Things always look just a little different across the pond, almost as if we’re looking at ourselves through a funhouse mirror. Take, for example, the following snippet, which comes from a Guardian article on the recently released intelligence dossier on author Doris Lessing.
In the early 1960s, Lessing’s file shrinks to include occasional references to her presence at anti-nuclear meetings and random press cuttings. Intermittently there is a run of reviews for a novel, as if in the archive of Lessing’s publisher rather than the security service. There are probably later documents still to come, but it seems unlikely there will be much else of interest. After Lessing devoted her energies to Sufism in the 1970s and 80s, it is difficult to imagine even MI5 thinking she constituted a threat to national security.
But did she ever represent such a threat and did MI5 really believe that she did? The latter question is arguably irrelevant because the business of those compiling intelligence files was as much to gather information as to protect the nation. The intelligence machine was necessary for Anglo-American relations, quite apart from genuine security needs. The 1950s were years of hardline McCarthyism in America, and if Britain wished to continue to receive political and financial assistance from the US, then it needed to be seen to play its part.
The question of whether Lessing posed a danger is better answered by her books than by her MI5 files. This was a war of ideas, and she was more menacing in words than deeds, though no one at MI5 seems to have read her books. Certainly, Lessing’s anger about the colour bar was as fervent as MI6 feared, and she wanted to bring down the government in Southern Rhodesia. Her files indicate she was spurred into action in London by her links with Mzingeli. She returned to Southern Rhodesia in 1956 determined to make a difference there, and the anxious letter from the private secretary suggests that she was perceived to have real power. If she constituted a security threat anywhere it was in Africa, but even there, having eluded her hunters, she didn’t do anything more than write another angry book about the situation.
I’m not really sure that it’s fair to characterize the Anglo-American intelligence cooperation of the early Cold War as nothing more than a British willingness to appease lunatics in Congress and at Langley, but it’s interesting that that view has an easy currency on the left over there. Also something that probably wouldn’t be written by an American is the assertion that a late-life conversion to Islam would be some great relief to our intelligence agencies that would encourage them to relax their surveillance. It’s true that we’re talking about a different time when Britain didn’t have a large disgruntled and marginalized Muslim population, but this story was published yesterday, not in the 1970’s.
We resemble the British, but we really are quite different peoples.
