over-emphasised’, Nye assured Whitehall.⁷⁸ Rather, Nye concluded that SIS operations in India were likely to yield little useful intelligence and would run an unwarranted risk of aggravating delicate Indo-British relations. The Security Service’s declared SLO, Nye judged, could meet Britain’s substantive intelligence requirements in India, and could do so without alienating Nehru’s government.⁷⁹ Importantly, Nye’s position was supported by British officials in India who had been galvanised by Shone’s opposition to SIS operations in the subcontinent. Senior members of MI5, such as Alex Kellar, also lined up to question whether undertaking espionage and launching covert operations in colonial or Commonwealth countries was altogether wise or, indeed, morally, and ethically sound.⁸⁰

Menzies and the Foreign Office were not prepared to sanction SIS’s permanent retreat from India without putting up a fight. Shutting SIS out of the subcontinent even temporarily, FO officials speculated, would make it difficult to, ‘start [intelligence operations] again and we might lose a lot of valuable information about Communism in the meantime’.⁸¹ William Hayter queried whether, ‘the Chiefs of Staff would feel strongly about a total shut down of intelligence activities in India’. ‘There is almost no country’, Hayter suggested implausibly, ‘of which we know so little’.⁸² It rankled with the Foreign Office that Nye had used a private meeting with Attlee to convince the prime minister that SIS could serve no useful purpose in South Asia. ‘Evidently the Prime Minister has forgotten’, one FO official recorded testily, ‘that he [Attlee] approved Sir E. Bridges’ minutes of 7th March and 21st July 1947 [authorising SIS activity in India]’. When it came to convincing Attlee that the Security Service could uphold British interests in the subcontinent absent SIS, Nye was pushing against an open door. Attlee had overcome an initial suspicion of the Security Service and grew to hold Percy Sillitoe and MI5 in high regard.⁸³ With Shone, Nye, MI5, and Nehru’s government having all expressed unease about SIS’s in-country presence, Attlee had ample reason to order Menzies organisation to quit India.

In late October, a dispirited Sargent informed Menzies that, ‘The Prime Minister is … determined on the closing down of covert activities in India and there is, I am afraid, nothing more that we can do for the time being’. The Chief of SIS was duly ordered to close his station in New Delhi and confirm his organisation’s withdrawal from India.⁸⁴ Attlee’s intervention, set out in the so-called ‘Attlee Directive’, appears to have taken the form of an oral instruction and was not put in writing at that time. It may well, in any case, have been moot in respect of Bayley and SIS’s India station. Sometime after the events of 1948, as MI5 worked to strengthen its relations with the IB, Alex Kellar noted that subsequent to the transfer of power the Intelligence Bureau had been, ‘particularly irritated … by the activities of M.I.6. [SIS] personnel in India: two were in fact asked to leave’.⁸⁵ Whether SIS was forced out of India by Attlee or was pushed from the subcontinent by Patel and the Indian government, made little practical difference. Henceforth, the Security Service, through its overt liaison relationship with the IB, would exercise exclusivity in managing British intelligence interests in India.

The political decision communicated through the ‘Attlee Directive’ to exclude SIS from India had broader consequences. Sillitoe and MI5 proved successful in extending the Directives scope beyond India to cover the entirety of the British Empire and Commonwealth. Menzies organisation was not merely shut out of India but was also largely precluded from conducting clandestine operations in swathes of Asia and Africa.⁸⁶ The imposition of the Directive made little difference to SIS in respect of the ‘old’ Commonwealth, where Canada and Australia were in the process of setting up their own foreign intelligence organisations. Menzies was, however, troubled that, by setting a precedent that prohibited his organisation from operating in former British colonies, Whitehall had made it harder for SIS to respond to a global threat posed by communism.⁸⁷ The empire and Commonwealth remained under the sway of the Security Service until well into the 1960s and, thus, was largely shielded from SIS’s ‘cloak and dagger’ operations.⁸⁸ In the subcontinent, it was not until 1964 when, in the wake of the Sino-Indian border war the Indian government reassessed the utility of covert action, that SIS reopened a station in New Delhi under the direction of Ellis Morgan, a protégé of the future head of the service, Maurice Oldfield.

Figure 1.1 Sir Percy Sillitoe, Director General of MI5 (1946–1953).

Central Press / Stringer / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

Security, Sovereignty and Secret Intelligence

By the close of 1948, and after a little local difficulty, a common purpose was established in London and New Delhi that would define the future intelligence and security dimensions of Britain’s relationship with India. India’s political leadership looked to Britain, primarily, to help rebuild an intelligence infrastructure in the subcontinent that had been created by the former colonial administration to function as a domestic security service rather than a foreign intelligence agency. From its inauguration, the Intelligence Bureau’s focus was on disrupting nationalist conspiracies and preserving the stability and authority of imperial governance. The IB was infused with an insular mentality, fearful of sedition, ever watchful for rebellion akin to the events of 1857 and, latterly, preoccupied by the threat posed by communist subversion following the Russian revolution of 1917. The transfer of power in India in 1947, as commentators on contemporary Indian intelligence practice have noted, reinforced as much as reinvented a colonial intelligence culture shaped by fear and anxiety.⁸⁹ In the 1970s, Parmeshwar Narayan (P. N.) Haksar, principal secretary to India’s premier, Indira Gandhi, and a leading architect of India’s external intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), lamented that, in many respects, independence had come to represent a missed opportunity. ‘Transfer of power meant continuation of elite domination’, Haksar bemoaned, ‘without any commitment to dismantle the colonial heritage and restructure the socio-economic relations on equalitarian and truly democratic lines’.⁹⁰ Haksar could just as well have been describing the evolution of India’s intelligence community.

Nehru’s interim Indian government approached secret intelligence in much the same way as their British colonial antecedents. The IB was conceived by a new generation of Indian leaders as a safety valve to help relieve internal pressures, to mitigate the influence of communism and communalism, and to serve the parochial interests of a domestic political elite. The intelligence organs of the state were not geared to meeting external threats from India’s neighbours. It was entirely unsurprising that, given a congruence in attitude and approach towards intelligence between the former coloniser and the recently decolonised, Patel and India’s Home Ministry identified merit in working closely with the British Security Service. In contrast, SIS, with its expertise in foreign intelligence, espionage, and covert action, as Shone, Nye, and other British officials cautioned Whitehall, was always likely to be regarded with suspicion bordering on hostility by a nascent post-colonial state sensitive to preserving hard-won national sovereignty. Menzies initial enthusiasm for establishing an SIS presence in India aside, policymakers in Whitehall were aware that assisting India in building up a foreign intelligence capability, not least in light of New Delhi’s fractious relationship with Pakistan, a fellow Commonwealth state, would prove more problematic than aid offered by MI5 in the security field.⁹¹ Tellingly, unburdened by the complication of having to sustain an appearance of impartiality between India and Pakistan, it was the United States, and the Central Intelligence Agency, more specifically, who would support India in the covert action arena in the aftermath of independence.

It was not until the early 1960s that SIS returned to India. By then, MI5, through a succession of resident SLOs in New Delhi, had been able to embed itself firmly into India’s intelligence bureaucracy. Reflecting on the reintroduction of SIS to the subcontinent, one future Director-General of MI5, Stella Rimington, who began her career in the Security Service in India, recalled that the two services offices were located adjacent to each other in the British High Commission behind security doors, ‘which had a combination lock that habitually stuck in the oppressive Indian climate and whose numbers had to be given a sharp hit with a shoe to get then to move into place’. Her SIS colleague, Rimington remembered, was ‘a genial, rather low-profile character, with some sort of job in the political section, but notable mainly for his performances in character parts in the plays put on by the British High Commission Amateur Dramatic Society’.⁹² A talent for acting, one assumes, proved useful in the context of the SIS officer’s day job. Senior SIS officers, including a coming Chief, Maurice Oldfield, went on to establish a productive relationship with their Indian counterparts. One Indian intelligence officer, who briefly rose to lead the R&AW, has recounted spending time getting to know Oldfield during recreational trips to Jaipur and Jaisalmer, in Rajasthan, in Western India.⁹³ Renowned as an engaging storyteller with a playful sense of humour, Oldfield’s highly developed sense of scepticism when it came to the utility of covert action was doubtless significant in securing Indian goodwill for SIS. In the period between the transfer of power in 1947, and the onset of the Sino-Indian War of 1962, it was not SIS, however, but its British partners and erstwhile rivals in the Security Service that, thanks to Clement Attlee, determined the course of Britain’s intelligence relationship with India.