Prompted by a Nikkei book review, this essay examines how intelligence operations have shaped world history. It highlights Japan’s structural vulnerability as the only country without organizations equivalent to the CIA or FBI, and illustrates the decisive power of espionage through the Anglo-Soviet intelligence war.

2016-05-22

Lately I had been reading newspapers only superficially, but just now my eye stopped on today’s book review section of the Nikkei.
This is probably because I have written several times that Japan, which has neither a CIA nor an FBI, is the only country in the world of its kind, and that it is therefore no exaggeration to say it is filled with danger.
For example, at a time when elegant isolationism and anti-Semitism were rampant and the United States—then even more the world champion than it is now—was enjoying the greatest wealth and prosperity in the world, it would not be an exaggeration to say that America had absolutely no intention of fighting the Nazis. I have written that, in order to bring this United States into the war, British intelligence continued every conceivable intrigue and finally succeeded in imposing an oil embargo on Japan, which was Japan’s lifeline; and this book review convinced me that this was probably 100 percent correct. (Incidentally, I thought that the intelligence officer Somerset Maugham mentioned here without any annotation must be that famous writer, and when I searched Wikipedia, it was indeed him.)
No one would doubt that the facts written here represent the reality of intelligence operations. That the intelligence services of South Korea and China
could have taken control of media such as the Asahi Shimbun, which had dominated Japan until the year before last, must have been easier than twisting a baby’s arm—especially since Japan has neither a CIA nor an FBI.
All emphases in the text other than the headline are mine.
Lenin vs. the British Secret Intelligence Service by Giles Milton
Depicting the Anglo-Soviet spy war after the revolution
In 1917, toward the end of the First World War that claimed about nine million lives in Europe, the February Revolution occurred in Russia, and in August Somerset Maugham of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, commonly known as MI6), who had infiltrated the capital Petrograd, informed Russian Prime Minister Kerensky that Britain would provide funds to continue the war against Germany and for the coming Bolshevik struggle. However, because of the prime minister’s indecisiveness, Maugham’s top-secret mission came to nothing. After the subsequent October Revolution, Lenin, who became head of the Soviet regime and won the civil war against counterrevolutionary forces, declared that the first target of attack against Western capitalist countries would be the British Indian Empire.
Meanwhile, the SIS, founded in 1909, responded to this major event in a way that stunned observers.
This book deals with five years of Anglo-Soviet espionage, from the Russian Revolution to the conclusion of the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement in 1921.
Immediately after the outbreak of the First World War, in September 1914, the SIS established an 18-member station within the Russian Army Ministry in Petrograd.
The station chief was a former Conservative MP and baronet, and the members included writers, diplomats, army and navy officers, newspaper reporters, businessmen, and musicians. They were masters of disguise and deception operations.
However, assassination attempts on Lenin and attempts to overthrow the Soviet government triggered “Red Terror” by the brutal Cheka (Russian secret police), and all station members were expelled from the country. Subsequently, as the Indian revolutionary operation in which the Red Army and anti-British Islamic forces cooperated became full-fledged, three SIS intelligence officers re-infiltrated the Soviet Union. They risked their lives to probe Soviet strategy, boldly disguising themselves as drivers of Red Army vehicle units, as Cheka officers ordered to arrest themselves under issued warrants, or as guests attending the founding congress of the Comintern.
The organization that made use of their information was the Indian Imperial Intelligence Service. While the Soviet Indian Empire operation was underway, the Soviet economy was driven to the brink of collapse due to poor industrial production and failed harvests. It was a resounding failure of the much-vaunted “War Communism” policy. With millions of citizens on the verge of starvation, the Soviet government’s last-ditch remedy was to sign a trade agreement with Britain. This came with a strong British condition: the permanent abandonment of conspiracies against the Indian Empire. The SIS had already secured high-ranking Soviet officials and was accurately grasping the contents of top-secret meetings in Moscow just hours later.
From then on, the lesson for British foreign policy became that intelligence operations “can strike the enemy more thoroughly than old-fashioned war.”
Review by Professor Emeritus Hiroshi Kawanari, Hosei University