The Defence of the Realm
Page 74
At a meeting with Maudling on 5 January 1972 FJ argued against an outside appointment with some passion and ‘at very considerable length’. ‘Members of the Service’, he insisted, ‘were not civil servants . . . They were a professional body who ought to be professionally led – just like the Army or the Police.’ In addition to the effect on Service morale:
To appoint an amateur at this stage would have a bad effect on our allies . . . At the moment, MI5 was regarded in the USA, Western Europe and the old British Commonwealth as being the best Security Service in the Free World, and arguably better than the KGB. This was because it was professionally staffed and had been professionally led for the last 18 years. It was the Service which was the most favoured by the CIA (the Israeli secret service being next). All this would be badly affected if an appointment were now made from outside, and the head of CIA would regard such an appointment as showing that the powers that be in this country thought there was something wrong with MI5.
FJ countered Home Office claims that the Service ‘would benefit from a breath of fresh air’ by linking them to similar statements by the discredited Sillitoe:
Sir Percy Sillitoe had said in his memoirs that the Security Service were ‘a bunch of introverts’, and other people had said that they would benefit from a breath of fresh air. Furnival Jones refuted both statements which he thought were nonsense. Their recruits tended to be fairly mature, with experience of the outside world; a good many of them were extroverts.5
The DG’s arguments failed to make any impression on the Home Secretary, who wrote to the Prime Minister recommending the Home Office candidate as the next DG. Heath, however, after speaking to FJ, ‘saw some force in the argument that the Service be professionally led’. 6 At interview, Heath found Waddell ‘if anything too balanced and careful’ to make a good DG and preferred the internal candidate, Michael Hanley, currently DDG: ‘It had been suggested that he might be a little heavyfooted; but I must say that was not the judgement I formed in our admittedly short talk.’7 Hanley was a large, powerfully built man who had acquired the nickname ‘Jumbo’ early in his career, and was ‘amazed’ to discover how small Heath was: ‘He sized me up. Asked me a few personal questions. I hit it off with him, always did.’8 On discovering that he had been overruled by the Prime Minister and that Hanley was to be the next DG, Maudling simply ‘shrugged his shoulders’. 9
Hanley was a less remote DG than his two immediate predecessors (or his two immediate successors). When Stella Rimington returned to work in 1971 from maternity leave, she ‘was surprised to be called into [Hanley’s] office to be welcomed back to work and to the counterespionage branch. His kindly interest was unusual in those days when personal contact between directors and junior staff was rare.’10 As DG, Hanley said later, ‘I made a point of circulating but I did not do enough.’11 Director B had noted in 1971: ‘We are committed to a significant expansion in the size of the Service, primarily in K Branch and our operational resources.’ Because of numerous retirements of wartime and post-war recruits and the drying up of some traditional sources of staff, particularly from the colonial administration of the now nearly defunct British Empire, Director B argued that the Service ‘could be required to make a major change in recruitment by seeking officer candidates among graduates leaving university’. 12 Some continued to oppose direct entry from university, among them B2, who argued that ‘Officers require qualities of maturity, common sense and knowledge of the world, which are rarely to be found in young men.’13 From 1975 to 1979, however, an average of fifteen staff officers a year were recruited direct from university.14
In 1976 testing was introduced to assess applicants’ potential. The tests were a curious mixture of current business practice and occasional throwbacks to a bygone era. Candidates were subjected to the American ‘Wonderlic’ test: fifty questions to be answered in only twelve minutes, which purported to measure verbal ability, numeracy and analytical skill. Though Kell would probably have been appalled by Wonderlic, he would have had more sympathy with a drafting exercise in which candidates were asked to imagine that they were the personal assistant to a wealthy landowner and had been instructed to write a letter designed to return to his possession ‘a beautifully inlaid desk which had been given to one of his ancestors by George IV’. 15 After preliminary sifting and testing, officer selection was by interview and final selection board.16
Training section moved from B Branch to the newly formed S Branch in 1976. The first step towards structured training was taken with the introduction of a four-week induction course under the direction until 1980 of an extrovert K Branch investigator, who was seldom without a black cigarette holder which she used for dramatic gestures as well as for smoking brown More cigarettes. ‘Her performance in training section’, it was noted, ‘won huge praise from the start.’17 One of her former pupils describes the use of the word ‘performance’ as unusually apt.18 Those taking her course arrived at Grosvenor Street, next door to the Estée Lauder salon, where they were given lectures on the ‘Threat of Espionage’ and ‘Counter-Espionage’, illustrated with slides of Philby, Burgess and Maclean, and were shown a film entitled Sweetie Pie, depicting a lonely secretary being cultivated by a scheming Soviet agent. They also went on a surveillance exercise, and were introduced to letter checks by being taken to see the Post Office Investigation Department steaming open envelopes with giant kettles. Agent-running courses for new entrants started in 1975 and rudimentary management training began in 1977.19
Those members of the Security Service who were least happy with its management, recruitment and training at the start of the Hanley era were the female graduates, who felt – one of them recalls – that they were expected ‘to develop into good NCOs’ rather than senior managers.20 Their views were shared by many professional women throughout British society, who complained of the ‘glass ceiling’ which kept them out of top jobs and the ‘golden pathway’ to promotion signposted by and for men. Expectations in Whitehall were raised by the introduction in January 1971 of a new civil service training grade for both male and female honours graduates direct from university.21 The Service failed to follow suit. Growing resentment among its female graduates led to a meeting in November 1972 to discuss a petition (known to some as the ‘Women’s Charter’) complaining against the career discrimination to which they were subject.22 One of the women present believes the meeting was bugged and is convinced she heard the ‘blow back’ from the microphone.23 Some signed the petition; others recorded their general agreement with its contents.24 One of the signatories later acknowledged: ‘Our meeting caused some justified ill-feeling amongst the non-graduate women; they should have been included, as the lack of career prospects affected them as much as us. However, we, being young and thoughtless, had not considered this.’25
One of the women not invited was widely reported to have said of the rebellious graduates, ‘My dear, they’re ten a penny! If they don’t like it, they can leave.’26 The petition became known to male management as ‘The Women’s Revolt’. Some male responses to the ‘Revolt’ were sympathetic; others recalled by one of the signatories included the following: ‘Are you preaching about your rights?’; ‘You’re just like my daughters, always saying: “It’s not fair!” Life isn’t fair and you’ve just got to accept it’; ‘You mustn’t, ah, lose your sense of humour about this . . .’; and ‘Think of Milicent Bagot!’ The implication of the last remark was ‘that at the merest whiff of power, all women would undergo a Hydran transformation into Milicent Bagot clones, which would then terrorise the Office’. 27
The biggest obstacle to female promotion was the general conviction throughout the British intelligence community that women were unsuitable for agent-running (despite the fact that the leading atom spy Klaus Fuchs, before leaving Britain for Los Alamos, had been successfully run by a female GRU controller). The minutes of a meeting in February 1973, attended by the DG, DDG and senior staff (all male), to discuss the qualities required of agent-run
ners record: ‘It was the unanimous view of the meeting (supported by MI6 experience) that agent-running was predominantly a male preserve,’ though the married male agent-runner (‘ideally not a teetotaller’) would be helped by having ‘a “conscious” and understanding wife’. 28 The only woman selected for the first agent-running training course in 1973 was Stella Rimington, later the first female DG.29 Rimington believed that, in the aftermath of ‘The Women’s Revolt’, senior management ‘were genuinely surprised at the strength of feeling and sufficiently concerned that so many of their good female staff, essential to the running of the Service, appeared to be disgruntled, that the policy was changed’. A number of female assistant officers, Rimington among them, were promoted to full officer rank and women began, like men, to be recruited at officer level,30 a policy change accelerated by the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act. In 1978 women were allowed to become agentrunners. Rimington was one of the first. Her first agent, however, was a Soviet Bloc seaman who initially refused to see a female case officer. Just when Rimington was beginning to imagine a return to a desk-bound existence, he changed his mind.31
Even for most female graduates, office life in the 1970s did not revolve around gender warfare. One of the prime movers of the ‘Women’s Charter’, despite her justified grievances about promotion prospects, found the Security Service, ‘principally because of the people, a good place to work, and I got on well with c.99% of those with whom I dealt’. 32 A sense of humour remained a valued characteristic of Service work culture.33 In the corridors of power, however, the image of the Service was quite different. In their limited contacts with the rest of Whitehall, desk officers usually had to deal with unwelcome matters involving security risks and security lapses. They thus tended to impress some of their official contacts, such as the diplomat George Walden, not as a Service which prized its sense of humour but as ‘a rather repressed group of people, suffering from low morale on account of how nobody understood them, still less the trouble they’d seen’. 34
In the mid-1970s the Service, already dispersed in a number of buildings around central London, suddenly found itself with an accommodation crisis. In 1974 Great Universal Stores, landlords of 15/17 Great Marlborough Street, unexpectedly gave notice that the Service’s lease, due to expire in 1977, would not be renewed. Late in 1975 the Service began moving into drab new headquarters at Babcock House at the northern end of Gower Street. Simultaneously, it began planning a large new computer installation at Curzon Street House, a bunker-like building at the opposite end of the street from Leconfield House, formerly occupied by the Department of Education and Science, to which the Registry and A and F Branches, together with the vetting section of C Branch, moved in March 1977.35 In addition to the installation of a new main-frame computer, the paper-filing system, which had changed little since the war, was updated by the introduction of an ingenious miniature single-track railway used for moving files around the building.36 Unable to find a headquarters large enough to house all its staff, by the mid-1980s the Service occupied nine separate buildings scattered around central London. A fleet of vans was required to run a continuous shuttle service ferrying often highly classified files from building to building, sometimes resulting in urgently needed papers being stuck in Mayfair traffic jams.37
When Hanley was asked after his retirement what he thought he had achieved during his six years as DG, he replied: ‘I was on the Whitehall map – certainly a change!’ His easiest Whitehall relationships were with successive Home Secretaries, which he called ‘my bread and butter’. During the Heath government he began the practice of seeing the Home Secretary monthly. Though the regular monthly meetings lapsed when Labour returned to power in 1974, Hanley and the new Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, got on well,38 and Jenkins sometimes invited him to lunch at his London club, Brooks’s.39 When Jenkins was succeeded by Merlyn Rees in 1976, he told Hanley in a handwritten letter: ‘I enjoyed working with you.’40 Rees resumed the practice of monthly meetings with the DG.41
Hanley made much less effort to cultivate the rest of Whitehall. As deputy head of the Permanent Under Secretary’s Department at the FCO (the Foreign Office had merged with the Commonwealth Office in 1968) and responsible for liaison with the Security Service, David Goodall found the DG ‘a bit of a bruiser’. 42 Though he always attended Joint Intelligence Committee meetings, Hanley later admitted that they ‘bored me stiff’. 43 It is likely that he communicated his boredom to colleagues on the JIC. ‘He was’, recalled one of his directors, a ‘good bull in a china shop sort of fellow and he did not mince his words.’44 While Hanley ‘hit it off’ with Heath, by his own admission he did not hit it off with the Wilson and Callaghan governments: ‘I didn’t think much of them, not that I’m anti-Labour – on the contrary – but I thought they were just amateurish.’ Though Hanley later admitted that he made too little effort to establish good relations with Number Ten, winning over Harold Wilson was probably beyond his power. During Wilson’s second term from 1974 to 1976, he became preoccupied with what the cabinet secretary, Sir John Hunt, called ‘paranoiac suspicions’ of a Security Service plot against him.45 Hanley had what he acknowledged was ‘a terrible row’ with Wilson. James Callaghan (whom Hanley privately described as a ‘bull frog’) and the DG also disliked each other.46
‘I was quite unhappy’, Callaghan said later, ‘with the way in which [Hanley] was conducting [MI5’s] affairs and when he was due to retire I determined to bring someone into the office from a different culture.’ Instead of promoting the DDG, John Jones, he decided that the next DG should be the ambassador in Moscow, Sir Howard Smith,47 who was intended to bring into the Security Service the ‘breath of fresh air’ for which Waddell’s Whitehall backers had hoped in 1972. Senior officials in the Home Office, Cabinet Office and FCO collaborated in an unprecedented secret operation, codenamed LORELEI, to ensure that the Security Service had no inkling of Smith’s impending appointment until it was a fait accompli. Smith informed the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, in Moscow on the morning of 19 December 1977 that he was to become DG of the Security Service just as the news was being broken to Hanley in London. Though the Service’s main target was Soviet intelligence, Gromyko took the news more calmly than Hanley, giving Smith his good wishes.48 Meanwhile in London Sir Robert Armstrong (now PUS at the Home Office) reported to the cabinet secretary, Sir John Hunt: ‘The decision obviously came upon Hanley as a thunderstroke – which speaks well for our security precautions – and was received with a very bad grace.’49 Probably no DG has ever been so furious at a meeting with the Home Secretary. An eyewitness in Merlyn Rees’s outer office remembers Hanley bursting into the Home Secretary’s room declaring, ‘It’s a fucking disgrace!’50 The DG insisted that his appointed successor was not merely unpopular in the Security Service but ‘had an abominable reputation’:
Sir Howard Smith was by reputation a weak man, an appeaser. When he had been head of the former Northern Department in the FCO, he had done nothing to respond to the Service’s warnings about the expansion of Soviet and satellite espionage. Similarly, during his time in Northern Ireland, Sir Howard Smith had been too ingratiating towards the minority community and acquired a reputation for spending more time with the Cardinal than with anyone else.51
In an obvious snub to his successor, Hanley appointed several new directors before his departure. Armstrong tried to persuade him simply to recommend the appointments to Smith and leave the new DG to make the final decision. Hanley refused and went ahead with the installation of the new directors.52 He also took the unprecedented step of asking to see the Leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher: ‘I met Maggie and poured out my woes. I think she took note of one or two things. I was just about to retire so I was very frank.’53
Among the areas where Whitehall was most convinced that the Service would benefit from a ‘breath of fresh air’ was in its recruitment procedures. The Service had traditionally resisted proposals that it take part in the Civil Service Selection Bo
ard (CSSB) because, as B1/0 put it in 1978, ‘We are looking for candidates with qualities different in some respects to those of a Civil Servant. . .’54 The Service preferred, as it had always done, to rely as far as possible on personal recommendation. That same year 30 per cent of officer candidates interviewed had been recommended by members of staff55 (down from 36 per cent in 1970).56 On Sir Howard Smith’s appointment as DG in 1978, Callaghan made clear that he expected him to ‘institute closer control, better management and more acceptable and accountable methods of recruitment’. 57 The blueprint for change was provided in the summer of 1978 by a report by Lord Croham, who had been asked to lead an inquiry into Service management and recruitment, to which, unprecedentedly, both the Prime Minister and Home Secretary gave evidence. Croham’s report seems to have been more favourable than Callaghan had expected; his criticisms were confined to the tendency for Security Service recruits ‘to be drawn from a somewhat narrow group’. 58 Though Smith believed that Croham had failed to appreciate ‘how wide a range of recruiting contacts the Security Service has nowadays in universities and polytechnics’, he agreed in September 1978 to make CSSB ‘a central feature of the recruitment procedure’ for officers. The Croham reforms introduced a four-stage selection system: paper sift of applications; formal board chaired by a former director; CSSB with a Security Service observer; and final selection board chaired by the DG.59
Though CSSB provided external, independent assessment of applicants, its Director, Clarence Tuck, acknowledged that ‘The staff of the Security Service are not Civil Servants and ultimately responsibility for selection and appointment remains with the Security Service.’60 Croham accepted that, in addition to new graduates, ‘the Service needed recruits who had seen something of life – the mature man.’ Among the most mature entrants was a former colonial Special Branch officer, long acquainted with MI5 and SIS, who joined at the age of fifty in 1981: