The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  that it had been agreed that the Home Secretary would continue to be the Minister responsible for the Security Service and that [its] charter would be re-affirmed. Nevertheless the Prime Minister did intend to give Wigg a charge to assist him from time to time on questions of security. Apparently what he had in mind was that Wigg should safeguard the Prime Minister against scandals taking him unaware and he did not want to be caught in the position of Macmillan at the time of the Profumo case.8

  Wilson sought to justify Wigg’s role to the probably sceptical head of the civil service, Sir Laurence Helsby, by claiming that he was to have an important role in strengthening protective security.9 The Security Service file on liaison with the Paymaster General is, however, very thin and contains little of substance – doubtless because, in reality, Wigg made no significant contribution to protective security.10 Roy Jenkins, who was to succeed Soskice as home secretary, later recalled Wigg’s role with derision.

  [Wilson] employed the half-comic, half-sinister George Wigg nominally as Paymaster-General, but in fact as a licensed rifler in Whitehall dustbins and interferer in security matters. Wigg as an unofficial emissary of the Prime Minister used to pay me occasional Home Office visits during which he delivered cryptic messages. As they increasingly came to refer back to previous ones which had passed over my head the crypticism became compounded. Out of a rash mixture of boredom and supineness (for I did not wish to embroil with Wilson over him) I decided to roll with his punch, particularly as nothing ever seemed to follow from what he said. ‘You know that matter I talked to you about last time,’ a typical conversation would begin. ‘It hasn’t moved much, but I’ll keep watching it.’ If one nodded sagely he went off quickly away, apparently satisfied, and no harm (or good either) ever seemed to result. But his activities hardly conduced to a coherent control of security policy.11

  Despite Wigg’s insignificant contribution to national security, for some time he saw Wilson more often than any other minister – more frequently even than the Chief Whip.12 The frequency of their meetings was due chiefly to what Barbara Castle, who held a series of portfolios in the Wilson cabinet, called Wilson’s ‘obsession with “plots” against him’. 13 Wigg kept the Prime Minister up to date with plotting within, and sometimes outside, the Labour Party, as well as with sexual and other irregularities on Labour benches which might erupt into public scandals.14

  Some of the material which Wigg supplied to the Prime Minister was bizarre. Early in Wilson’s first administration, Wigg sent him a large envelope marked ‘Not to be opened by female staff’. Understandably disregarding this curious instruction, the duty clerk, Anne Kiggell, now an Anglican priest, recalls opening the bottom of the envelope and removing from it the photograph of a public figure, whom she was able to identify, in the act of removing the corset of a female companion. She then replaced the photograph in the envelope, resealed it and sent it on to the Prime Minister.15 The purpose of the photograph was presumably to alert Wilson to the possibility of a public scandal involving the man who appeared in it. It is difficult to imagine a more bizarre relationship between a prime minister and his security adviser than that between Wilson and Wigg. A decade later Wilson was to go to the extraordinary lengths of personally hiring private detectives to follow Wigg to the home of his (Wigg’s) mistress and illegitimate child.16 Soon afterwards Wigg was stopped a number of times for kerb-crawling, on one occasion – according to police evidence – accosting six women in the Park Lane area of London in the space of only twenty minutes.17

  Despite Wigg’s unpopularity on Labour benches in the Commons, he caused few problems to the Security Service. At his first meeting with Hollis in October 1964, Sir Frank Soskice assured the DG that he ‘did not propose ever to ask to see Security Service files or their contents, nor to ask for the source of our information’. Wigg gave the same assurance, though adding the self-important claim that he ‘did get a good deal of information about security’ from his own sources. ‘All he intended to do with it’, however, ‘was to hand it to [Hollis] and he would not expect to be told what action was to be taken on it.’18 At the end of his three years as paymaster general, Wigg wrote to thank the DG (by then Furnival Jones) for the ‘wonderful support’ he had received from the Service: ‘You have enlisted me as a supporter and whenever the wellbeing of the Security Service is an issue I shall be on your side.’19

  Wigg’s confidence in the Security Service merely served to strengthen the suspicions of some of his fellow ministers. Even the law officers of the Wilson government believed that the Security Service kept files on them as a matter of routine. Lord Gardiner, the Lord Chancellor, had been told by an unidentified and misinformed informant some years earlier that, on joining the cabinet, ministers were allowed to see their own files. On taking office, he therefore asked for his Security Service file, ‘thinking that this would give me a good opportunity to judge the efficacy of MI5. After all, I would be able to judge what they said about me in comparison with what I knew about myself.’ When his department failed to obtain the non-existent file, Gardiner went to see the Home Secretary.20 Despite his legal expertise and personal charm, Soskice was, in the view of his successor Roy Jenkins, ‘a remarkably bad Home Secretary’ – ‘extremely indecisive’ with ‘practically no political sense’. 21 Both these failings were in evidence when the Lord Chancellor asked to see his file. Soskice wrongly assumed that such a file existed but was unwilling to reveal to Gardiner that he had given Hollis an assurance that he would never ask to see the contents of any Security Service file. Soskice’s response to the Lord Chancellor’s request was thus confused. According to Gardiner: ‘Frank Soskice was embarrassed and said that he couldn’t agree and that he wasn’t allowed to see the files either. When they wanted to show him anything, they photographed a page and gave it to him but he never saw the complete file. He was so upset about it that I just let it drop.’22

  Soskice’s embarrassment reinforced the Lord Chancellor’s suspicions about the Security Service. Gardiner later revealed that he ‘thought it more likely than not that MI5 was bugging the telephones in my office’. When he had really confidential business to discuss with the Attorney General, Sir Elwyn Jones, he would ask his chauffeur to drive them around during their discussion, confident that ‘she would never have allowed the car to be bugged without my knowledge.’23 The law officers’ naivety was as breathtaking as their ignorance. Had the Security Service really decided to break the law and bug the Lord Chancellor’s car, it is scarcely likely that the chauffeur would have seen them do it. Most extraordinary of all is the fact that, though the law officers thought it ‘more likely than not’ that the Security Service was acting illegally in breach of its charter, they believed themselves powerless to prevent the Service breaking the law. From such bizarre delusions by Labour ministers, Tony Benn drew the alarming conclusion ‘that there is no political control whatsoever over the security services. They regard a Minister – even the Home Secretary – as a transitory person, and they would feel under no obligation to reveal information to him.’24

  The most senior minister on whom the Security Service did have a file (though not one based on active investigation) was the Prime Minister himself.25 Hollis must have been relieved when, at their first meeting on 9 November, Wilson failed to follow the Lord Chancellor’s example and inquire about his file. The DG tried to allay Wilson’s suspicions by insisting that the Service strictly observed the restrictions of its directive and avoided ‘Party political matters’. 26 Wilson is unlikely to have been entirely convinced. Though he probably did not know the full story, he may well have discovered from Wigg that in August 1961 the then Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, and his closest associates had sought Security Service assistance in tracking down ‘crypto-Communists’ on Labour benches.27 Wilson questioned Hollis about ‘an official at Labour Party Headquarters who claimed to be in contact with the Security Service and to be compiling a black list. Did I know anything about this? I said I did not and that
I would be very surprised if it were true.’28 The official whom Wilson had in mind was probably John Franklin Clarke, administrative officer at Labour HQ in Transport House, whom – doubtless with Gaitskell’s approval – Gordon Walker had suggested in 1961 as a reliable workinglevel contact for the Security Service. The Service, however, did not take up the suggestion.29

  Soon after Wilson took office, Sir Burke Trend ‘told him in general terms about the use of microphones and similar techniques to obtain intelligence in the U.K.’.30 Wilson was ‘anxious that Ministers should not be told about the techniques although some, including the Home Secretary, the Foreign Secretary and the Commonwealth Secretary, should occasionally see the product’. 31 Wilson’s developing fascination with bugging, which a decade later was to become an obsession,32 was reflected in his belief that, when he was on holiday in the Isles of Scilly, a Russian SIGINT-gathering trawler was monitoring his phone calls – as indeed may have happened. Wilson amused himself by devising cryptic messages, such as ‘The fox has a black cloak,’ designed to confuse Soviet intelligence. When the zip on his shorts jammed after swimming, he declared for the benefit of any KGB eavesdropper: ‘You can tell the Russians there are no flies on the British Prime Minister.’33

  Early in 1965 Wilson raised the question of telephone checks on MPs. On 3 March Hollis told Soskice that ‘during the last few years 4 M.Ps had been on check, 3 from the Labour Party and 1 Conservative.’

  We then proceeded to No. 10 and saw the Prime Minister, who said he was very strongly opposed to tapping the telephones of M.Ps. The Home Secretary said that he was satisfied that the Security Service had asked for such facilities in the case of M.Ps only in the most exceptional circumstances and that, in each case, the Home Secretary had been consulted and had authorised interception for a strictly limited period only. He mentioned the fact that 4 M.Ps had been on check and the proportion as between the political parties, and the Prime Minister accepted his advice that it would be wrong to ask for names . . . In reply to a direct question [from the Prime Minister], I gave him an assurance that telephones to the Houses of Parliament were never tapped.34

  Soskice had just signed an HOW on the left-wing Labour MP Bob Edwards, who was later revealed by Oleg Gordievsky to be a long-term KGB agent. Wilson, however, countermanded the warrant, thus probably delaying Edwards’s discovery by over a decade. Late in 1965 Edwards became chairman of the Defence, Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Sub-Committee of the Parliamentary Estimates Committee and in 1966 vice chairman of the Western European Union (WEU) Defence Committee. The Security Service later concluded that ‘Both would have been of interest to the KGB and there is no doubt Edwards would have passed on all he could get hold of. We know Edwards’ motivation was ideological, though he occasionally accepted money . . .’35

  Despite his reluctance to allow the investigation of MPs and trade unionists suspected of links with the KGB and his slighting references to what he called MI5’s ‘gentlemen in raincoats and black boots’, Wilson came to depend on Security Service intelligence on industrial subversion. In May 1966, two months after an election victory had raised its majority in the Commons from three to ninety-seven, the Labour government was ‘blown off course’ by a strike called by the National Union of Seamen (NUS) which threatened to cripple overseas trade and wreck the government’s prices and incomes policy. Wilson’s last-minute attempt to avert the strike by summoning the seamen’s leaders to Number Ten on 13 May ended with acrimonious accusations that he was supporting capitalist shipowners against the workers.36

  F1A (counter-subversion) later recalled that the Security Service initially regarded the seamen’s strike as ‘a straightforward industrial dispute – nothing to do with us’. Then two NUS militants were overheard by A2A transcribers visiting the CPGB’s King Street headquarters to ask the Party’s chief industrial organizer, Bert Ramelson, for advice on how to run the strike: ‘From the day-to-day coverage of King Street it was clear they were getting quite a lot of advice.’37 The advice they were given was decided by Ramelson in consultation with the Party leader, Johnny Gollan, and the Political Committee.38 A4 began surveillance of several NUS leaders to obtain evidence of their contacts with Communist ‘trouble makers’. 39 Following two reports by F1A to the Cabinet Office on CPGB involvement in the seamen’s strike, he and the DG, Furnival Jones, were summoned to see Sir Burke Trend, who then decided to inform the Prime Minister of the intelligence the Service was obtaining. F1A, Furnival Jones and Director F briefed Wilson and Wigg in the Cabinet Room.40

  From 24 May onwards, the Security Service provided both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary with regular reports on the seamen’s strike,41 which convinced Wilson that the NUS was controlled by an inner core of Communist militants who were manipulating the strike for their own subversive purposes. No previous Prime Minister had shown such enthusiasm for regular up-to-the-minute Service reports during an industrial dispute. He was sometimes briefed daily, or even twice daily, by varying combinations of Furnival Jones, Director F and F1A.42 The briefings were conducted in the greatest secrecy with the door between Wilson’s office and that of his political secretary, Marcia Williams, kept locked.43 Director F already had a reputation as a popular briefer with a more extrovert manner when dealing with Whitehall audiences than most of his Service colleagues; Wilson’s private secretary Michael Halls, who had heard him speak on previous occasions, called him ‘Comic Cuts’. 44 Director F was worried by the ‘danger that the Government would look at these problems through Communist eyes as we were forced to do’ and take too little account of the non-Communist influences on the strike which MI5’s charter did not allow it to cover.45

  On 26 May, following Wilson’s decision to declare a state of emergency, eavesdropping in King Street revealed that the CPGB Political Committee had set up a secret committee, headed by Ramelson, to co-ordinate Party activities in support of the strike.46 The first meeting of this committee monitored by the Service decided to campaign for the recall of the NUS Executive Council with the aim of persuading it to transfer control of the strike, so far as movements of ships within port were concerned, from the National Disputes Committee, on which the Party was not represented, to the strike committee which had Communist members. It was announced a few days later that the Executive was to be recalled.47 On 3 June the bugging of King Street revealed the decision of the CPGB Political Committee that, for the strike to succeed, it had to be expanded. Ramelson was also overheard reporting that he was to meet the Communist chairman of the NUS Negotiation Committee, Gordon Norris, at 4.30 p.m. that day, and would press on him the need for the militants on the NUS Executive Council, whatever the outcome of a court of inquiry into the strike, to oppose any return to work without ‘a satisfactory agreement’ – one, in other words, which defied the government’s prices and incomes policy. Norris was also to be told that the Executive Council must be persuaded as a matter of urgency to ‘black’ all oil tankers arriving in the UK and ask the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) to black all British ships arriving in foreign ports. Whether or not as a result of Norris’s persuasion, the Executive Council did indeed declare the court of inquiry’s proposals insufficient to justify a return to work, and agreed to black the use of foreign oil tankers to replace strike-bound British tankers, as well as to appeal to the ITF to black all British ships in foreign ports.48

  On 10 June, at a meeting attended by Wigg, Trend, the DG and F1A (but not by Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary), ‘The Prime Minister opened the discussion by expressing his satisfaction with the series of intelligence reports submitted . . .’49 When passing on Wilson’s warm thanks to the Service, FJ singled out for praise the secretaries, transcribers and officers of A Branch: ‘I know that many have worked early and late during the past three weeks.’50 By 10 June eavesdropping revealed that King Street realized that its efforts to extend the strike on behalf of the NUS through the other unions, notably the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), had fa
iled, and that it must concentrate its efforts on bringing about a stoppage in all British docks with or without official union support.51

  Despite the fact that the Security Service played a more active part in briefing the government than during any previous industrial dispute, Roy Jenkins as home secretary was scarcely involved.52 George Wigg played a much more active role. When Director F took the latest situation report to Sir Burke Trend in the Cabinet Office on the morning of Saturday 11 June, the day of the Queen’s Birthday Parade, Trend asked him to wait until after the parade (of which he had an excellent view) to speak to the Prime Minister and Paymaster General. Wigg was the first to arrive and briefed Director F on his use of the media in an attempt to discredit the strike. Impressed by John Freeman’s celebrated television interview with the ETU president Frank Foulkes during the ballot-rigging scandal six years earlier,53 Wigg reported that, as well as arranging for ITV coverage of a strike meeting in the docks that morning, he had made ‘tentative’ arrangements for Gordon Norris, and possibly Ramelson as well, to be interviewed on television that evening. Wigg had ensured that he would supply all the questions for the interview. Director F was appalled:

  I said I thought this was not a very happy project and compared it with the ETU case. There were two main difficulties. In the ETU case they had a first-rate interviewer in the form of John Freeman and although Foulkes had, in fact, stood up well in the beginning he finally cracked because he was trying to hide corruption in his union. In the present case, Norris and, for that matter, [the dockers’ leader, Jack] Dash, who are quite open Communists, had nothing to hide because they behaved with reasonable correctitude throughout the strike. Norris, moreover, was something of a personality and, if he was put on TV, the result might be in his favour instead of the other way round.