The Security Service is part of the Defence Forces of the country. Its task is the Defence of the Realm as a whole, from external and internal dangers arising from attempts of espionage and sabotage, or from actions of persons and organizations whether directed from within or without the country, which may be judged to be subversive of the state.
Though instructed to avoid any political or sectional bias, the DG was left free to judge what was ‘subversive of the state’. Unlike SIS and GCHQ (the successor to GC&CS), the Security Service was thus essentially selftasking.22
When Guy Liddell retired from the Service in 1952 at the age of sixty to become head of security at the Atomic Energy Authority, Dick White succeeded him as DDG. Relations between White and Sillitoe did not improve. White later recalled, ‘I found Sillitoe vapid and shallow and frequently wrong. I was close to leaving to try my hand at something else.’23 Before retiring as DG on 31 August 1953, Sillitoe cut his ties to the Security Service in dramatic and unprecedented fashion by ordering the destruction of his record of service.24 Maxwell Fyfe delegated the shortlisting and interviewing of candidates for the succession to Sillitoe to a high-powered committee of Whitehall mandarins, chaired by the head of the civil service and former cabinet secretary Sir Edward Bridges.25 The Committee acknowledged that Guy Liddell had ‘unrivalled experience of the type of intelligence dealt with in MI5, knowledge of contemporary Communist mentality and tactics and an intuitive capacity to handle the difficult problems involved’. But ‘It has been said that he is not a good organiser and lacks forcefulness. And doubts have been expressed as to whether he would be successful in dealing with Ministers, with heads of department and with delegates of other countries.’26 The Committee concluded that the two strongest candidates were Dick White and General Sir Kenneth Strong (who had been shortlisted in 1945). Following interviews with both, Maxwell Fyfe told Churchill that he agreed with a majority on the Committee in recommending White:
Particularly since the last two appointments were made from outside the Service, there would be substantial advantage, from the point of view of the internal morale of MI5, in making an appointment from within if there is a suitable candidate there. I have seen a good deal of the work of MI5 since I have been Home Secretary and I have formed the highest opinion of Mr White’s capabilities.27
White’s appointment as DG at the age of forty-six was welcomed with relief as well as pleasure within the Security Service. The future DDG, Anthony Simkins, probably spoke for many of his colleagues when he said, ‘We’ve got a professional and not a policeman in charge!’28 Among the fairest judges of White’s character was the Oxford historian and wartime intelligence officer Hugh Trevor-Roper, who had an unblemished reputation for never conferring unmerited praise. Trevor-Roper singled out White’s ‘liveliness, the genial equanimity, the sense of humour – and of the absurd – which carried him through every crisis’. It was precisely these characteristics which underpinned White’s popularity within the Service. Of his intellect, Trevor-Roper wrote, probably also fairly: ‘His mind was not original but it was always open. He enjoyed discussing ideas, literature and the arts.’29
Sillitoe had been a semi-public figure, whose photograph occasionally appeared in the press and who sometimes seemed to court publicity. As the features editor of the Sunday Express, J. L. Garbutt, told Maxwell Fyfe, Sillitoe’s ineffectual attempts to disguise his appearance by, for example, wearing dark glasses at football matches or walking backwards out of aeroplanes merely increased media interest in him: ‘The way he went about the job simply cried out for publicity. It was Sillitoe’s unwisdom that was responsible for it all. I know this myself. He would even seek out the editors.’ Garbutt advised the Home Secretary: ‘Just let the Chief of M.I.5 fade into obscurity. It has been done. It can be done again. It all depends on the man.’30 White was of the same mind. Though a naturally clubbable man, he was determined that both he and the Security Service should return to the shadows as soon as possible after Sillitoe’s departure. While Sillitoe’s appointment had been publicly announced, White’s was not. Admiral George P. Thomson, the head of the D-Notice Committee (which advised on the publication of matters affecting national security), asked newspaper editors, ‘in the national interest’, not to publish his name.31
Though the media also made no reference to the Service’s shabby Mayfair headquarters at Leconfield House,32 to which it moved late in 1948, bus conductors and taxi drivers were less inhibited. A member of Registry recalls:
When you got off the bus in Park Lane the conductor would shout down the bus ‘Curzon Street and MI5’ and all the girls would troop off looking somewhat embarrassed! We also had to contend with some of the ‘ladies of the night’ in Curzon Street as Shepherds Market was a very red light district in the 60’s and I think they might have thought they had some competition.33
Post-war cutbacks reduced the total size of the Service from 897 in July 1945 (down from a wartime peak of 1,271 early in 1943)34 to 570 in 1947.35 MI5 remained heavily male-dominated. In May 1945, though there were no female officers, fifty-nine women were doing officers’ jobs.36 As in the rest of British society, progress to equal opportunity was slow. In March 1952 fifty-four officers and twenty-four ‘other’ staff in B Division (intelligence) were male; three officers and 172 ‘others’ were female.37 As staff numbers increased with the worsening of the Cold War, the Service had to seek additional accommodation at a number of other central London sites.
Dick White began his term as DG with what became known as the ‘October Revolution’: a major reorganization in which the three existing Divisions – Establishments and Administration (A); Intelligence (B); Protective Security (C), supplemented in 1950 by an Overseas Division (OS) – were replaced by six Branches. Surveillance staff, formerly part of the Intelligence Division, became part of a new A Branch charged with technical support. B Branch became Personnel and Establishments; C Branch was Protective Security; D Branch took over Counter-Espionage; E Branch was responsible for Counter-Subversion in the Empire and Commonwealth; F Branch was charged with Counter-Subversion at home.38
As DDG White chose Roger Hollis,39 a much more reserved personality than himself. High among his reasons for doing so was the fact that, during the Second World War, Hollis had been foremost in the Security Service in foreseeing the post-war threat from Soviet espionage and Communist subversion, the Service’s two main targets at the time when White took over.40 Despite his reserve, Hollis had also won the confidence of Britain’s two most important Commonwealth intelligence allies. Both the Australian secretary of the Department of Defence, Sir Frederick Shedden and the Canadian under-secretary for External Affairs, Norman Robertson, became personal friends and – White believed – ‘greatly respect his ability and judgement’.41
Since Hollis was a year older than White, his prospects of becoming DG appeared remote. But for Sir Anthony Eden’s dissatisfaction with the leadership of SIS when he succeeded Churchill as prime minister in 1955, White would probably have remained DG until his retirement in 1968. Eden’s desire to move White to SIS is usually explained by his annoyance at the embarrassment caused by the death of an out-of-condition SIS diver, ‘Buster’ Crabb, while secretly inspecting the hull of a Soviet warship in Portsmouth Harbour during the state visit of the Soviet leaders, Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin, in April 1955. In reality, Eden had already made up his mind in December 1954 to move White on the retirement of the current ‘C’, Sir John ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair, in June 1956. On being told the news by Eden,42 the Home Secretary Gwilym Lloyd George described it as ‘a great blow to me’:
Sir Dick White has grown up in MI5 and I do not think it is an irresponsible statement to say that he is, in the opinion of the Home Office, far and away the best that that Department has ever had. He made the most excellent impression when he appeared recently before the Conference of Privy Counsellors on Security.43
White himself was reluctant to leave the Security Service, telling Sir Frank
Newsam (PUS at the Home Office) that he was happy for ‘as strong a counterargument as possible’ to be put to the Prime Minister:
Basically, I really do believe that . . . Security and Counter-Espionage are more important than Espionage in the present world context. The latter is faced by the totalitarian security measures of the Soviet bloc countries and I imagine is becoming progressively less feasible. On the other hand the Russians and their Satellites are increasing their efforts to obtain our secrets and this puts the emphasis on defence.44
Both White and the Home Office, however, gave way to the Prime Minister’s insistence that he succeed Sinclair as chief of SIS.45
Gwilym Lloyd George told Eden that, as the next DG, ‘I can only think of one man in MI5 who would be in the running, viz Mr R. H. Hollis, who is Sir Dick White’s deputy.’46 At the time White gave Hollis his enthusiastic support.47 He later changed his mind, writing in a sympathetic obituary that, though respected within the Service during his nine years as DG, Hollis ‘did not enjoy easy personal relations with its ordinary members who tended to find him reserved and aloof’.48 Some, probably many, did not meet him at all. One staff member who encountered Hollis in the lift and failed to recognize him, said: ‘Oh, we haven’t met. What section are you?’ ‘I am the DG,’ replied Hollis.49
Perhaps the ultimate example of Hollis’s remote management style came during the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, the most dangerous moment in British history. Though the crisis was caused by the American discovery of Soviet nuclear missile bases under construction in Cuba, the threat to Britain, the United States’ chief ally, was even greater than to America itself. There must have seemed to many Service staff, as to much of the British population, a real danger that the crisis would end in thermonuclear warfare and the obliteration of the United Kingdom. Most staff knew no more about the crisis than they read in the press and saw on television news. Once the BBC (slightly ahead of US television channels) broadcast photographs of the Soviet missile sites under construction on Cuba taken by American U-2 spy planes,50 staff knew that intelligence was likely to play a crucial role in the resolution of the crisis. But, as they worried about the fate of themselves and their families, they heard nothing from the DG or senior management.51 The DG had decided six years earlier, without informing most staff, that in a nuclear war ‘it was no good envisaging an organised Head Office existing anywhere; indeed there would be nothing to do.’ Any surviving senior officers were expected to go to help the wartime regional commissioners to preserve what survived of local administration. No plans were made for the rest of staff.52
Had war seemed likely in 1962, Hollis would have had to select two or three representatives of the Service (of whom he might have been one) to join the Prime Minister, the War Cabinet and senior defence and intelligence staff in a large underground bunker, codenamed TURNSTILE, near Corsham in the Cotswolds.53 Before the Missile Crisis, Harold Macmillan, who had succeeded Eden as prime minister in 1957, directed that TURNSTILE was to ‘act as the seat of government’ in what he optimistically described as ‘the period of survival and reconstruction’ following a nuclear attack. More realistically, in a Third World War the bunker would probably have provided no more than a short-lived underground refuge for the remnants of British government while Britain was obliterated above them. Such thoughts must surely have been in the Prime Minister’s and DG’s minds at the height of the Missile Crisis. Macmillan planned an exceptional Sunday cabinet meeting on 28 October at which he probably intended to authorize the move to a ‘Precautionary Stage’ in the countdown to war. Shortly before the cabinet was due to meet, however, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev brought the crisis to a dramatic end by giving in to US demands to dismantle the Cuban missile bases.54 Security Service staff were not briefed about the Missile Crisis even when it was over. By contrast, their former DG, Sir Dick White, now ‘C’, was believed to have congratulated SIS staff on the role they had played.55
At a personal level, Hollis’s final years in office and much of his comparatively brief retirement were among the most difficult experienced by any DG. In 1963 he authorized the surveillance and secret investigation of Graham Mitchell, whom he had made DDG in 1956, on what turned out to be the unfounded suspicion of being a Soviet agent. By 1964 Hollis had fallen under suspicion himself from a small but determined minority of Service conspiracy theorists.56 The tiny but influential circle of Whitehall mandarins privy to these extraordinary suspicions might perhaps have been expected to favour an outside appointment to succeed Hollis as DG on his retirement in December 1965. That an insider was preferred was due partly to the fact that Hollis, at least in operational matters, retained the confidence of the Home Office and, in particular, its powerful PUS, Sir Charles Cunningham. Equally influential was the unhappy precedent set by the appointment of Sir Percy Sillitoe – ‘a clear illustration’, in Cunningham’s view, of the dangers of appointing an outsider: ‘I am satisfied that an outside appointment would be wrong so long as there is a suitably qualified successor to Sir Roger Hollis in the Security Service itself – and fortunately there is.’ The successor Cunningham had in mind was Martin Furnival Jones (FJ), both the first Cambridge graduate and the first man with a law degree to become DG, widely regarded as the cleverest man in the Security Service.57 FJ had succeeded Mitchell as DDG in 1963 and was strongly backed by Hollis.58
In 1965, as a result of continued staff expansion, the Service leased a new headquarters from Great Universal Stores at 15/17 Great Marlborough Street near Oxford Circus, to which the new DG, his secretariat and A, B and D Branches moved.59 Furnival Jones was a shy man with much the same reserved manner as Hollis. One female member of staff recalls that when he came to office bridge evenings, ‘You would be his partner and he would not even talk to you.’60 FJ’s main visible enthusiasms were bird-watching and The Times crossword.61 The aloof management style of Hollis and FJ did little to diminish the sociable work culture of the rest of the Service, many of whose members never met the DG. One new recruit was told in 1953 by Bill Foulkes, a personnel officer in the newly founded B Branch, ‘One of the best things about working here is that the percentage of bastards is extremely low.’62 Extensive interviews with retirees and staff opinion surveys since the end of the Cold War63 strongly suggest that this has remained ever since the view of a considerable majority of the Service.
The earliest known post-war attempt to sum up the qualities expected of a Security Service officer is a note prepared in the mid-1950s by Antony Simkins, then B1 (personnel), for German liaison. Though an intellectual himself, with a first-class honours degree in history from Oxford University, Simkins began by emphasizing that, while ‘a good standard of ability is required’, ‘intellectual arrogance is a grave fault since matters of opinion bulk large in the work of the Security Service’:
While integrity is no doubt the first qualification, it is closely followed by stability, sense of responsibility and purpose, stamina, humour, tolerance and generosity which go to make a good colleague. A Security Service officer must work as a team. To be humourless, opinionated or personally over ambitious is a serious defect. Maturity is essential and a man will rarely be suitable before he reaches the middle twenties at the earliest . . . The hall mark of a good security officer is judgement, which is generally the product of a trained mind and well rounded personality.64
A sense of humour was regarded, as it had been since the earliest days of the Service,65 as indispensable both for preserving a sense of proportion when dealing with fraught issues of national security and for maintaining team spirit. A secretary who worked at Leconfield House from 1949 to 1958 still had vivid memories half a century later of ‘a lot of humour’ in the Service.66 A member of the Registry in the 1950s remembers ‘endless laughter, particularly working with Dolly Craven, oh my goodness!’67 Many other female staff recall beginning the working day by listening to the extrovert Ms Craven, who was in charge of outgoing mail, frankly recounting to g
ales of laughter the latest episodes in her adventurous private life.68 A secretary who worked at Leconfield House from 1959 to 1965 remembers Service culture as a mixture of humour and hard work: ‘Life was fun for young secretaries, even on £9 a week.’69 After making due allowance for the fact that fond memories tend to become fonder still as the years go by, it is impossible to mistake the affection with which the Security Service is still regarded by so many of its surviving post-war veterans. Even the disaffected memoirs of Peter Wright, though permeated by personal grievances and conspiracy theories, record that ‘in the main, the 1950s were years of fun, and A Branch [of which he was an officer] a place of infectious laughter.’70
Post-war Service recruitment remained largely by personal recommendation. Following earlier informal contacts with the careers services (then called Appointments Boards) at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, formal contact was established in 1949. Ironically, in view of what later became known about the KGB’s recruitment of Cambridge graduates in particular, the DDG, Guy Liddell, was not in favour of going further afield for university recruits with the possible exception of Edinburgh: ‘London is something of a breeding ground for Left Wingers and Manchester and Birmingham, as far as I know, produce specialists such as chemists, engineers, etc.’ The Service preferred its officer recruits, however well educated, to have experience of the outside world and to be in at least their mid-twenties. It thus took relatively few direct from university. The Oxbridge Appointments Boards were cultivated partly because their advice continued to be sought by some graduates when changing jobs in the course of their careers. A circular to Service officers in 1953 concluded that ‘a personal introduction . . . still remains the most satisfactory form of introduction’. Recruitment procedures were somewhat perfunctory. A preliminary interview with the Director of Establishments and Administration, if it was recorded at all, usually amounted to only a few lines, sometimes with dismissive comments such as ‘a small man of a retiring disposition’.71
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