British Use of ‘Dirty Tricks’ in External Policy Prior to 1914

Abstract

The war in South Africa from 1899 irrevocably changed the character of British foreign policy from one of disdaining the behaviour of the continental European states to one of imitation of their methods through acceptance of the premiss that a fully functioning secret service needed to be established in Britain in order to ensure national defence in peacetime. Not only was press and cable censorship instituted, but the communications of enemy and neutral states were intercepted and deciphered where possible and steps were taken to exploit Britain’s dominance of the global communication system in the course of hostilities. In addition, the traditional policy of blockade of ports supplying goods and services to the enemy was supplemented by a resort to bribery and sabotage, which were sanctioned by politicians and officials who normally pursued public business with the utmost probity.

These steps were not simply undertaken under the legal cover of wartime exigencies. Techniques of interception of foreign communications were also pursued in peacetime after 1902 first within the framework of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance against Russia and France and secondly within the framework of the entente with France and Russia against Germany. In the first case, French and Russian communications were secretly monitored by the British-owned Eastern Telegraph Extension Co. and selected signals were supplied to Japan by the Admiralty in response to French assistance to Russia, as well as to documented Russian efforts to intercept and decipher British communications and to interfere with British trade with Japan, all of which were carefully concealed from the British public. British intelligence and technology were directly supplied to Japan from the summer of 1902 in order to frustrate Russian expansionism and the methods adopted by Japan for confronting Russia were directly recommended by Sir John Fisher on the basis of British naval exercises in the Mediterranean during the South African War.

In the second case, efforts were made to avoid Russian humiliation as far as possible in order to achieve a shift in the global balance of power against Germany. Both Admiralty and War Office came to the conclusion in February and March 1905 that an impending Russian defeat increased the likelihood of German pressure on France and steps were taken to encircle Germany by directing the existing secret service organisation to target Germany in the event of conflict and by concentrating armed force in Europe in defence of France from German threats. Evidence of German hostile threats to the British Isles appears to have been made available from French files, which hastened the formal establishment of the Secret Service Bureau in 1909 and the provision of materials on German, Austrian and Italian communications by the French War Ministry followed from 1912 onward. Even if Britain became a target of French and Russian intelligence agencies, as suspected, this merely reinforced a conviction that German threats to the Low Countries and the Levant should be confronted directly in those areas rather than yielding to any compromise which could result in conflict on metropolitan soil.