Secretary in Britain's wartime coalition cabinet, declared: 'I assume that the aim of British policy must be first, that we should continue to exercise the functions of a world power.' This is a stance which has frequently forced Whitehall to tell governments of the difference between illusion and reality. Winston Churchill was a statesman who did grasp this difference, particularly in his relations with Josef Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt. Ernest Bevin was another realist who sought American backing for the containment of Russia in Europe and the maintenance of Britain's position in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Anthony Verrier has selected six major post-war episodes to describe what British governments do when the desire to remain a world power is not matched by the resources necessary to be one. Verrier reveals fully for the first time the crucial role of the Secrte Intelligence Service in the execution of British foreign policy: in the air and sea landing in Albania organized by the CIA and the SIS - an operation which it is now known Philby betrayed to his Soviet control; in the debacle of Suez;in the Kuwait operation July 1961 where Britain strove to demonstrate that it 'still counted' in the Middle East; in Nigeria; in the Cuban missile crisis when Kennedy received crucial information from the SIS's Soviet informer, Oleg Penowsky, which he needed to read Krushchev's hand and call his bluff, and in the abiding disaster of Northern Ireland. Verrier shows conclusively that this role was far more important than those who have both fantasized and derided the SIS ever realized. This is not the world of James Bond or George Smiley though every bit as complex and extraordinary. This is the real orld and the SIS emerges as an organization which adjusted far more rapidly to the realities of power in the post-war world than its political masters. Through the Looking Glass is based primarily on interviews with participants in the six episodes and, to a degree, on the author's own experience. The reader is offered a cautionary tale, directly relevant to the increasingly dangerous world of the 1980s.

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