The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  The paranoid strain in Wilson’s view of intelligence was further strengthened by the attempted assassination of Jeremy Thorpe’s former lover, the male model Norman Scott.62 The inexperienced would-be assassin, Andrew Newton, a former airline pilot, succeeded only in killing Scott’s Great Dane. Early in 1976, a hysterical Scott, who was being prosecuted for benefit fraud, claimed in open court that he was ‘being hounded all the time by people just because of my sexual relationship with Jeremy Thorpe’.63 Thorpe succeeded in persuading Harold Wilson that he was being framed by an elaborate plot orchestrated by the South African intelligence service, BOSS – a deception for which Marcia Williams later said she ‘could not forgive him’.64 Wilson required little persuasion by Thorpe – despite the fact that two years earlier he had contemplated publicizing stories about Thorpe’s homosexuality and vulnerability to blackmail.65 In Donoughue’s view, the Prime Minister had become obsessed by the belief ‘that the South African espionage system – BOSS – is doing dirty tricks’.66

  Such evidence as there was for the claim that Thorpe was the victim of BOSS dirty tricks derived from the activities of an ex-Yorkshire burglar, South African freelance journalist and BOSS agent Gordon Winter, who had slept with Norman Scott and learned of his affair with Thorpe.67 Wilson believed that Winter’s attempts to publicize Scott’s story were part of an elaborate plot by BOSS. The Security Service concluded that, on the contrary, they were a private initiative by Winter.68 The Prime Minister was convinced that he understood BOSS better than the Security Service. The Intelligence Co-ordinator, Sir Leonard ‘Joe’ Hooper (formerly director of GCHQ), noted after being summoned to a meeting with Wilson on 23 February: ‘PM suspects authors [of an MI5 report] do not know much about the subject and fears that friendly relations with S[outh] A[frican] diplomatic and intelligence people in London preclude their being watched properly.’69

  Like some of the media, which bizarrely regarded BOSS as ‘arguably the most efficient intelligence service in the world’,70 Wilson had a greatly inflated view of the sophistication of its foreign operations. Its use of the mendacious and unreliable Winter tends to support the contrary view of the Security Service that these operations were, in reality, ‘comparatively crude and unsophisticated’. Wilson may also have been misled by Rhodesian threats to blackmail an ‘immoral’ Labour MP into believing that BOSS operated in a similar way. In an attempt to uncover the (nonexistent) evidence for South African involvement in fabricating a gay scandal involving Thorpe, Wilson once again approached Sir Leonard Hooper,71 without – apparently – gaining any support for his conspiracy theories.

  The supposed South African connection in the Thorpe case was one of Wilson’s chief preoccupations during his final two months in power. Donoughue noted: ‘The PM is loving it all, since it appeals to his obsessions with plots, spies, conspiracies, etc.’ One of Wilson’s late-night meetings with Thorpe lasted three hours, from 10.30 p.m. to 1.30 a.m.72 On 9 March, one week before he announced his resignation, Wilson declared, in reply to a parliamentary question he had planted himself: ‘I have no doubt that there is a strong South African participation in recent activities relating to the leader of the Liberal Party.’ Though Wilson avoided accusing the South African government directly, he claimed that ‘massive resources of business money and private agents of various kinds and various qualities’ had been involved in the campaign against Thorpe. Donoughue stated in his diary: ‘Nobody knows if he has any evidence, and he did not consult anyone before planting a question with Jim Wellbeloved.’73 The unknown source of some, perhaps much, of Wilson’s information on the supposed South African conspiracy was his private and political secretary Lady Falkender. At a lunch only days before his resignation, he declared that he had proof that South African money had been involved in the plot to discredit Thorpe: ‘It’s been a great detective exercise, I can tell you. Detective Inspector Falkender has been up to her eyes in it.’74

  Wilson’s mental decline during the year before his resignation in April 1976 was obvious to all around him. Once impressively quick on his feet, he now found it difficult even to improvise a short constituency speech. ‘For someone who had prided himself on his quickness of mind, his legendary memory,’ writes Philip Ziegler, ‘to slow up, to be at a loss for words or to grope for a statistic was not merely galling but a blow to his confidence.’ Physically too, he became increasingly run down, consulting his doctors far more frequently than before, and suffering increasingly from psychosomatic stomach pains before difficult meetings (of which there were many).75 Wilson’s mental and physical decline was accompanied by, and may partly explain, his increasing tendency (long present in more muted form) to conspiracy theory. One of his colleagues recalls standing next to him in the lavatory at Number Ten, and watching in some astonishment as the Prime Minister pointed to the electric light fitting and gestured to indicate that, because it might well be bugged, it was unsafe to mention anything confidential. During his last few months in office, Wilson appears rarely to have said anything in the lavatory without first turning on all the taps and gesturing at imaginary bugs in the ceiling.76 The Prime Minister also suspected that a hole in the wall of the Cabinet Room behind a portrait of Mr Gladstone contained a listening device. Apparently not trusting either the Security Service or any other government agency to examine it, he called in a firm called Argon Ltd. The hole turned out to be have been caused by nothing more sinister than the removal of an earlier picture light.77 Wilson was also convinced that his study was bugged and on 16 February 1976, only a month before his resignation, arranged for a private security expert to search the room.78 Wilson’s obsession with bugging by now infected much of Number Ten. Bernard Donoughue, who distanced himself from many of Wilson’s conspiracy theories, wrote in his diary, ‘I believe that my room is bugged. Certainly my phone is tapped.’79 He was wrong on both counts.

  Though the various searches in 10 Downing Street predictably discovered no bugs, the Prime Minister’s suspicions remained. In February 1976 he sent his publisher, George Weidenfeld, on a mission to the former US Vice President Hubert Humphrey, to ask him to try to discover whether the CIA had been involved in a smear campaign against him.80 George Bush the elder, then Director of Central Intelligence, flew to London to reassure the Prime Minister in person, but emerged from a meeting at Number Ten asking, ‘Is that man mad? He did nothing but complain about being spied on!’81 Wilson’s conspiracy theories about the involvement of the British intelligence services in plots against him were powerfully reinforced on 9 March when the maverick former Deputy Chief of SIS, George Young, gave a speech alleging that three of Wilson’s ministers were crypto-Communists and that a prominent Conservative had been run by a KGB officer in London during the Heath government. On the 15th, the day before he announced his resignation, Wilson was briefed about Young’s extreme right-wing activities and his connections with Chapman Pincher. A later Security Service inquiry concluded that a confused recollection of this briefing might have been responsible for Wilson’s subsequent denunciation of a plot to discredit him by ‘a very small MI5 mafia who had been out of the Service for some time who still continue the vendetta for no doubt very right wing purposes of their own’.82 There was, in reality, no plot by any Service officer, serving or retired, to conspire with George Young against Wilson. Indeed, F Branch were becoming increasingly worried about Young’s clandestine organization of the extreme right-wing group UNISON (not to be confused with the later trade union of the same name).83

  Ironically, Wilson’s resignation on 16 March 1976 gave rise to illinformed speculation among some of his colleagues that the knowledge that the Security Service had obtained discreditable material on him had forced him to step down. At a dinner given by Michael Foot there was talk of ‘very strong rumours’ to this effect. ‘Some funny things have evidently been happening,’ believed Tony Benn. He himself suspected dirty dealing by South African intelligence.84 Wilson’s controversial Resignation Honours List, drafted on lavender
(some say lilac or pink) notepaper by Lady Falkender, added to the conspiracy theories. Along with the usual quota of the great and good were some inappropriate names and a few subsequently exposed as criminals: among them Sir Joseph Kagan (given a peerage) who was imprisoned for fraud in 1980, and Eric Miller (knighted) who committed suicide in 1977 while under official investigation for financial irregularities.85

  Shortly after his resignation Wilson invited two young BBC journalists, Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtiour, whom he had never previously met but knew to be searching for evidence of South African interference in British politics, to investigate the ‘grave danger’ to British democracy from ‘anti-democratic agencies in South Africa and elsewhere’. Thorpe’s accuser, Norman Scott, was, he told them, a South African agent, like others in the international conspiracy to discredit the Liberal leader. He also claimed to have discovered in 1975 that MI5 had been trying to discredit both him and Lady Falkender in the belief that both were Communists. Wilson offered to help Penrose and Courtiour (‘Pencourt’ as they became collectively known) discreetly with their inquiries:

  I see myself as a big fat spider in the corner of the room. Sometimes I speak when I’m asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally when we meet I might tell you to go to the Charing Cross Road and kick a blind man standing on the corner. That blind man may tell you something, lead you somewhere.86

  In the three centuries since Sir Robert Walpole became Britain’s first prime minister, no holder of that office has given a stranger interview.

  After an exhausting year pursuing Wilson’s and other conspiracy theories that the case against Thorpe had been fabricated by BOSS and its agents, Pencourt concluded that there was no substance to them. Unwilling to reveal these conclusions to Wilson for fear that he might break off contact with them, they approached Lady Falkender instead. ‘Harold’, she told them, ‘certainly won’t be happy to hear that.’87 Pencourt, however, continued to believe Wilson’s story, supported by Falkender, that the Security Service had plotted against him. That story was the most sensational item in their book, The Pencourt File, whose serialization rights were bought by the Observer. On Sunday 17 July 1977 the Observer led with a frontpage story headed ‘World Exclusive’: ‘Wilson: “Why I Lost My Faith in MI5”’.88

  For the Security Service, Wilson’s most damaging claim to Penrose and Courtiour, reported by the Observer, was Hanley’s alleged admission to Wilson in 1975 that MI5 did indeed contain ‘a disaffected faction with extreme right-wing views’ capable of plotting against him. The Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, informed Wilson’s successor, Jim Callaghan, that, on the contrary:

  I am assured by Sir Michael Hanley that, at his meeting with Sir Harold Wilson1 in the summer of 1975, he did not confirm ‘the existence within his Service of a disaffected faction with extreme right-wing views’. Sir Harold Wilson apparently suggested to him that, because there were a number of former army officers in the Service, there was likely to be some sort of bias against Labour Ministers; Sir Michael Hanley acknowledged that there were a number of retired [army] officers in the Security Service, but did not accept that that meant that their loyalty and integrity as public servants was in question.

  Nor was there any evidence that, as Wilson claimed, the Service had ever confused Will Owen (who had been lucky to be acquitted of espionage for the Czechoslovak StB) with his fellow MP David Owen or the Soviet spy Edith Tudor-Hart with the Labour minister Judith Hart. But because some of the other information passed by Wilson to Penrose and Courtiour was correct – including the highly embarrassing revelation that Wilson had sought the help of the head of the CIA in investigating the supposed plot against him – Rees believed ‘it would not be possible to deny the whole of the article.’ He suggested simply a general statement reaffirming ‘confidence in the competence and integrity of the Security Service’.89

  The DDG, John Jones, noted on 27 July 1977:

  Since no one has yet fathomed Harold Wilson’s devious purpose in making allegations against the Security Service, the Prime Minister [Callaghan] thought it highly desirable for the record to have a talk with the DG for the specific and formal purpose of going over all the allegations in The Observer articles.90

  Hanley briefed Merlyn Rees on 3 August, then had an unusually long meeting with Callaghan, lasting one and a half hours. Both struck the DG as ‘friendly and relaxed, and very supportive of the Security Service’, but – especially in Callaghan’s case – deeply suspicious of Wilson. Callaghan thought Wilson perfectly capable of causing horrendous embarrassment by publicly revealing the lengthy investigations of Hollis and Mitchell based on suspicions that they were Soviet agents. If Wilson did decide to publicize this story, Callaghan feared that he ‘would do so to the hilt’.91

  On 23 August a press statement from 10 Downing Street announced:

  The Prime Minister has conducted detailed inquiries into the recent allegations about the Security Service and is satisfied that they do not constitute grounds for lack of confidence in the competence and impartiality of the Security Service or for instituting a special inquiry. In particular, the Prime Minister is satisfied that at no time has the Security Service or any other British intelligence or security agency, either of its own accord or at someone else’s request, undertaken electronic surveillance in No 10 Downing Street or in the Prime Minister’s room in the House of Commons.

  Callaghan repeated the same statement to the Commons, adding that there were no grounds for doubting Wilson’s loyalty and that he was also ‘quite satisfied . . . with what is going on in the security services’. Callaghan’s official biographer, Kenneth Morgan, comments: ‘On the face of it, the affair implied a rebuke of his predecessor by the Prime Minister. One of his main concerns, however, was to protect Wilson who was already showing signs of the illness that was to dog his later years.’92

  After the front-page story in the Observer in July 1977, Wilson seems to have lost the desire to publicize his claims of a Security Service plot against him. Part of the explanation probably lies in his growing, though reluctant, awareness of the declining credibility of his claims that the allegations against Jeremy Thorpe were part of a great conspiracy by BOSS to undermine British democracy. On 19 and 20 October the Evening News led with confessions by Andrew Newton and Peter Bissell, headlined respectively: ‘I was hired to kill Scott. Exclusive: Gunman tells of incredible plot – a murder contract for £5,000’ and ‘Former MP reveals murder plot. Exclusive: He [Scott] must be bumped off.’ The Observer followed on 23 October with more in the same vein from Penrose and Courtiour. Next day the Home Secretary asked Hanley if the Security Service had ‘any hard security information against Jeremy Thorpe other than allegations of homosexuality’. The DG ‘said there was none. We had known about these allegations for some time but Thorpe was not otherwise a security case.’93

  The ‘Wilson plot’ conspiracy theory was given continuing currency by allegations of dirty tricks by the Security Service and other sections of the intelligence community made by a number of others including Colin Wallace, an MoD information officer in Northern Ireland from 1968 to 1975, and Captain Fred Holroyd, who had served for a year as military intelligence officer in the Province in 1974–5.94 The DG, Sir Antony Duff, assured staff in 1987 that Wallace’s and Holroyd’s allegations of dirty tricks were ‘equally baseless’.95 Duff also declared that claims that the Security Service had tried to encourage the Ulster Workers strike were ‘completely untrue’, and that the allegation by the future Labour minister Peter Hain that his arrest on an unfounded charge of robbery in October 1975 might have had assistance from an element in the Service was ‘rubbish’.96

  The longevity of belief in the Wilson plot owes as much to Peter Wright as to Harold Wilson. A decade after Callaghan’s public statement that he was ‘quite satisfied’ with the role of the Security Service, Wright claimed in Spycatcher that thirty MI5 officers ‘had given their approval to a plot’. During a television interview Wright admitted that this f
igure was exaggerated: ‘The maximum number was eight or nine. Very often it was only three.’ When pressed further and asked, ‘How many people, when all the talking died down, were still serious in joining you in trying to get rid of Wilson?’, Wright replied, ‘One, I should say.’ In reality, instead of orchestrating a plot, he spent his final years in MI5 before retiring in January 1976 ‘mostly going through the motions’.97 Though Wright had effectively discredited his own evidence, Spycatcher persuaded many who had dismissed Wilson’s conspiracy theories a decade earlier that there must have been something to them after all. The former Home Secretary Roy Jenkins noted that ‘the publication of Peter Wright’s tawdry book . . . nonetheless chimed in with a chorus of other allegations.’98 Callaghan reached a similar conclusion. So did the official biographers of both Wilson and Callaghan. The DG, Sir Antony Duff, recorded after a meeting on 31 March 1987 with Callaghan and the then leader of the Labour Party, Neil Kinnock: ‘Callaghan fixed me with a fairly penetrating, not to say hostile glance, and said that even if only a tenth of what Wright had said about destabilising the Wilson government was true, it was still a “bloody disgrace” that it had happened. I said that it was all in any case untrue.’ Though not all Callaghan’s suspicions seem to have been laid to rest, he acknowledged ‘Wilson’s “paranoia” and said that Marcia and others had been responsible for a lot of it’.99