The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  He by no means slavishly follows Ramelson’s advice, but is prepared, when it suits him, to work closely with the Party . . . Daly can perhaps best be described as an aggressive extreme left wing militant of no fixed ideological abode, articulate and shrewd, but not an intellectual. He is a very heavy drinker but appears able to remain sober when he is involved in critical negotiations.26

  Ramelson believed that, unlike McGahey, Daly did not finance his heavy drinking from NUM funds: ‘When Daly bought him a drink, it had been out of his own pocket.’27 Following Daly’s election to the TUC General Council in September 1971, he regularly supplied Ramelson with copies of its minutes.28

  Though anxious to avoid strike action, the NUM president, Joe Gormley, was outvoted by his own executive.29 The Security Service noted that Ramelson was ‘particularly secretive’ about his meetings with Daly and other NUM contacts, and ‘rarely committed anything to paper’. 30 At the beginning of the miners’ strike in January 1972, the NUM was much better prepared than the Heath government. The devastating use of a novel industrial weapon, the ‘flying pickets’, marauding from Yorkshire under the flamboyant leadership of the thirty-four-year-old Arthur Scargill, the youngest member of the NUM executive committee, succeeded in closing a major supply depot as far away as Saltley in the West Midlands.31 As Scargill later admitted: ‘We took the view that we were in a class war. We were not playing cricket on the village green like they did in ’26. We were out to defeat Heath and Heath’s policies . . . We wished to paralyse the nation’s economy.’

  With coke unable to reach the power stations, it looked as if the flying pickets might succeed.32 The Heath government declared a State of Emergency and took powers to put industry on a three-day week to conserve energy.33 Brendan Sewill, special adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Anthony Barber, later recalled:

  At this time, many of those in positions of influence looked into the abyss and saw only a few days away the possibility of the country being plunged into a state of chaos not so very far removed from that which might prevail after a minor nuclear attack. If that sounds melodramatic I need only say that – with the prospect of the breakdown of power supplies, food supplies, sewage, communications, effective government and law and order – it was the analogy that was being used at the time. This is the power that exists to hold the country to ransom: it was fear of that abyss which had an important effect on subsequent policy.34

  The government capitulated to the miners’ demands, conceding the large pay rises rapidly recommended by a committee of inquiry. During 1972 miners’ earnings increased by up to 16 per cent, double the rate of inflation. More working days were lost in strikes during 1972 than during any year since 1919 – another year when the government had been preoccupied by the apparent menace of subversion.35

  Heath strongly suspected that there was some undiscovered subversive masterplan behind the industrial unrest. His principal private secretary, Robert Armstrong, wrote to Trend on 21 February 1972:

  The Prime Minister finds it hard to believe that the way in which the miners’ dispute developed was unplanned, and has asked for the preparation of an analysis to show who was responsible for the organization of this episode. Such an analysis would ideally show how the decisions were taken that the NUM should not give strike pay, who was responsible for the decision to try to bring power supplies to a standstill, and who planned and organized the programme of picketing.

  The Security Service was asked to prepare an answer to the Prime Minister’s questions and agree it with the Department of Employment.36 On 16 March FJ sent Trend, ‘as a basis for a discussion between the Prime Minister and some of his colleagues, a memorandum describing the present state of subversive activity in this country to cover industry, education, communications and so forth’. The tone of the memorandum, entitled ‘Subversion in the U.K. – 1972’, was resolutely unalarmist:

  The number of people who may be described as committed supporters of the various subversive organizations or who are violently inclined Anarchists, is little more than 40,000 or well below 0.1% of the population. This figure bears little relationship to the temporary, wider support which subversive organizations sometimes obtain when they adopt causes of the day which enjoy a broad appeal.

  By far the largest subversive organization remained the CPGB with 29,000 members:

  Having consistently failed to attract the electorate, it is pursuing political power through infiltrating the trade unions. Using union representation, the Communists hope to influence Labour Party policy to the point where an alliance, which they would try to dominate, became possible . . . Although, through its industrial influence, its size and its relatively strong organization, the C.P.G.B. remains the major long term subversive threat in this country, it is weakened by internal dissension.

  Trotskyist groups currently had only about 4,000 members but their numbers were increasing. Maoists and anarchists together totalled about 4,500. Fascist groups represented ‘only an occasional problem for law and order rather than a threat to national security’.

  The main subversive threat was in industry:

  For complex reasons an atmosphere prevails in industry in which militancy and disruptive activities flourish, particularly at shop floor level. This provides continuing opportunities for exploitation by the different subversive groups, though there is no significant collaboration between them in this field; on the contrary they regard themselves as rivals for the allegiance of left-wing workers . . . Despite extensive penetration of the largest trade unions the Communist Party does not yet control any union or exercise a decisive influence on the T.U.C. Its attitude to industrial disputes is tactical and it exploits rather than creates them, preferring to work through union leadership where it has a vested interest, than through the shop floor level. It sees an opportunity in current disputes for forcing a General Election, its principal aim since June 1970. The Party’s secret caucuses within the major unions and in some industries provide effective electoral machinery for Communist supported candidates for union office and thus bring influence to bear on union policies. The present Industrial Organiser of the C.P.G.B. [Bert Ramelson] is a competent, natural militant with wide contacts at the top levels of unions.

  The Service view was that there was no novel dramatic solution to the menace of subversion but that good intelligence was of central importance:

  There is no panacea for subversive activities. Government is limited in what it can do . . . It has sometimes been expedient to encourage the Press to expose subversive activities but this and other forms of action which draw attention to subversive organizations risk playing into enemy hands, as publicity is often what those concerned in subversive activities are looking for. Suitable openings for exposure tend to be rare.37

  Heath criticized the Security Service memorandum on subversion for taking ‘too relaxed a view’. Burke Trend told the DG that ‘[Heath] and some of his ministerial colleagues were worried by the growing lack of respect for authority and were convinced that there was a number of evil minded men particularly in the unions. Some of them must, the Prime Minister said, be “done”.’ According to Trend, Maudling supported the less alarmist Security Service view ‘but he was almost the only member of the Cabinet to take a relaxed attitude.’38 Maudling told FJ on 13 June: ‘He disagreed with most of his colleagues who thought that industrial disputes could be blamed on a subversive conspiracy. He read our Subinds [reports on subversion in industry] with much interest and thought that they, and notably those dealing with the railways dispute, supported his point of view.’39 On 18 July 1972 Maudling was succeeded at the Home Office by Robert Carr. The senior management of the Security Service was doubtless relieved to hear from Allen, the Home Office PUS, that the new Home Secretary ‘is not given to gossiping’. 40

  Soon after Carr became home secretary, the new DG, Michael Hanley, who inspired far greater confidence in Heath than FJ had done,41 proposed to Allen the establishment of a new committee und
er Home Office chairmanship which would be responsible for assessing the internal security situation in the UK:

  With the growth of violence and with increasing industrial relations trouble, the Security Service was in a very exposed position. Traditionally we had provided assessments but under the present conditions it seemed possible that something more authoritative was required which could not be so easily rejected by Ministers who might have other views.42

  The purpose of the new committee, in Hanley’s view, was to keep subversion and ‘increasing industrial relations trouble’ away from the Joint Intelligence Committee. Despite the fact that the JIC’s terms of reference included a duty ‘to keep under review threats to security at home and overseas and to deal with such security problems as may be referred to it’, Hanley thought it had ‘bugger all to offer except on Ireland’. Its Assessments Staff was ‘packed by the FCO, where the JIC chairman was an FCO official and so was the Intelligence Coordinator’, who since 1969 had been responsible for producing an annual review on the ‘state of intelligence’ and the intelligence community.43 Hanley agreed that a suitable chairman for the new committee would be the unsuccessful Home Office candidate for the succession to FJ.44 The Service would supply the committee staff and continue to co-ordinate information from the police. On 31 July 1972 Trend informed a meeting attended by the DDG that Heath wanted more to be done to expose the hidden hand of the Communists in industrial subversion and for the Security Service to extend its investigations into industrial unrest. Trend asked whether, for example, the Service could tap the phones of key individuals involved in the current dock dispute. The DDG insisted that the Service stick to its charter and investigate only those with ‘subversive affiliations’: mainly defined as Communists, Trotskyists and sympathizers. There was, however, already an HOW on one of the dockers mentioned by Trend who came into the ‘subversive’ category.45

  In September 1972 the new interdepartmental committee proposed by Hanley to study Subversion in Public Life (SPL) came into being ‘to supervise and direct the collection of intelligence about threats to the internal security of Great Britain arising from subversive activities, particularly in industry and to make regular reports to the Ministers concerned’. Draft reports were initially jointly prepared by an official of the Department of Employment and a Security Service officer. Trend told the Committee that ‘The Prime Minister attaches particular importance to Ministers receiving comprehensive reviews of the position at regular intervals and not merely when some critical situation has already developed.’46 For the remainder of the Heath government, at approximately two-monthly intervals, SPL issued a series of major studies of industrial subversion, concentrating on those unions or industries thought most likely to become involved in disputes,47 with titles including ‘Impact of Subversive Groups on Trade Union Activity’, ‘Potential Disputes in the Public Sector – October 1972’, ‘Claimants and Unemployed Workers Union’, ‘National Union of Mineworkers’, ‘Labour Relations at Ford Motors’, ‘Industrial Relations in British Rail’, ‘The Security Significance of the Ultra Left in the UK in 1973’, ‘The Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers’, ‘The Construction Industry’ and ‘The Transport and General Workers Union’,48 The papers included considerable background information on unions and industry from the Department of Employment, and some from the FCO’s Information Research Department. However, the SPL paper on ‘The Communist Party of Great Britain in 1973’49 was a purely Security Service production. Circulation of these reports was initially restricted, on Heath’s instructions, to only eight ministers (Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, Secretaries of State for Defence, Scotland, Trade and Industry, and Employment) and their senior officials.50 The Lord President of the Council was later added to the circulation list.51

  At the end of 1972 there was further ministerial pressure on the Service (though not from Carr, the Home Secretary) to go beyond its charter in the investigation of subversion and industrial unrest. In December 1972 Allen told Hanley that he and other officials were resisting pressure from ministers to change the Service’s terms of reference in order to allow it to collect more industrial intelligence. Provided the DG was ‘able to take not too narrow a view of our Charter’, he thought they would be able to persuade ministers to accept the position as it stood. Hanley replied that he stuck to the charter but did not interpret it ‘legalistically’. He was prepared to ‘stretch the Charter as far as it would go’, but could not, for example, put an application for an HOW on someone against whom there was no adverse security information.52 Trend also reported to Hanley that Heath had said that the Security Service charter ‘ought to be enlarged’, but that he had dissuaded him.53

  In the summer of 1973 another confrontation with the miners began to loom over NUM opposition to the latest phase of the government’s statutory incomes policy. Heath became suspicious that the moderates on the union’s executive were being manipulated for political ends by the hard left and in particular the Scottish Communist Mick McGahey. At the NUM conference in July 1973, McGahey called for ‘agitation in the streets’ to defeat the Heath government. He made an even more dramatic impression at a private meeting at Number Ten of some senior ministers and officials with the entire NUM executive, nearly thirty strong, on 28 November. Though McGahey claimed his words had been distorted, according to Heath:

  When I asked him what he really wanted, he proclaimed that he wanted to bring down the government. During the election campaign, even the Labour Party had to disown McGahey when he demanded that any troops which might be called out to deal with a national emergency should support the miners.54

  On 14 November the Service obtained an HOW on Arthur Scargill, whom it regarded as a Communist sympathizer, ‘to help establish the extent of communist influence on present negotiations in the mining industry’. 55

  This time the government was well prepared – or thought it was – for another miners’ strike. In December 1973 it pre-emptively declared a three-day working week, instead of delaying as in 1972. On 12 December the Secretary of State for Employment, Willie Whitelaw, summoned a group of senior Security Service officers to his office and told them that intelligence was ‘one of the keys of success in handling the present situation’. 56 The Service view of the origins of the latest conflict with the NUM, summarized in a note of 8 January 1974, was very similar to its analysis of the seamen’s strike almost eight years earlier and was once again drafted with a possible Commons statement in mind. Its author had had the lead role in drafting Harold Wilson’s celebrated Commons denunciation of the seamen’s leaders in 1966 as a ‘tightly knit group of politically motivated men’:57

  Communists in the [NUM] were largely responsible for framing the pay claim which is the subject of the present dispute. This originated from the Communist-controlled Scottish Area and was subsequently endorsed by the NUM’s National Conference in July 1973. The Party’s aim was to try to ensure that this claim would ultimately result in a strike . . . Throughout the whole of this period leading Communist members of the Executive have kept closely in touch with the Party’s National Industrial Organiser, Ramelson, and continue to discuss their tactics with him. Before meetings of the NUM National Executive Committee, McGahey, the Vice-President of the NUM, usually consults privately with Ramelson and agrees with him the policy which the Communist Party would wish to see pursued by the Executive as a whole.58

  The transcribers within the CPGB transcribing room, who provided much of the highly sensitive raw intelligence on which this assessment was based, worked inside a glass partition which separated them from the other transcribers. The young English graduate who transcribed Mick McGahey’s phone calls during the three-day week had the same difficulty as her predecessors with his sometimes impenetrable Scottish accent. Though already aware of his alcoholic tendencies, she had the impression that at the height of the crisis he ‘more or less reinvented heavy drinking’. 59

  With a miner
s’ strike due to begin on 9 February, Heath called an election to be held on the 28th. Unlike Wilson, Heath decided not to use Security Service intelligence to launch a public attack on ‘a tightly knit group of politically motivated men’. Instead he chose to fight the election on the larger constitutional issue of ‘Who Governs Britain?’ After an indifferent campaign Heath lost the election and Labour emerged with five more seats than the Conservatives. ‘The miners yet again appeared triumphant, indeed in the euphoric view of young left-wingers like Arthur Scargill virtually invincible.’60

  3

  Counter-Terrorism and Protective Security in the Early 1970s

  The main shift in Security Service priorities during the last two decades of the Cold War was from counter-espionage (CE) and counter-subversion (CS) to counter-terrorism (CT). The transition, however, was very gradual. The Service had no sense during the 1970s, or even for much of the 1980s, that CT was destined to become its main priority. Counter-terrorism was initially regarded as ‘the violent side of subversion’1 and was included in the responsibilities of the counter-subversion F Branch. The first step towards the creation of an independent CT Branch did not begin until 1976 and was not fully implemented until 1984. Protective security against terrorist as well as other threats remained throughout the responsibility of C Branch.2

  After long periods of quiescence, Middle Eastern terrorism and the IRA (the two main targets of the Service’s CT operations in the later Cold War) both re-emerged as threats almost simultaneously at the end of the 1960s. For historical reasons, the counter-terrorist responsibilities of the Security Service against the IRA were quite different from those against Middle Eastern terrorism. Ever since the foundation of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch (originally Special Irish Branch) in 1883 during the Fenian ‘Dynamite Wars’ in London, it had held the lead intelligence role against Irish Republican terrorism on the British mainland. The lead role in Northern Ireland belonged to the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Within the United Kingdom the Security Service thus had only a supporting role against the IRA. Against all other terrorist threats to mainland Britain (even including those from Northern Ireland Loyalist paramilitaries) the Service had the lead intelligence role, though that role was not formally acknowledged until 1972.3