The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  In the wake of the Radcliffe Report, the Security Service was anxious to limit the drain on its resources caused by increase in vetting. In October 1962 the DG, Sir Roger Hollis, attended a long meeting with the Chiefs of Staff to repel proposals that the Service should take over responsibility for vetting throughout Whitehall. In theory, each government department was responsible for organizing most of its vetting requirements in-house. In practice much vetting within Whitehall was done by the Ministry of Supply, which had accumulated relevant experience as a result of its involvement in the nuclear field. Hollis spoke for the Service as a whole when he told the Chiefs of Staff that vetting was a thankless task which was likely to become steadily more onerous.93

  The Security Service also had to resist pressure for increased vetting from the British Broadcasting Corporation.94 The main initiative for the introduction of vetting in the 1930s had come from the BBC’s first director general, Sir John (later Lord) Reith, an authoritarian Calvinist, 6 feet 7 inches tall (aptly described by Churchill as ‘the wuthering height’), whose interpretation of the requirements of public service broadcasting led him to seek MI5 assistance in excluding Communists and Fascists from the Corporation.95 Kell agreed that ‘general vetting’ was required. Initially informal, negative vetting was formalized in 193796 and changed little over the next two decades. MI5 reported to the cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, in 1952 that it was responsible for vetting about 5,000 of the BBC’s 12,000 staff: all those who received monthly salaries, all non-British employees and about half the engineering staff.97 The Security Service was then sending the BBC ‘adverse reports’ on about 10 per cent of its applicants.98 Though it was up to the BBC whether to act on these reports,99 during the early Cold War it seems to have done so. The Home Office forwarded to the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, a 1952 MI5 report which concluded: ‘Our considered opinion is that communist influence in the BBC is very slight and does not constitute a serious security danger.’ The Security Service calculated that less than 1.5 per cent of BBC staff were known or suspected Communist Party members or sympathisers.100

  The appointment of Sir Hugh Greene as BBC director general in 1960 was followed by a ‘long dispute’ with MI5. Despite his success in giving the Corporation a less stuffy image and his support for satirical programmes mocking establishment values such as That Was The Week That Was, Greene, according to a Security Service minute, ‘wanted us to vet far more widely than we were prepared to do because they did not wish to employ anyone who might damage their reputation for impartiality’.101 Hollis noted after a meeting with Greene that there was ‘an irreconcilable difference’ between them over the purpose of vetting: ‘We were concerned with defence interests but they were really concerned with the avoidance of embarrassment.’ The Home Office sided with MI5 and supported Hollis’s refusal to extend vetting in the BBC.102 The fact that vetting occurred at all remained a closely guarded secret. Both Greene and his head of administration, John Arkell, steadfastly refused to admit its existence. Arkell told a senior colleague in 1968 that he ‘might like to gain a bit of credit for the BBC next time you talk to MI5’ by telling them that, despite ‘pointed and penetrating questions’ in a recent press interview, ‘I still denied that we had any vetting procedures.’103 Though Sir Charles Curran, who became DG in 1969, lacked Greene’s liberal reputation, he attached less importance to vetting. For the first few years of the Curran era, C3 complained that the BBC frequently ignored vetting advice: ‘it was their deliberate policy to offer jobs to some people with ultra left records whom they considered to be imaginatively creative and desirable.’104 The mood changed after Sir Michael Swann, former principal and vice chancellor of Edinburgh University, became BBC chairman in 1973. Swann told the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, in 1975 that, though the situation in the Corporation ‘was a picnic compared with Edinburgh University’, he was concerned ‘about “hippie” influences in the BBC’:

  . . . He thought that too many young producers approached every programme they did from the starting point of an attitude about the subject which could be summed up as: ‘You are a shit.’ It was an attitude which he and others in the management of the BBC deplored, and they would be using their influence as opportunity offered to try to counter it.105

  C3 noted that the BBC now, once again, usually took its vetting advice.106

  There was a case for some degree of vetting in the Corporation. It is scarcely imaginable, for example, that loyal adherents of the CPGB pro-Moscow line should have been employed in news rooms during the Korean War and the Hungarian Uprising. But the scale of the mass vetting of BBC staff (drastically cut back after it gave rise to public controversy in the mid-1980s)107 now seems seriously disproportionate – though at the time it was accepted by successive governments. The fact that, in contrast to the Whitehall Purge Procedure, BBC management refused even to admit that it practised vetting added to the sense of injustice felt by those who believed, sometimes with good reason, that their careers had been damaged by it.108

  Probably the most pointless vetting for which the Security Service was responsible was of homosexuals in the public service. The initial criteria for positive vetting had identified homosexuals as inherently untrustworthy.109 In 1951, Graham Mitchell, then in charge of the Service’ departmental security section, had produced the fi rst detailed case for the vetting of gays. Though acknowledging that ‘all lay generalisations are or should be suspect’, Mitchell proposed as less suspect than other generalizations the claims that homosexuals were:

  (a) maladjusted to the social environment and may therefore be of an unstable character;

  (b) they stick together and are backward in giving information even though it is their duty to do so; and

  (c) in so far as their activities are felonious they are at least in theory open to blackmail by a hostile intelligence agency.110

  As the 1957 report of the Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution made clear, at least the first two claims were ill founded.

  Controversy over the alleged security risks posed by gays was revived by the case of John Vassall, who confessed in 1962 that, while working as a clerk in the office of the British naval attaché in Moscow, he had been blackmailed by the KGB and recruited as a Soviet agent after being secretly photographed (in his words) ‘having oral, anal or a complicated series of sexual activities with a number of different men’.111 In the aftermath of the Vassall affair, Director C (Bill Magan) was impressed by an alarmist report to the May 1963 Commonwealth Security Conference by Mr Kelly of the RCMP:

  Kelly said that the Canadian Government has an absolute rule against the employment of homosexuals on sensitive work . . . A purge has been going on on an extensive scale. It has not led to embarrassment or administrative difficulty. Investigations point to some 10% of Government servants being homosexuals. The practice is not concentrated in any identifiable types of people; it is spread pretty evenly involving the highest and the lowest, administrative, executive, clerical staffs, service officers, other ranks and so on. A considerable number of high officials and armed forces officers have been purged. (One very senior Foreign Affairs official was thought to have had homosexual associations with one of HMG’s ambassadors.) In Kelly’s own words, ‘Shoals of people have been brought back from behind the Iron Curtain.’112

  To assess the problem in Britain, HOWs were obtained for telephone checks in 1964–5 on four suspected homosexuals in the public service. Three were discovered to be relatively discreet in their relationships. The telecheck on the fourth, however, generated an ‘immense amount of material’ involving over 250 men engaged in ‘long telephone conversations which were often of a revolting nature’. The transcribers found the whole exercise a stressful experience: ‘The regular members of [his] circle were much given to referring to each other by girls’ names (Maud, Kitty, Alice and so on). This transposing of the sexes, and the use of other homosexual slang, at times made for difficulties of interpretation.’113
The Security Service, however, saw no reason to follow the Canadian example: ‘It was concluded that the present criterion was right, i.e. that homosexuality raises a presumption of unfitness to hold a P.V. post but the presumption can be disregarded by the Head of the Department if he is satisfied in all the circumstances that this can be done without prejudice to national security.’ In 1965 the Security Service successfully resisted the Treasury view that it might be necessary to treat homosexuality as an absolute bar against holding any post which required positive vetting.114

  Though its criteria were never fully spelt out, the Service seems to have been relatively unconcerned during positive vetting by the presence of gays in the government service, provided that they did not actually identify themselves as homosexual and remained discreet about their sexual liaisons (which, until 1967, remained illegal). After the passage in 1967 of the Sexual Offences Act, which embodied the ten-year-old Wolfenden recommendation to legalize gay sex between consenting adults, C Branch recommended to Whitehall’s Personnel Security Committee (PSC) that the issue of homosexuality should continue to be considered during the PV process because the risk of blackmail remained. The PSC agreed. In guidance to government departments, however, it was suggested that, since lawbreaking was no longer involved, they might now be able to decide in favour of individuals who would previously have failed positive vetting. Much of Whitehall none the less remained anxious. The Service continued to receive numerous requests from government departments for advice on whether individual homosexuals were security risks. As late as 1969 almost 50 per cent of the ‘character defect’ cases passed to the Service concerned homosexuality.115

  5

  The Communist Party of Great Britain, the Trade Unions and the Labour Party

  Pressure of work had forced the wartime Security Service to give up the attempt to keep a comprehensive database of all CPGB members. The Service told chief constables in 1942 that henceforth it would concentrate on maintaining records on Party officials and keeping track of Communist activity in the armed forces and other sensitive areas. That policy, reaffirmed in another circular to chief constables in December 1945, changed three years later with the onset of the Cold War. Attlee’s announcement to the Commons in March 1948 of the Purge Procedure, designed to exclude Communists and Fascists from work ‘vital to the Security of the State’, made it necessary to identify all Communists as well as the few remaining Fascists. The Service concluded in October 1948, ‘Our ultimate aim must be the keeping of accurate records of all members of the [CPGB].’1 In most respects the CPGB was ‘a political party like other political parties’, with officials who spent most of their time on humdrum administration. But, because of its loyalty to Moscow, there was a danger that, in wartime, it would ‘prove a formidable fifth column’.2

  The Service had extraordinary success in gaining access to Party membership records through both agents and a series of operations collectively codenamed STILL LIFE which gained covert entry into all British and Northern Irish local Party offices. The first major operation, RED KNIGHT in 1949, succeeded in copying Party registration forms for the London district.3 An even more successful operation, PARTY PIECE, followed the discovery that a large collection of Party records were stored in the house of the Communist Berger family4 at 5 Grove Terrace, Highgate Road, in north-west London.5 Roland Berger had first been identified as an undercover Communist and member of a Communist cell in the civil service during the Second World War.6 After working for the United Nations from 1947 to 1952, he established the British Council for the Promotion of International Trade, which at one point was believed to be a conduit for Soviet funding of the CPGB.7 An MI5 officer, who became tenant of a flat in the Berger household, organized the first phase of Operation PARTY PIECE in June 1955, during which about 6,000 documents were copied inside the house. Three months later, 48,000 documents were secretly removed at night in suitcases to be photographed at Leconfield House and returned before their absence was noticed. Security Service files were regularly updated by further covert entries into local Party offices, at first every three years, later at five-year intervals.8 Such was the expertise of the STILL LIFE operations that they passed virtually undetected.

  Sillitoe told Attlee in May 1949 that ‘we now had quite a number of agents in the Communist Party who were well-placed and gave us good coverage.’ ‘The P.M.’, noted Liddell, ‘seemed particularly pleased about this.’9 Like Olga Gray in the 1930s,10 the most successful penetration agent in the early Cold War was probably one of Maxwell Knight’s women agents.11 She applied to join MI5 after the war but said she could not make ends meet on the salary she was offered and accepted a better-paid post elsewhere. Norman Himsworth, an officer in Knight’s section who had himself successfully penetrated the Party early in the war, then recommended her recruitment as an agent.12 Knight invited her to lunch at Canuto’s and told Dick White afterwards, ‘I feel very strongly she is the sort of agent for whom we have been looking for so long.’13 Himsworth, who became her case officer, called her his ‘Number 1’ agent.14

  Within a year of joining the Party, the agent had been asked to work for it and, like Olga Gray, ‘was treated as part of the furniture, which is what she wanted’.15 For a decade she provided regular reports (eventually filling thirty-two volumes) as well as, intermittently, Party records. Though highly motivated, she eventually became depressed by the atmosphere within the CPGB: ‘When she saw it at close quarters she saw the deceit, ruthlessness and double standards of CPGB officials. She admitted that by working for “the elite” of the CPGB she might see these aspects more clearly than a rank and file member.’16 To maintain her cover, she lived in what she found depressing working-class accommodation, rarely went on holiday, lacked opportunities to make new friends, and had to fend off sexual harassment by a Communist colleague.17 Once it was clear that she had become burned out, it was mutually agreed that she should cease work as an agent.18 Probably with Kipling’s Kim in mind, she wrote to the DG, ‘It has always been a deep satisfaction to me to be able to play a small part in the game.’19

  As late as the summer of 1950, the CPGB leadership gave no sign of realizing either the level of Security Service penetration or that the Service had gained extensive access to its membership records. The Party’s industrial organizer, George Allison, told a closed (but bugged) meeting of Communist trade union officials that he believed:

  MI5 coverage of the Party was extremely haphazard so far as the purge was concerned, and that they relied upon liaison with the heads of firms, etc, for their information [about Party membership], which, he thought, was obtained through suggestion boxes, i.e. in some factories and firms fellow workers put notes in these boxes, probably with malicious intent, saying that so-and-so is a Communist, etc.

  Allison’s misconceptions were greeted with delight by the Service leadership.20 At the end of 1950, however, the detailed knowledge of Party members displayed during the Purge Procedure at last led the CPGB leadership to conclude that the Service must have gained access to some of its membership records. Alerted to this discovery by agents and technical intelligence, the Service requested that the Purge Procedure be pursued less energetically. Attlee agreed to instruct permanent under secretaries to try for the time being to avoid purging Communists in some districts and merely move them to less sensitive posts.21

  In 1952 the Security Service reported that a comparison of its existing files on the CPGB with the latest sample of current Party membership records it had purloined indicated that it had identified approximately 90 per cent of the 35,000 CPGB members. The missing 10 per cent were thought to be mostly young or new members ‘who have not yet come to notice and who are so far of minor security significance’.22 The Service’s main difficulty was in coping with the sheer volume of CPGB records it obtained. F4 reported in 1970 that over the past year it had ‘handled approximately 20,000 items of Still Life. Often Still Life from several districts may arrive together with a result that a backlog of valuab
le security information builds up in F4.’23

  The Service’s most reliable way of keeping track of the Party leadership was through hidden microphones and tapping telephones at the CPGB’s London headquarters in King Street, Covent Garden. In 1943 Blunt revealed to his Soviet controller that a microphone had been placed in King Street. Soviet intelligence passed this report to the CPGB, which searched its premises but failed to find any eavesdropping equipment.24 After the war, eavesdropping detected ‘periodic scares about the presence of microphones’. On one occasion all the floorboards were taken up in an attempt to find them – but to no avail.25 From time to time eavesdropping in King Street revealed an awareness that the telephones were tapped. On 22 January 1948, for example, the future general secretary John Gollan was heard complaining to an unidentified Party member: ‘That bloody phone there – the fact that you phoned me, they know. What I said to you, they know. They open our letters. They go to our meetings. We are spending more on the bloody Secret Service now than we ever spent in the years of British history. The spies are everywhere!’ Gollan added that none of this would become public knowledge ‘until we’ve cracked the [intelligence] archives one day. Then you’ll know what was going on!’26 ‘In practice,’ the Security Service noted in 1968, ‘the Party has never taken any prolonged counter-measures other than the development [in 1965] of Room 10 as a safe room.’ The Party was unaware that Room 10 was also bugged, though sound quality from the hidden microphone was poor.27