The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  The probably crestfallen Wigg accepted Director F’s arguments but said that he had ‘already made certain overtures to the Press, which he could not withdraw’. When Wilson arrived after a party which followed the Birthday Parade, he agreed with Director F and ordered that no further action be taken until after the weekend. In Director F’s view, however, Wigg’s influence on coverage of the strike in the following day’s Sunday Times was ‘obvious’. 54

  On 20 June, after the strike had dragged on for six weeks without an end in sight, Wilson denounced the seamen’s leaders in the Commons as a ‘tightly knit group of politically motivated men’ – a phrase, like other parts of his speech, coined by the Security Service.55 F1A, the chief drafter, was present in the Chamber, occupying one of the three seats below the Speaker’s chair reserved for civil servants who may be needed to brief ministers. He remembers it as ‘one of the most fascinating days of my life’. 56 The Communists, Wilson declared, had at their disposal ‘an efficient and disciplined industrial apparatus controlled by headquarters’:

  No major strike occurs anywhere in this country in any sector of industry in which the apparatus does not concern itself . . . For some years the Communist Party have had as one of their objectives the building up of a position of strength, not only in the seamen’s unions, but in others concerned with docks and transport.

  The central figure, Wilson declared, following his Security Service brief, was the CPGB’s industrial organizer, Bert Ramelson. He gave details of Ramelson’s staff, his contacts in the NUS and the address where he met them.57 ‘I couldn’t find anyone in the Cabinet who thought it very clever,’ a sceptical Barbara Castle told her diary. ‘Elwyn [Jones, the Attorney General] and Roy Jenkins [the Home Secretary] both assured me they had not been consulted.’ Next day Wilson informed the cabinet that he and Ray Gunter, the Minister of Labour, believed that, but for ‘outside pressures’, many members of the NUS Executive would have supported a return to work. When Mrs Castle asked ‘if we could be given more details of the conspiracy’, Wilson replied that ‘there were some things that were better not revealed even to the Cabinet.’58 Crossman, like Castle, suspected ‘Wiggery-pokery’. 59 Wilson’s speech was better received outside Westminster. It either coincided with or helped to prompt a change of mood in the NUS. The moderates in the leadership voted down the ‘extremists’ and the strike was called off at the end of June.60

  Labour suspicions of the Security Service were revived by the sensational, though garbled, revelation on 15 February 1967 of the attempt in 1961 by the then Labour leadership to seek the Service’s assistance in tracking down crypto-Communists among Labour MPs. Chapman Pincher wrongly claimed in the Daily Express that the approach by the Party leadership had prompted a major Security Service investigation: ‘The enquiry lasted many months. The standard methods employed in such enquiries involve surveillance, the tapping of phones and the opening of mail.’61 In reality none of these methods had been used against a single Labour MP on the 1961 leadership list of ‘crypto-Communists’. Wilson had already been enraged by Pincher’s campaign against Labour defence cuts which, as Pincher later acknowledged, used ‘as many embarrassing leaks from angry service chiefs as possible’,62 and suspected that the latest story might be the result of a plot between Pincher and the Secretary of the D-Notice Committee, Colonel L. G. ‘Sammy’ Lohan. The Home Office PUS Sir Philip Allen did not take Wilson’s conspiracy theory seriously, telling the DG ‘it was difficult to see how [Lohan] could possibly have come into the picture.’63

  When Pincher published another front-page attack on the Labour government in the Daily Express on 21 February, Wilson came close to losing self-control. The article accused him of using ‘Big Brother methods’ and moving towards 1984-style surveillance by demanding copies of all cables and overseas telegrams for inspection by the security authorities. Wilson was convinced that the publication of this story should have been prevented by a D-Notice and was convinced there had been collusion between Pincher and Lohan. Marcia Williams wrote later: ‘Now began the time when Number Ten was dominated by the D-notice affair . . . We all became obsessed with the matter. The whole lamentable affair . . . hung like a heavy cloud over us for many months. It . . . sapped the energy of the Prime Minister and his morale.’64 Wilson’s conspiracy theory, as on other occasions, turned out to have little foundation. Lohan, instead of colluding with Pincher, had tried to dissuade him from publishing the article, though admitting that it did not breach any D-Notice.65 Under Opposition pressure, Wilson agreed to hand the matter over to a committee of Privy Counsellors chaired by Lord Radcliffe. But when the committee found in favour of Pincher, the Prime Minister refused to accept its findings. Wilson accused Lohan of ‘overclose association with journalists and especially with Mr Chapman Pincher’, then fired him.66 After lengthy research into this bizarre episode, the official historian of the D-Notice Committee later concluded: ‘One is left with a strong image of a Prime Minister at bay, alone in his study except for his faithful bloodhound George Wigg occasionally licking his writing hand.’67

  Chapman Pincher’s source for his story about the search for crypto-Communists on Labour benches had been George Brown, and his informant about cable interception a disaffected former employee of two cable companies.68 Wilson, however, appears to have harboured suspicions that the Security Service was somehow involved. Even the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, who did not share Wilson’s conspiratorial mindset, seems to have suspected on this occasion that the Service had been up to no good. On 24 February the DDG, Anthony Simkins, was summoned to see Jenkins and his PUS. The Home Secretary asked for, and received, an assurance that two recent applications for HOWs did not have a ‘political inspiration’ intended to damage the Prime Minister. Jenkins also said that Jackie Kennedy’s sister, Princess Lee Radziwill, ‘was positive that their telephone was tapped when President and Mrs Kennedy stayed with them in 1961’ during their visit to Britain. Simkins assured the Home Secretary, without perhaps entirely convincing him, that the Radziwills’ phone had never been tapped. Jenkins said that he was anxious to reduce the number of HOWs in operation.69 Obituaries after Jenkins’s death plausibly reported that his numerous love affairs had included one with Lee Radziwill.70

  As well as causing severe damage, never wholly repaired, to Wilson’s once excellent relations with the media, the D-Notice affair also helped to terminate Wigg’s career as Wilson’s security adviser. Probably like a majority of the cabinet, Castle and Crossman concluded that ‘The evil genius had once again been George Wigg – “Harold’s Rasputin”. ’71 It seems likely that Wilson too put some of the blame on Wigg for what he realized in retrospect had been a major error of judgement. In November 1967 Wigg was appointed chairman of the Horserace Betting Levy Board, resigned as both paymaster general and MP and was made a life peer. With Wigg’s departure, Wilson lost his main early-warning system of potential scandals on Labour benches, in particular within the cabinet. The head of the civil service, Sir Laurence Helsby, informed the DG that Wilson wanted to know: ‘How would chit-chat about the activities of Ministers now reach the Prime Minister?’ Furnival Jones, predictably, declined to help, telling Helsby: ‘I hoped that I would not be instructed to seek out or report on information on the morals of Ministers unless there were some security aspect to them.’72 Wilson’s interest in ‘chit-chat’ extended to the staff at Number Ten. In July 1968 the Prime Minister informed FJ via the newly appointed head of the home civil service, Sir William Armstrong, that his private and political secretary, Marcia Williams (later Lady Falkender), was expecting a child by the political correspondent of the Daily Mail, Walter Terry. The DG was asked to make inquiries about Terry and replied that nothing to his detriment was known. Armstrong and FJ then jointly agreed that the Prime Minister should be advised not to keep Mrs Williams as his secretary because of ‘the obvious risk that sensitive information would leak from No. 10 to the Daily Mail. Even if Mrs Williams were the soul of discretion, the general pu
blic, if this became a scandal, would certainly think a risk existed.’ Wilson rejected the advice.73

  To his later regret, Wilson also rejected security advice about Jeremy Thorpe, who in 1967 became leader of the Liberal Party. Thorpe was aware from his early days in the Commons (if not before) that his career might be ended by sexual scandal. He wrote in 1961 to a gay lover he had met in San Francisco: ‘How I adored S[an] F[rancisco]. SF has everything, & certainly is about the one city where a gay person can let down his defences and feel free and unhunted. If I’m ever driven out of public life in Britain for a gay scandal then I shall settle in SF!’74 The risk of ‘gay scandal’ at a time when gay sex, even between consenting adults, was still illegal laid Thorpe open to the risk of blackmail, and it was this threat which led the Security Service to issue a warning to the Foreign Office early in Wilson’s first administration when it was suggested that Thorpe join a group of experts with access to secret material who would advise the Foreign Secretary on policy to the United Nations.75 In April 1965 Thorpe’s friend and fellow Liberal MP Peter Bessell warned the Home Secretary, Sir Frank Soskice, ‘that Thorpe’s mother had received a letter from a young man [presumably claiming to be a gay lover] asking for £30 and making statements about his relations with Jeremy Thorpe’. Soskice informed the DG ‘that this confirmed him in his belief that Thorpe should not be given any position which would give him access to Government secrets, and that we should report to the Home Secretary if it came to our notice that there was any intention to put him in any such position’. 76

  Following Thorpe’s election as Liberal leader in January 1967, Furnival Jones informed Soskice’s successor as home secretary, Roy Jenkins, of earlier complaints of ‘buggery’ made against Thorpe to the police by Norman Scott (then known as Norman Josiffe), a sometime male model, while working as a horse trainer. Though Scott was regarded as unstable and likely to make an unreliable witness, the police attached ‘some credence’ to his allegations.77 FJ told the Home Secretary: ‘We had never investigated Thorpe and would not at all welcome a request to do so now.’ Jenkins replied that ‘Thorpe’s homosexuality was common knowledge in the House.’78

  Thorpe’s predecessor as Liberal leader, Jo Grimond, had had to wait five years before being made a privy counsellor, with access under certain circumstances to classified information on national security. Despite the warnings from the Security Service, Wilson made Thorpe a privy counsellor only two months after he became Party leader. He did so partly because he enjoyed Thorpe’s company. Marcia Williams later recalled that ‘Harold and I used to giggle at his impersonations. He was a colourful addition to any dinner party.’79

  After Wigg’s departure from Number Ten, Wilson made clear his anxiety that there should be no interruption in the flow of intelligence on ‘Communist activities in the industrial field’, of which Wigg had previously been the most frequent conduit. The Prime Minister remained deeply interested in intelligence on industrial subversion. So did James Callaghan, who succeeded Jenkins at the Home Office in November 1967. In retirement Callaghan later sought to distance himself from the surveillance he had authorized as home secretary. According to his distinguished official biographer, Kenneth O. Morgan: ‘No one ever needed to bug him. He also did what he could to prevent the bugging of others. Thus as Home Secretary he forbade MI5 from engaging in the surveillance of certain prominent trade union leaders and dismissed the idea that they were in any way security risks.’80 This claim does not square with the evidence of Service files.

  Speaking to Furnival Jones unofficially (‘as a private citizen’) on 7 March 1969, Callaghan said that he had ‘two ploys in mind’ to diminish Communist influence in the unions:

  (a) To unseat [Hugh] Scanlon [the hard-left leader of the Amalgamated Engineering Union] and replace him by [John] Boyd at the next elections due in Spring 1970. He wanted to have a broadsheet printed and distributed unattributably. This involved getting damaging material together and arranging for its printing and distribution. Could the Security Service help?

  (b) The governing body of the London Cooperative Society was now wholly Communist and some members suspected that [a leading official] was misappropriating some of the £80,000 p.a. that the Society was supposed to provide the Labour Party with for political purposes, either into his own pocket or the Morning Star [the Communist newspaper]. A body of members . . . was manoeuvring to unseat the present governing body and take over control. Could the Security Service help with information about this?

  Somewhat taken aback, FJ replied that he would see ‘whether we had any dirt on Scanlon’ but ‘thought the second question was getting perilously near the field of party politics’, with which the Security Service had a duty not to become involved. Allen, the Home Office PUS, agreed with the DG that Callaghan’s proposed ‘ploy’ to unseat Scanlon was ‘rather alarming’. It was decided that FJ ‘would assemble such intelligence as we had’ which would assist the two ‘ploys’, but would take no further action until he heard from Allen.81

  Both Wilson and Callaghan showed much the same ambivalence towards industrial intelligence, being keenly interested in obtaining ‘damaging material’ from eavesdropping operations on pro-Communist union leaders but at the same time reluctant to take the political risks of signing HOWs. On 19 November 1969 Furnival Jones discussed with Callaghan proposals for telephone checks on a number of trade unionists, chief among them Jack Jones of the TGWU and Ernie Roberts of the AEU.82 Jones had been an open CPGB member from 1932 to 1941 and, the Service believed, did not leave the party until 1949. FJ reported (chiefly on the basis of eavesdropping at King Street) that there was ‘no doubt that Jones, after fifteen years’ disassociation from the Party, has resumed active and regular contact with it’:

  Ramelson, the Party’s chief industrial organiser, claimed in August 1969 that Jones had said that although there would be tactical differences between himself and the Party, they were going in the same direction and wanted the same things . . . It has become clear that [Jones] is prepared to pass to the Party Government and other information which has been passed to him confidentially in his trade union capacity.83

  FJ told Callaghan that the Czech StB defector to the United States, Josef Frolik, who had served in London in 1964–6, had revealed that he had been told to abandon his plan to cultivate Ernie Roberts on the grounds that he was already ‘in touch with friends’ (the KGB). Roberts had subsequently apologized to Frolik for causing him trouble: ‘If Frolik did not form a mistaken impression this information would indicate that Roberts was a recruited agent by that time.’84

  Callaghan did not challenge, or even query, the Service’s assessment of Jones and Roberts but was worried by the potential political fall-out of investigating either.85 On 28 November FJ was informed by Sir Philip Allen that, after long discussion, Wilson and Callaghan had decided not after all to authorize a telecheck on Jack Jones: ‘They felt that the case just fell short of what was required to justify such a delicate operation.’86 Had the case involved a civil servant rather than a trade union leader, it is unlikely that they would have hesitated. Oleg Gordievsky later reported that Jones had been regarded by the KGB as an agent from 1964 to 1968, providing confidential Labour Party documents which he obtained as a member of the NEC and the Party’s international committee as well as information on his colleagues and contacts. Though the KGB believed that Jones’s motives were ideological, his case officer noted that he accepted, without visible enthusiasm, modest contributions towards holiday expenses. Jones broke contact with the KGB after the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks in August 1968.87

  Despite Labour’s criticisms while in opposition of the laxity of Conservative policy on protective security, Wilson’s government showed no great enthusiasm for it after its 1964 election victory. Wigg’s intended role as a protective-security supremo who would ensure that ‘security procedures were efficient and were kept up to date’ came to nothing. The main initiative emerged instead from the Sec
urity Commission, which had been set up in the wake of the Profumo affair.88 The Commission’s first report89 followed the conviction in 1965 of two heavily indebted mercenary spies, Frank Bossard, a project officer in the Guided Weapons (Research and Development) Division of the Ministry of Aviation recruited by the GRU,90 and Peter Allen, a chief clerk at the MoD, who had contacted the United Arab Republic and Iraqi military attachés in London offering to supply top-secret documents for money.91 Though C Branch, then headed by the future DG Michael Hanley, approved of most of the Security Commission’s proposals, it argued strongly against a few recommendations which ‘might be superficially attractive to the layman in that they might hamper or deter a spy, but which in practice the Public Service would find intolerable’. Chief among them was a proposal for periodic searches of civil servants. In January 1966 Harold Wilson announced that it had been decided not to pursue the Security Commission’s proposal.92

  The Commission returned to the charge in 1967 after the conviction of Helen Keenan, a secretary in the Cabinet Office, on charges of passing classified material to an agent of South African intelligence.93 As well as reviving the proposal for periodic searches of staff, the Commission proposed that, in order to prevent the unauthorized removal of documents, officials should not be allowed to carry the keys to their own briefcases when they went to meetings in other government offices. Instead, designated officials in every government department would unlock briefcases at the beginning of every meeting and lock them at the end. C Branch believed that, as well as being remarkably cumbersome, these procedures also carried security risks. ‘God help us’, minuted Furnival Jones, ‘if the Government accepts these proposals.’ The government, however, required little persuasion from C Branch before turning the proposals down.94