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Intelligence and decolonization: The life and death of the federal intelligence and security bureau, 1954–63

The role of intelligence agencies in the process of British decolonization has not so much been ignored by historians as systematically concealed from them as a matter of government policy. Until very recently, the authorities in Great Britain invoked the Public Records Act of 1958 to impose extended or indefinite closure on the vast majority of papers relating to the activities of the British intelligence community, no matter how ancient or apparently innocuous. The lack of intelligence-related material in the Public Record Office (PRO) was a particular problem for editors of the earlier volumes in the British Documents on the End of Empire series. Since they drew their material exclusively from the Public Record Office and were not granted privileged access to restricted material, they were able to do little more than hint at this area of activity. These restrictions have not, however, prevented the appearance of a growing body of literature that touches on the role of intelligence in British withdrawal from Empire. Writers have adopted a number of different strategies in order to obtain information. One has been to challenge official secrecy headon through the use of investigative reporting, drawing on unauthorized interviews and other forms of 'private information'. Another has been to bypass the Public Record Office and, instead, to draw documentary evidence from archives that have escaped the attentions of Whitehall's 'weeders'. A third tactic has been to focus upon episodes in the history of decolonization when internal security became a central concern of British policy-makers: namely, the colonial counter-insurgency operations of the 1940s and 1950s. Even in the 1980s, substantial quantities of documentary evidence relating to these conflicts were released to the PRO. They betrayed (often inadvertently) sufficient traces of the intelligence community's presence to enable historians to make some informed guesses about its activities, both in the specific territories involved and elsewhere in the colonial world.