The Korean War also increased demands on the vetting system. An internal review of B Division in July concluded that ‘The constantly increasing mass of business to transact here has led to a crisis in management and a crisis in manpower.’ The Fuchs case had shown that, when investigating Soviet espionage, old Communist affiliations had to be taken into account as well as current Party membership, and this became the responsibility of B1E.47 Sillitoe was informed on 1 August that:
a number of our industrial contacts were showing a very welcome keenness in getting rid of their Communist employees, and are now taking the initiative in dealing with them rather more quickly than in the past. They have, in fact, already dealt with a case which it was proposed to submit for the industrial purge . . . Non-Communist employees at de Havillands, Stag Lane, had threatened to strike if the Communist employees were not sacked!48
In late September 1950, Henry Arnold, Harwell’s security officer, informed the Security Service that one of Fuchs’s former colleagues at Harwell, the Italian-born atomic physicist Bruno Pontecorvo, had failed to return to the UK after a family holiday abroad. It was later discovered that he and his family had flown to Finland and from there had defected to the USSR. The Pontecorvo case dramatically illustrated once again the limitations of negative vetting. Until a few months earlier, he had been ‘No Trace’ in MI5 files.49 Positive vetting, however, would have revealed that some of his Italian family were well-known Communists.50 Pontecorvo had first become a cause for concern to the Security Service on 2 March when it received intelligence from Sweden reporting that both he and his wife were Communists. When questioned by Arnold, Pontecorvo denied the report but admitted that some of his relatives were Communist sympathizers. He acknowledged, however, that he might be seen as a bad security risk and said that he would prefer to leave Harwell for a university post. By the time he defected, a post had been found for him at Liverpool University.51
Pontecorvo’s defection led to another fierce exchange of correspondence between MI5 and the FBI. Shortly before Pontecorvo began work for the wartime Anglo-Canadian atomic research team in Montreal in 1943, the FBI had reported to British Security Co-ordination (BSC) in New York, whose responsibilities included intelligence liaison with the United States, that it had found Communist literature in his home in the United States. ‘Nobody knows what happened to these reports,’ wrote Liddell in October 1950, ‘since the records of B.S.C. have been destroyed.’52 Because Pontecorvo had never lived in Britain, BSC had not referred his case to MI5. An investigation led by Hollis after Pontecorvo’s defection concluded that, because of bureaucratic mismanagement at BSC, the FBI report must have been misplaced.53 Hollis’s investigation also revealed that in February 1950 Sir John Cockcroft, the head of Harwell, had been informed by a US official that the Italian-born nuclear physicist Emilio Segrè had reported that ‘several members of Pontecorvo’s family in Italy were Communists, some quite prominent, who “had influence on him”. ’ Segrè also claimed that Pontecorvo’s decision to remain in atomic research could have been ‘for the wrong purposes’. Incredibly, before Pontecorvo’s defection, neither Cockcroft nor Arnold had passed on this report to the Security Service, which did not reveal their lapse to the FBI for fear of strengthening its suspicions about British nuclear security.54
Just as the new dispute arose with the FBI over Pontecorvo’s defection, Sillitoe was in Washington, attempting to resolve the earlier problems created by the Fuchs case. Geoffrey Patterson gloomily reported to London that the goodwill created by awarding Hoover an honorary KBE was in danger of being dissipated: ‘Now we are faced with another case which can, to put it bluntly, upset the apple-cart.’55 While in Washington, Sillitoe was briefed on SIS reports of Pontecorvo’s defection by the SIS representative, Kim Philby. As Calder Walton has noted, the DG was thus, unwittingly, in the extraordinary position of being briefed on the movements of one Soviet agent by another Soviet agent.56 Philby doubtless sent a full report to Moscow. Though Attlee had been sympathetic during the Fuchs case, he was exasperated by MI5’s failure to prevent another atomic security scandal so soon afterwards. At a meeting with the Prime Minister, Sillitoe made the unlikely claim that it was ‘quite probable that Pontecorvo had no intention of decamping to Russia’ when he went on holiday.57 The later defector Oleg Gordievsky, who knew KGB officers acquainted with the case, later revealed that Pontecorvo had first volunteered his services to Soviet intelligence soon after he arrived in Montreal during the war and was highly rated by his case officers.58
In the aftermath of Fuchs’s conviction and Pontecorvo’s defection, Attlee was anxious not to be taken by surprise again, and asked to be personally informed of any further ‘cases of persons holding positions of great importance about whom there were unusual security doubts’. His attention was drawn to the case of Boris Davison,59 a scientist who had been employed at Harwell after negative vetting had revealed no evidence against him in Security Service files. Davison’s personnel file at Harwell, however, disclosed that, though his parents were British by birth, he himself had been born and brought up in Russia. Further investigation by MI5 then revealed that Davison’s father currently lived in Moscow, that Davison himself had had ‘Communist associations’ at university (unsurprisingly, since the university was Leningrad), and that he had come under pre-war pressure to become a Soviet agent. In 1938, because he had refused to give up his British passport, his Soviet passport had not been renewed and he had moved to Britain. The Security Service concluded that ‘Because he had undoubtedly had a complete conversion and was almost certainly completely trustworthy, no real risk had been run on this occasion; but . . . we ought to have got evidence of his conversion before deciding to accept him as a good risk.’60 Given the Service’s view that Davison was currently ‘a good risk’ and the difficulty of finding a replacement for him, Attlee agreed in January 1951 that he could remain at Harwell and ‘personally accepted responsibility for any political consequences’.61
Both the Pontecorvo and Davison investigations strengthened the case for positive vetting, which was accepted by the Cabinet Committee on Subversive Activities, chaired by Attlee, on 13 November 1950. An attempt was made, however, to limit the demands on Security Service resources:
If Departments found themselves unable, from their own resources and from routine enquiry of the Security Service, to reach a certain conclusion, they should ask the Security Service to have specific enquiries made through the local police: such enquiries ought, however, to be exceptional and only taken in the last resort.62
With its parliamentary majority reduced to single figures after the February 1950 elections, the Attlee government dared not risk backbench claims that it was conducting a witch-hunt in the civil service. The Cabinet Committee on Subversive Activities therefore decided that the introduction of positive vetting (PV) would not be publicly announced, nor would individuals subject to it be informed that inquiries were being made about them.63 The secrecy of the PV system inevitably limited its effectiveness. As Winnifrith later acknowledged, vetting inquiries could be directed only to ‘third parties who were unlikely to blow the gaff’. Initially, it was expected that only 1,000 government posts would be subject to positive vetting, all of them ones in which ‘the holder [was] privy to the whole of a vital secret of crucial value to an enemy’.64
The main pressure for extending positive vetting and making it publicly known came from the United States, whose concerns about weaknesses in British security were strengthened by the defection of Burgess and Maclean in April 1951.65 In July 1951 the Americans called a Tripartite Conference on Atomic Energy with the British and Canadians in London. The Conference recommended that ‘in future no one should be given access to classified atomic energy information unless he passed an open enquiry into his loyalty, character and background’66 – thus extending the numbers subject to positive vetting in Britain from 1,000 to 11,000.67 According to Winnifrith, the British delegation backed these proposals ‘in the hope t
hat they would lessen American doubts about the efficacy of our security arrangements and remove obstacles to greater co-operation in atomic energy matters’.68 During its final months in power before losing the October 1951 election, the Labour government was reluctant to implement most of the proposals of the Tripartite Conference. It was left to Churchill’s Conservative administration to announce publicly in January 1952 a much expanded positive-vetting programme.69
Under the Churchill government the question arose for the first time of whether ministers with access to atomic secrets should be positively vetted. In retirement Attlee admitted that he had thought some of his cabinet ‘were not fit to be trusted with secrets of this kind’.70 As a result the momentous decision on 8 January 1947 to build the British atomic bomb was taken not by the full cabinet but by a specially convened Atomic Energy Cabinet Committee (GEN 163) consisting only of Attlee and five trusted ministers.71 News of the decision was not made public until an answer by the Minister of Defence, A. V. Alexander, to a parliamentary question in May 1948. Alexander, however, was economical with the truth. Even Churchill was amazed after the 1951 Conservative election victory to discover that Attlee had concealed from the Commons the £100 million cost of the atomic bomb programme. Breaking with the precedent set by his predecessor, Churchill submitted the decision on whether to build a hydrogen bomb to the full cabinet, which approved it on 26 July 1954. His friend and adviser on nuclear policy, Lord Cherwell, then suggested that ministers, like everyone with access to ‘the most vital atomic energy secrets’, should be positively vetted. While Conservative ministers, he believed, were ‘perfectly secure’, a Labour prime minister, ‘whose colleagues might not always be quite so exceptional’, might well be grateful for the requirement that they undergo the PV process. The United States, Cherwell reported, did not wish to share atomic secrets with socialists. That, Churchill replied, was a problem not for him but for the Labour leadership: ‘The Socialists must win the Americans’ confidence like anyone else.’ The best solution was for the British electorate ‘not to elect them’. Churchill rejected the proposal to vet ministers.72 It became the practice, however, immediately after every election for the DG to provide the PUS at the Home Office (later the Prime Minister) with a dossier on prospective cabinet ministers about whom MI5 had security concerns.73
American pressure was partially responsible for strengthening protective security as well as for the introduction of positive vetting. At tripartite discussions on security with the United States and France in 1953, the US delegates criticized the lack of any central UK authority responsible for setting and enforcing standards of protective security. In discussions with the cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, the DDG Roger Hollis acknowledged that there was some force to the American criticism. Though the Security Service had produced a booklet of guidance on protective security, there was no mechanism to ensure that Whitehall departments acted on it. On Brook’s proposal an official committee was established under his chairmanship with a membership consisting of the DG and department heads most concerned with protective security.74 Thereafter much of Whitehall asked the Security Service to inspect security arrangements and recommend improvements. The main thrust of the Service’s advice was that ‘full-time security officers with authority to follow up security instructions are a necessity in any Government Department which has a substantial amount of classified material to protect.’75 The part of government least interested in Security Service advice was the Houses of Parliament, whose security remained woeful until the beginning of the twenty-first century.76
In November 1954 the Security Service informed the Whitehall Personnel Security Committee that they had ‘moved somewhat from their original position’ on positive vetting and ‘now appreciated more fully the advantage to be derived’ from it.77 ‘At the risk of being smug,’ wrote Sir John Winnifrith in a memorandum on vetting to the Security Conference of Privy Counsellors in 1955, ‘I would like to say in the first place that, particularly given the speed with which it has been evolved, the present system is a pretty good one.’78 Eleven thousand working in the atomic field had so far been positively vetted, with 3,000 PVs still to be completed. In other sensitive posts, 7,000 had been PV’d, with another 6,000 to follow.79 There was no anti-Communist witch-hunt in Britain comparable to that led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the United States. Two years after his election defeat, Attlee gave a withering response in an American journal to McCarthy’s criticism of the Purge Procedure he had introduced: ‘The Labour Party has had nearly 40 years of fighting Communism in Britain, and despite war and economic depression, the Communists have utterly failed. We are pardonably annoyed at being instructed by a beginner like Senator McCarthy.’80 Between 1947 and 1956, US purges led to the sacking of 2,700 federal employees and the resignation of another 12,000.81 By American standards, the numbers purged in Britain were small. The declared number of dismissals in the civil service (which probably included resignations and reassignment to non-sensitive work) during the period from 1948 to 1954 was 124. The main impact of vetting, however, was at the point of entry. Almost certainly more were refused entry, or were deterred from applying, than were dismissed.82 The psychological impact was also considerable. Positive vetting was alien to the work culture of Whitehall. When Arthur de la Mare became head of the Foreign Office Security Department in 1955, it was still widely considered to be ‘unBritish’ and regarded by many diplomats with ‘contempt and derision’. He complained that many of the referees nominated by members of the Diplomatic Service who were being vetted ‘protested to us and their MPs at being interrogated by “snarks” on the background and integrity of their friends’.83
Far more remarkable than the distaste felt by the Diplomatic Service was the opposition within the Security Service to applying positive vetting to itself. Among the leading opponents was Roger Hollis, who minuted as DDG in 1954 his opposition even to seeking referees for Service staff:
The secrecy of one’s employment influences one’s private life, and I doubt if any of us who have spent a number of years in the Security Service could produce referees whose testimonial would be really valuable. I am sure I could not and I should not like to ask my friends to act as referees in a matter of this importance because I do not think it would be fair to them . . .84
At a subsequent Directors’ Meeting Hollis was overruled and staff were required to provide the names of two referees.85 The requirement that all Security Service staff undergo positive vetting seems to have followed an embarrassing incident in its relations with the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, probably in 1957. Shortly before four of its officers were about to inspect security at Aldermaston, the Service was asked if all had been PV’d. They had not and rapid vetting had to be arranged. One of the four, who came from the north-east of England and had joined the Service two years earlier, recalls the irritation of Director B (personnel and organization), John Marriott, at his inability to provide London referees and the need to carry out hasty PV interviews in Newcastle.86 Even after the Aldermaston embarrassment, however, positive vetting of existing Security Service staff proceeded painfully slowly – so slowly that Hollis decreed as DG in 1957 that it was unnecessary to investigate staff who had joined before the introduction of PV, ‘if there is evidence that references were taken up’.87 Remarkably, Hollis also ruled that A4 (formerly B4) surveillance personnel and other staff members who did not have access to files need not be subject to the PV process.88
Positive vetting was not fully implemented within the Service until the early 1960s. Following spy scandals at the beginning of the decade,89 an inquiry headed by Lord Radcliffe ‘to review procedures and practices currently followed in the public service’, which reported in 1962, led to an extension of vetting within the civil service. Hollis gave the cabinet secretary an undertaking that the whole Service would be PV’d. The Service officer who was asked to devise a PV system later recalled that John Marriott wanted nothing to do with it, and in
any case ‘hated’ Hollis. Marriott was overridden. The officer who devised the system recruited a team of interviewing officers, mainly retired senior officers from the armed services, and interviewed the officer grades himself.90
The Radcliffe inquiry was deeply impressed by a Security Service briefing paper which reported that in the major civil service unions one-third of the permanent and one-quarter of the elected officials were Communists or sympathizers.91 It concluded that Communist penetration of these unions was ‘most dangerous to security’ and recommended that:
Departments should have the right in respect of establishments or staff employed on secret work to deny access to or refuse to negotiate with trade union officials whom they had reason to believe were communists. This would require a formal challenge, in each case, with a right of appeal to the Three Advisers [on the vetting Tribunal].
Nine trade union officials were identified by the Security Service under the Purge Procedure as Communists who should be excluded from civil service negotiations, though two names were withdrawn before they had been formally submitted to ministers. The three-man Advisory Tribunal, under a new head, Sir Henry Hancock, former chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue, and with a changed membership, no longer had the harmonious working relationship with the Security Service of a decade earlier. The union officials who were purged had no official access to secrets, were not government servants and their livelihood was at risk. The Advisers, perhaps understandably, seemed to find their task distasteful. Challenging some of the Security Service evidence, one Adviser claimed that he had experience of ‘distortion by security people’. At one of the hearings, when a photograph was produced as evidence of a union official’s attendance at a Communist meeting, the Tribunal insisted on the appearance of a member of A4 who would be prepared to swear to the date on which the photograph was taken. It also became clear that the Advisers sometimes had their Security Service briefs before them when interviewing suspects, and put intelligence sources at risk by referring to surveillance photographs or to Communist Party registration cards. The Service none the less regarded the outcome of the Tribunal hearings as a success. Five of the union officials identified as Communists resigned their posts; two others were moved to jobs which involved no contact with sensitive departments.92
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