xxx•INTRODUCTION
Iraq, traditionally managed by Royal Air Force personnel, maintained
order in prewar Baghdad on a level that has gone unsurpassed since.
Over the years, the various components of British Intelligence be-
came a veritable alphabet soup, including the OIC, SIME, BSC, ISLD,
PWE, MEIC, SOE, CIFE, STS, JIC, SWG, CSO, and FRU. Together
they covered the globe, supporting British rule over a quarter of it, from
running intercept stations in the Northern Territory of Australia to the
administration of Special Branch in Hong Kong, from MI5’s counteres-
pionage operations in London to countersubversion activities in prewar
Bombay. British Intelligence manned outposts in Cyprus, Masira, Sin-
gapore, and St. Helena and continues to send declared representatives
to Washington, D.C., and Moscow, with others in undercover roles in
Belgrade, Buenos Aires, and Basra.
Over the years, these differing groups have had a measurable impact
on British public life and politics, and a brief overview of Margaret
Thatcher’s premiership illustrates the point, with her administration
dogged by one intelligence or security incident after another seizing the
newspaper headlines. She had scarcely been elected in 1979 before the
former keeper of the queen’s pictures, Professor Sir Anthony Blunt,
was exposed as Soviet mole who had penetrated MI5 and was stripped
of his knighthood. There followed the intelligence failures that led to
the invasion of the Falklands, the Zircon satellite affair, the arrests of
Geoffrey Prime and Michael Bettaney, Matrix Churchill, the suspicions
over Roger Hollis, several telephone tapping scandals, the banning of
trade unions at GCHQ, the Cyprus signals base arrests, theSpyCatcher
saga, and as a finale and backdrop to her departure from Downing
Street, the unanticipated invasion and occupation of Kuwait by Saddam
Hussein. The common thread running through all these events is the
involvement of the security and intelligence agencies, demonstrating
not only their capacity to cause ministerial embarrassment but also the
consistency with which they can be relied upon to create problems for
all governments.
The difficulties that beset Mrs. Thatcher were far from unique. An-
thony Eden was infuriated when Buster Crabb disappeared on a clan-
destine mission in 1956, and Harold Wilson came close to paranoia in
his suspicions over plots he was convinced had been orchestrated by
members of the Security Service. Harold Macmillan’s loss of power
was in part due to the Profumo affair, and Ted Heath was infuriated to