The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  Of the 164 officers in the Service in 1955, thirty had joined after demobilization from the wartime armed forces, twenty-three had come from the police, twenty-two from the professions, twenty-one from the regular armed forces, twenty from business, seventeen from the colonial and home civil services, nine from other parts of the intelligence community and one from the BBC. Eleven were listed in the statistics as ‘direct entry’ (probably from university). By 1955 there were ten women officers (listed as a separate category), all of whom had achieved their rank as a result of internal promotion within the Service.72 The most influential of them was Milicent Bagot, the Service’s first female Oxford graduate, who had joined the Service from the Special Branch during the 1931 reorganization.73 In 1949 she was promoted from administrative assistant to the rank of officer,74 in recognition of her extraordinary memory for facts and files on international Communism which passed into Service folklore.75 Bagot was a stickler for meticulously correct office procedure, terrifying some young officers to whom she pointed out their shortcomings.76 Though a powerful personality within the office, she was a quite different person at home. A male colleague, who for a time lodged at Bagot’s house, later recalled:

  Milicent had the most extraordinary domestic arrangements because she shared a house in Putney with her Nanny, and Nanny was boss . . . She looked after Milicent and was not afraid to correct or criticise her . . . Milicent, I think, adored her . . . Milicent in fact on her own could hardly boil a kettle of water.77

  Officers who joined the Service early in the Cold War could expect to spend a quarter to a third of their careers on overseas postings in the Empire and Commonwealth.78 This, for many recruits, was one of the attractions of a Service career in an era before the invention of the package holiday had brought foreign travel within the reach of most of the British population. An officer who joined in 1949 remembers overseas postings as ‘definitely the cream on the pudding’.79 Most secretaries were equally enthusiastic. One of them recalls that, when offered a two-year posting in Colombo soon after joining, ‘I could hardly believe my luck.’ The cautionary advice given to women posted abroad by the last of the lady superintendents, Catherine Weldsmith,80 has passed into Service folklore. The warning most frequently attributed to her was ‘Beware of men in hot climates!’ She also advised wearing a girdle at all times ‘just in case’, though its precise function as a defence against hot-blooded males was never spelled out.81 At various times during the thirty years after the Second World War, the Service had forty-two outposts abroad, the great majority in the Empire and Commonwealth.82

  By 1965, some 65 per cent of officers recruited during the previous ten years had come from the administrative services of newly independent colonies.83 The Indian civil service and police had long provided recruits to MI5, chief among them the wartime DG Sir David Petrie. In the spring of 1947, shortly before Indian independence, Liddell, then DDG, visited India84 and recruited eight policemen, three of whom later reached high rank in the Service.85 From the mid-1950s contact with the head of the Re-employment Bureau of the Sudan Political Service led to a stream of recruits nicknamed the ‘Sudanese souls’.86 In 1955 Director B, J. H. Marriott, wrote to the head of the Cambridge University Appointments Board:

  What we want in fact is the sort of combination of brains and character that was looked for in the I[ndian] C[ivil] S[ervice] or the Colonial Service in its palmy days. Our chaps frequently find themselves in a position where, since they have no authority, their ability to put across the point of view of the Service depends almost entirely upon themselves.87

  At the beginning of 1957 the DDG, Graham Mitchell, and B1 visited Malaya to make job offers to officers of the Malayan civil service, who were known after their arrival in MI5 as the ‘Malayan mafia’. Stella Rimington, the first female DG, later complained that, though some of the colonial recruits rose to senior positions, a minority, with the security of a pension and a lump sum to buy a house, ‘seemed to do very little at all, and there was a lot of heavy drinking.’88 Others claim that that heavy drinking was limited to a few notorious cases – chief among them a director whose alcoholism led to his early retirement.89

  By the time Furnival Jones became DG in 1965 there was growing dissatisfaction among Security Service officers with their confused salary and career structure. Though many had pensions from previous employment in addition to their Service salaries, most were in their forties or fifties with poor promotion prospects. Some had remained at the top of their pay scale for ten years or more. After an internal inquiry, FJ approved a new career structure in which officers in charge of sections were renamed assistant directors, and a new rank of senior officer was created as an intermediate grade. For the first time directors, hitherto paid at different rates, were to receive the same salary, and the DG’s salary scale was raised to that of a deputy secretary in the civil service. Unusually, Treasury officials agreed to the proposals without a quibble. In fact they were so taken aback by the Service’s confused salary scales that one official asked Director B, John Marriott, ‘Why haven’t you had a mutiny?’ Already privately distressed by the investigation of his predecessors as both DDG and DG on suspicion of working for the KGB, FJ seems to have been shocked to discover how far behind the times the Service had fallen in providing a coherent career structure for its staff. At a meeting of about twenty officers selected for promotion to the new-style senior-officer grade, Furnival Jones burst into tears in the middle of his announcement. Few members of the Service had previously realized the strong emotions concealed by FJ’s stiff upper lip and shy exterior.90

  During the early Cold War, the Security Service’s training policy, like its management style, was old-fashioned. Ironically, when Training Section was set up in 1955, its job was to train not Service staff but police and administrative personnel in colonies on the verge of independence and other parts of the Commonwealth.91 Though new entrants were given two or three days’ practical training on administration and the running of the office, there was no attempt to address broader issues.92 It was only during this brief initial training that some staff discovered the identity of the organization they had joined. An officer recruit relates how he had been in the office several days before he was told by Director B, John Marriott, ‘I suppose someone told you this is MI5?’ In fact, no one had.93 One new entrant to the Registry recalls that she had been in the Service for several weeks before she was told. The training recollections of those officers who joined during the early Cold War are mostly very similar: ‘In all my career in the Service I had very little training – what I knew I picked up’;94 ‘Training was something you didn’t have or you did it on the job’;95 ‘Training when I joined was sitting with Aunt Nellie . . . It was briefing not training.’96

  By the mid-1950s most new entrants to the Security Service started in what was called the ‘Study Group’, successively designated F1A, F2C and F1C. This section, also known as the ‘nursery’, was responsible for identifying members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), using both intelligence and open sources,97 and was thus seen as an ideal training ground for learning the basic investigative work of the Service, file-making, indexing, source evaluation, and liaison with local police forces. Newcomers lived in dread of the Registry Examiners who sent back files with green slips pointing out their errors. As Stella Rimington later recalled, ‘The arrival of files one thought one had got rid of, covered in green notes, was a sort of ritual humiliation that one was required to suffer as an embryo desk officer.’98

  During the early Cold War the ‘watchers’ of A4 (as they became in the White reorganization of 1953)99 came from working-or lower-middle-class backgrounds very different from those of most of the officers. Their social separation was emphasized by the fact that they were housed separately from most of the Service. By the time he retired in 1947, Harry Hunter, who had joined MI5 in 1917 and headed the surveillance department since 1937, was the longest-serving male member of the Service. In Hunter’s
view:

  From experience it has been found that the ideal watcher should be 5' 7" or 8" in height, looking as unlike a policeman as possible. It is likewise a mistake to use men who are too short as they are just as conspicuous as tall men. We favour shadowers of a nondescript type; good eyesight is essential, also hearing, as it is often vitally important to overhear a suspect’s conversation; active and alert, as it frequently happens that a suspect hastily boards or alights from a fast moving vehicle; hardy enough to withstand cold, heat and wet during the long hours of immobility in the street, and, more important, to escape being spotted by the suspect himself.100

  Hunter’s successor, David Storrier, was a former policeman. A4’s total size in December 1946 was only fifteen (including a male secretary); by 1956 it had increased to fifty. Instead of dressing casually, the watchers were expected to wear suits, trilby hats and raincoats. In winter they were sometimes forced to stuff newspapers under their shirts in an attempt to stay warm. Brown envelopes containing their weekly wages were frequently delivered to A4 staff in the street by bicycle from Head Office. They worked a five-and-a-half-day week with no Sunday working until 1956 when mobile watchers were required to work one weekend in four (from 1963 two weekends in five).101

  The main surveillance target was the Soviet embassy and intelligence residencies in Kensington Palace Gardens (KPG). Soviet personnel initially travelled mostly on foot, or by bus and taxi. So did A4 surveillance personnel, communicating with each other by hand signals. Immediately after the war, A4 had no car, though it sometimes pressed into service the DG’s Wolseley. By the end of the 1940s it had acquired three or four Hillmans.102 When the Russians started to use embassy cars, a watcher (usually one who could not drive) would alert A4 surveillance cars to their movements by radio-controlled buzzers. Equipment allowing speech communication was not installed until 1951.103 The head of A4 from 1953 until his retirement in 1961 was William (known as Jim) Skardon, a former detective inspector in the Met whose record of service notes that, since joining the counter-espionage division of the Service in 1947, he had shown himself ‘perhaps the most foremost exponent in the country’ of the interrogation of suspects.104 But for his ability to extract confessions, the atom spy Klaus Fuchs could not have been successfully prosecuted.105 It was an indication of the continued lowly status of A4 that, despite Skardon’s achievements as interrogator and the crucial role of surveillance in Service investigations, he was never given promotion to senior officer.106

  Since the Second World War the Service had had an outstation, in a Post Office building in St Martin’s Le Grand near St Paul’s, headed in the 1950s by Major Albert Denman (remembered by Peter Wright as ‘an old-fashioned military buffer with a fine sense of humour’), which was responsible for postal interception and the installation of telephone taps under Home Office Warrants. Technicians, wearing rubber gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, sat at long trestle tables, equipped with powerful lamps and large kettles, steaming open mail and producing photostats of their contents with pedal-operated cameras. During the early 1960s the outstation moved across the road to Union House, another Post Office building, and replaced the photostat machines with less cumbersome 35mm film and Kodak cameras. The number of postal items opened in London and at other units around the country increased from 135,000 in 1961 to 221,000 in 1969. In 1966 a letter to the Ministry of Public Building and Works condemned the working conditions in Union House as ‘so far below the Shops and Railway Premises Act that it is little short of disgraceful’; after heavy rain the sinks were said to overflow and the parquet flooring began to lift. There was no major improvement until 1969, when the unit joined a refurbished laboratory in Union House.107

  The recording and transcription of telephone calls intercepted under HOWs and the product of eavesdropping devices was carried out on the sixth floor of Leconfield House in A2A, a section closed to most members of the Service. In the 1950s Dictaphone cylinders were used to record telephone intercepts and acetate gramophone disks for microphone circuits.108 The work of the mainly female transcribers in A2A was supervised during this period by a redoubtable assistant officer, Mrs Evelyn Grist, noted for her powerful personality and fondness for hats, necklaces and shawls.109 A2A was known in her honour as ‘The Gristery’.110 There was some alarm in 1950, before the introduction of shredders, when fragments of secret waste from the Gristery which had been placed in a malfunctioning incinerator blew up the chimney and scattered in the street outside.111 After Mrs Grist’s retirement, A2A was put under the control of an officer. By 1964 it had ninety-four members: fifty-three English-language transcribers, thirty linguists, eleven managerial and office staff. With the intensification of operations against Soviet Bloc targets and counter-subversion in the mid-1960s, its total staff jumped by half in only two years to reach 140 in 1966.112 The Russian transcribers came mainly from White Russian émigré families. To Peter Wright they seemed to have turned their sixth-floor hideaway into ‘a tiny piece of Tsarist Russia . . . Some even installed icons in their rooms.’113 Until 1970 the threat from Arab terrorism seemed so remote that A2A contained only one Arabic linguist.114

  A Branch’s lack of funds and state-of-the-art technology for its early Cold War operations was partly compensated for by the technical virtuosity of some of its members. A1 acquired a ‘burglar’ of genius, a former sergeant major, who set up a locksmith’s workshop in the ‘Dungeons’ (basement) at Leconfield House with neatly arranged rows of numbered keys acquired or duplicated in the course of operations against offices, hotels and private homes.115 He was passionate about his work, spending many evenings and nights of unpaid overtime on operations. Christopher Herbert (A1) wrote of him in 1968:

  One is asked to avoid superlatives. I find it difficult to do so in writing about the work of this officer. For over a year he has been engaged in a series of difficult operations involving a high degree of engineering skills, apart altogether from running his workshop and participating in what one might call more routine operations. I can only pay tribute to his determination, professional ability and qualities of leadership. He refuses to be beaten by technical difficulties and has inspired his subordinates to work as they have never worked before. He is one of the greatest operational assets possessed by the Service.116

  His admirers included Peter Wright who, after some years’ part-time work, was recruited in 1955 as the Service’s first scientist to advise A Branch on the operational use of electronic and other scientific equipment. Wright appears to have had considerable success in improving the performance and deployment of eavesdropping technology. Cleve Cram, who as deputy head of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) station in London had regular contact with Wright, subsequently said that he would give him a mark of 8½ out of 10 for his work in A2 – despite his distaste for Wright’s later conspiracy theories of Soviet penetration.117 Shorn of selfdramatization, Wright’s celebrated claim in his disaffected memoirs to have ‘bugged and burgled our way across London at the state’s behest’ is broadly true.118 There was no HOW system for the installation of eavesdropping devices, which usually required burglary (though the Service did not use the word), mostly against Communist and Soviet Bloc targets. Approval was given instead by the Home Office PUS.119 The belief at the time that ‘bugging and burgling’ in defence of the realm was covered by the royal prerogative was probably mistaken. Following publication of Peter Wright’s memoirs in New York in 1987, according to Stella Rimington, the DG, Sir Antony Duff, argued – in the end successfully – that new legislation was needed to give the Security Service authority for operations which required ‘entry on or interference with property’.120

  During the early Cold War the integration of science and technology into Security Service culture and operations proceeded slowly. In 1962, after a series of discussions with SIS, a former senior government scientist was appointed joint director of science for the two Services.121 Wright quickly fell out with him, claiming that he ‘wanted to integrate scienti
fic intelligence into the Ministry of Defence. He wanted the Directorate to be a passive organization, a branch of the vast inert defence-contracting industry, producing resources for its end users on request.’122 In 1963 Wright and two SIS scientists formed a joint scientific directorate which in the following year was based in the new SIS headquarters at Century House in Lambeth. In 1966 the joint directorate broke up and the Service established a new scientific R&D section as A5.123 In 1970 A5 had only six members, one of them a non-scientist, but its services were rapidly in heavy demand. Director A reported in August of that year that A5 officers were ‘run off their feet’.124

  The largest section of the Security Service, the Registry, was an exclusively female preserve. The first men did not join until 1976. In the immediate post-war years the daughters of former officers and debutantes were a major source of recruits. The Director of Establishments claimed in 1948 that ‘the general atmosphere . . . is that in which ex-officers would like to find their daughters working.’ According to Service folklore, ‘a job in the Registry was as much a step in a debutante’s progress as Queen Charlotte’s Ball.’ Though the folklore exaggerates the proportion of debs, there was no shortage of individuals who fitted the stereotype. One young woman in the Registry in the 1950s lived in the Curzon House Club (which then had no casino but was widely used by ladies from county families on shopping trips to Harrods), conveniently situated for the Service’s then HQ at Leconfield House. Another Registry deb is said to have arrived each morning accompanied by her boyfriend in the Household Cavalry, with whom she had just been riding in the Park. Partly because of what were then termed the ‘hazards of marriage’ (normally followed by resignation) among its young and eligible female employees, turnover was always heavier in the Registry than anywhere else in the Service.125 In 1960 the DG, Sir Roger Hollis, was asked informally by Burke Trend of the Treasury (later cabinet secretary) if he would consider the possibility of a building south of the river in the Elephant and Castle area. He replied that it was a rather ‘slummy’ district. Hollis wrote subsequently that ‘since most of our girls come from the Kensington and Bayswater area’, a move to the Elephant and Castle would have an adverse effect on recruiting.126 Some of the working-and middle-class girls in Registry were initially rather intimidated by the novel experience of working with debs.127