Operation Lyautey

I’ve found something of interest to my studies of counterinsurgency and this is somewhat tangentially related. So Hubert Lyautey is the father of French counter-insurgency doctrine and practice today. Very checkered history that depends implicitly on the reader’s biases for understanding his impact today. More than just ‘bad’ as critics of imperialism will no doubt designate him but had interesting ideas of small wars and intelligence. With him you have to take the bad before you attempt to use him for today. I think the best military view of Lyautey is Douglas Porch’s account in Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War. Also Martin Thomas features him a great deal in his work to. That’s where I’ve mainly been exposed to his ideas and impact, I haven’t read any actual biographies of him or anything.

Now that that’s out of the way, I came across this article while browsing at disinformation history. One of the interesting things I might feature after reading Thomas Rid’s new book in disinfo is the East Germany era. The most poignant idea from disinfo is to start and tell the truth, spinning it in the way and impact for maximum effect. This individual Julius Mader was one of the best at this in exposing CIA officers and their plans.

The real reason for this post was to reflect on the name of one of the SIS operations in East Germany. It was called Operation Lyautey and focused on a longer intelligence undermining plan of Soviet interests as opposed to the flashy CIA plans. The CIA in the 50s was very much a junior service compared to SIS (they’d been doing it much longer). In dealing with modern counter-insurgency mumbo jumbo Lyautey is indeed relevant although the later period of FLN in Algeria of Nagl is often blown out of proportion. I just wanted to make note of the continued importance of Lyautey’s ideas like his ink spot method. Porch shows that many of his ideas were far from perfect and not as successful at first glance. This post makes note of a more linear influence of Lyautey and there’s less of a jump from early 20th century to the 21st.

“Another Western subversive operation referred to by Mader is worth mentioning because it may shed light on the historiography of secret activities during the Cold War. This is Operation ‘Lyautey’, named after the French colonial general and administrator who saw imperial conquest as a long-term and progressive undertaking involving the use of means far removed from actual warfare. Mader discusses Operation ‘Lyautey’ in Nicht La ¨nger Geheim and, in his discussion, relies in part on a Soviet journal. He presents the operation as the idea of SIS at the start of the 1950s. SIS conceived the operation – as its name implies – as a very long-term effort to undermine completely the Communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc. Espionage would determine what the weak points of the Communist societies were, and then the West’s propaganda, fuelled by the information obtained from spying, would be directed at these weaknesses, like ‘targeted fire’ in a battle. Its aims would be to separate the satellites from the USSR, to diminish the appeal of Soviet foreign policy (especially for newly independent states) and to encourage dissatisfaction with the Communist Party line within each of the Eastern Bloc states, thus causing public unrest.80 A Western source confirms that this operation existed. The source is Tom Bower’s The Perfect English Spy, published in 1995, almost 30 years after Nicht La ¨nger Geheim. The book is a biography of the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service between 1956 and 1968, Dick White, and draws heavily on interviews conducted with White and other retired SIS officers. In the book, it is stated that when George Blake was transferred to SIS’ West Berlin station in 1955, he was instructed to obtain all the damaging information he could on Soviet representatives so that they could be blackmailed. These instructions came from SIS’ Special Political Action group and formed part of its Operation ‘Lyautey’.81 Bower does not state his source for this information; it may have been Blake (whom he interviewed) or White or another former SIS officer. But the source must have been someone who had once worked for SIS. He may have been the more willing to talk about the operation because Mader had already made its existence and purposes known. At the very least, Bower’s source confirmed that there was such an operation. His characterization of it is much more modest than Mader’s depiction of it as a long-term effort to win the Cold War. However, the operation may have envisaged using damaging information in a great variety of ways, only one of which Bower and his source discussed. Foreign Office records show that at precisely the time mentioned by Mader, the early 1950s, the British were indeed critical of American covert action as too ambitious and favoured types of activity likely to yield better results. Two of these were operations to aggravate relations between the satellite governments and the USSR, and efforts to provoke disruptive purges of the Eastern Bloc governments by the use of false information connecting important Communist officials with opposition groups.82 Nicht La ¨nger Geheim alleges that the aims of ‘Lyautey’ remained those of the Western secret services’ propaganda against the Eastern Bloc in the 1970s.”[1]

*Update 01/17/21 - Marshal Thomas-Robert Bugeaud is the actual father of French counter-insurgency. Lyautey was directly influenced by him.

[1] Paul Maddrell, “What We Have Discovered about the Cold War Is What We Already Knew: Julius Mader and the Western Secret Services during the Cold War,” Cold War History 5, no. 2 (January 1, 2005): 251–52, https://doi.org/10.1080/14682740500062127.