In Disrupt and Deny, Rory Cormac takes readers into the hidden world of British foreign intelligence activity. With extraordinary detail and easily accessible prose, Cormac’s work sets a standard for espionage history.
A young professor at Nottingham University, the author’s passion for the subject is clear. Still, Cormac’s passion is not unbound from his academic scrutiny. Throughout Disrupt and Deny, the author doesn’t simply tell us what happened; he explains why it happened. Cormac also reports on the lessons learned (and not learned). In doing so, he charts the organizational evolution and culture of various elements within the British intelligence apparatus.
Focusing on Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, SIS/MI6, the book begins with “the Service” as it found itself in the post-Second World War environment. The Soviet threat loomed large, and the British government was anxious to restrain the spread of communism across Europe and the Middle East. This lead Britain to prioritize its relationship with the U.S. intelligence community. One British official notes that a side benefit of this special relationship would be its enabling of British efforts to “keep American action under control.” But as Cormac notes, “the other less noble factor driving SIS into the arms of the Americans, lack of money, was left unsaid in [London.]” This quiet but sustaining tension between the U.S. and Britain on certain intelligence matters is one that appears again and again throughout the book.
A key strength of Disrupt and Deny is its mixing of swashbuckling espionage history with assessments of the broader political environment. In this manner, Cormac takes us inside the high-level government meetings that authorized sensitive intelligence activities but also out into the field with those carrying out the actions.
Attempting to undermine Soviet expansionism in eastern Europe, for example, SIS ran the early 1950s “Operation Flitter.” This involved using “fake radio signals to incriminate leading Soviet officials by linking them to subversive activity. The plan was ruthless: to plant damning evidence on innocent and unsuspecting personnel operating in the West in order to spread suspicion [with Russian] leaders back home, perhaps resulting in a purge.” This didn’t always work out as planned. One target of the operation, Gen. Aleksei Antonov wasn’t ruined; he was rather “promoted and went on to become chief of staff of the combined forces of the Warsaw Pact, eventually being buried in Red Square.”
Covert action, or deniable intelligence operations, forms a major focus of the book. We see how SIS attempted to influence and overthrow governments in the Middle East. Some actions were more successful than others. Britain did indeed affect the removal of Iran’s far-left Mosaddegh premiership in 1953. With support from the Special Air Service special forces unit, it also saved the Omani royal family from the Dhofar insurgency. But the 1956 Suez crisis signified the shift of global power from the European old world to the American new world. The lesson of these experiences is the indispensability of collecting quality intelligence.
Equally interesting is Disrupt and Deny’s examination of the CIA-SIS relationship.
Amid the 1980s effort to arm Afghan rebels against the Soviet-led regime, the CIA found a good reason to work with their British colleagues. At a meeting in London, a CIA officer “sensed an opportunity not only to circumvent the Pakistanis [who wanted to control the Afghan resistance], but also to use SIS to bypass American legal restrictions on covert action. Without ever asking for proper confirmation, he fully expected SIS to use CIA money to channel silencers to Afghanistan, effectively funding assassination. He later recalled that SIS ‘had a willingness to do jobs I couldn’t touch. They basically took care of the How to Kill People Department.’ This, he figured, would not be illegal so long as he never specifically discussed what he was doing.”
This is just one example of the American and British use of each other as political and legal shields for otherwise controversial actions. In “early 2012, SIS helped a CIA operation to move weapons from Gaddafi’s stores into Syria, often using front companies established in Libya. As usual, SIS input was useful for the Americans because it allowed the CIA to class the operation as liaison rather than a covert action and therefore avoid reporting it to Congress.” However, it’s not always, or even regularly, about the killing. Other examples of deep state-style shenanigans include SIS’s 1990s effort to plant stories in foreign media. This worked surprisingly well.
While Disrupt and Deny is primarily focused on SIS and Special Forces activities, its later pages also bear close attention to Britain’s signal intelligence service, Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ. The equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency, GCHQ and the NSA have the closest relationship of any two foreign intelligence services globally.
The two services recently engaged in a highly successful operation related to a major political event in Europe, for example. We learn how “GCHQ disrupted Taliban operations by blitzing mobile phones with text messages and calls every ten seconds.” Cormac also notes some of GCHQ’s more amusing, and very British, successes. These included one known as “Cupcake,” which “altered an al-Qaeda bomb-making pamphlet to include cupcake recipes instead.”
To be sure, this is a very serious book worthy of serious readers. But offering various anecdotes amid the history, the book sometimes reads as much as a spy thriller. It will have broad appeal. Disrupt and Deny is thus well worth your eyes — and not eyes only.
