The Defence of the Realm
Page 128
59 Aldrich, Hidden Hand, pp. 262–3.
60 Security Service Archives.
61 Bethell, Palestine Triangle, p. 331.
62 Security Service Archives.
63 Heller, ‘Failure of a Mission: Bernadotte and Palestine, 1948’; Marton, Death in Jerusalem.
64 Security Service Archives.
65 Security Service Archives. Stanley also claimed to have an influential Zionist friend in the United States, who he said had ‘80 Senators working with him’. The Security Service assessed the friend as ‘a gifted charlatan claiming a peculiar facility of access to influential political figures in the USA’; Security Service Archives.
66 Security Service Archives.
67 Security Service Archives.
68 Slowe, Shinwell, p. 286.
69 Security Service Archives.
70 Sillitoe later told the Chief of SIS, Sir Stewart Menzies, that ‘Stanley’s connection with Shinwell had . . . come to our notice, that he had spoken to Sir Eric Speed [Shinwell’s PUS] about it and that as a result of enquiries made by the latter it was clear that Shinwell had acted perfectly correctly and refused to be drawn on the point.’ Security Service Archives.
71 Baron, Contact Man, p. 145. There is some doubt about the date of the dinner party.
72 Ibid., pp. 145–6.
73 Security Service Archives.
74 Baron, Contact Man, p. 194.
75 Ibid., p. 187.
76 Ibid., pp. 167, 224.
77 Security Service Archives.
78 There is no evidence, however, that Stanley became involved in plans for terrorist attacks in Britain.
79 Security Service Archives.
80 Security Service Archives.
81 DOS (J. V. W. Shaw), Minute no. 131, 5 Aug. 1953, TNA KV 2/2252.
82 Security Service Archives.
83 Security Service Archives. A small number of mostly (if not entirely) female Jews slipped through the general prohibition.
84 Security Service Archives.
85 Security Service Archives.
86 When discussing a Jewish applicant in 1974, Director B and the DDG agreed that:
There are no grounds for imposing a general bar on the recruitment of Jews of British nationality. An important factor however in determining the suitability of a candidate will be the extent to which he practises his faith. A secondary factor, and one more easy to assess during our formal interviews, will be the representational quality of the candidate.
Security Service Archives. A note records, after the rejection of the candidate at the staff board:
Director B was invited at this very unusual and difficult case to record that the Board’s rejection of the candidate should not prejudice our consideration of future applications from Jews. Were any such applications to be received, recruiting staff should satisfy themselves on two major counts before bringing a candidate to Final Board. First, that the candidate’s loyalty to the Crown and the antecedents of his/her parents and grandparents offered no grounds to sustain the fear that the candidate could become subject to pressure; and secondly, that the candidate’s physical appearance and demeanour was unlikely to inhibit his relations with other members of the staff and outside contacts of the Service.
87 Hennessy, Never Again, p. 239.
88 Comments as prejudiced as Attlee’s occur from time to time in post-war Service files. In 1949, for example, B1A speculated that the quarrel between the Communist MP Phil Piratin and another Stepney Communist, Michael Shapiro, might ‘simply be the ravings of two Jews jockeying for Party honours’. B1A, ‘The Shapiro–Piratin Row’, 14 Oct. 1949, TNA KV 2/2033, s. 268c.
Chapter 3: VENONA and the Special Relationships with the United States and Australia
1 Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only, pp. 150–56, 161–3.
2 Guy Liddell diary, 5 Feb. 1946, Security Service Archives. It had never occurred to Petrie to pay a liaison visit himself. Because of his failure to attach adequate importance to the Special Relationship, he thought it sufficient to conduct liaison at a lower level. His poor personal relations with his DDG were probably also partly responsible for the humiliating formula which he proposed. Though Petrie may have suspected that in the course of the trip Liddell intended to see some of his children who were living in the US with his estranged wife, this is unlikely to have been the main reason for his decision.
3 VENONA replaced the previous codename DRUG (which had replaced BRIDE in the late 1950s) on 1 December 1961. Security Service Archives.
4 The method of decryption is summarized in a number of NSA publications, among them the account by Cecil James Phillips of NSA, ‘What Made Venona Possible?’ Reference to this account does not imply that it is corroborated by HMG or any British intelligence agency.
5 By 1948 GCHQ cryptanalysts were working full time on the VENONA material at the ASA HQ at Arlington Hall. www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00039.cfm.
6 Security Service Archives describe the collaboration as having taken place between GCHQ and the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA). The original collaboration, however, was between GCHQ and ASA. AFSA was not founded until July 1949, when it was set up in an attempt to co-ordinate SIGINT operations by the three armed services. It then took over the VENONA programme.
7 Security Service Archives.
8 www.cia.gov/csi/books/venona/preface.htm.
9 Guy Liddell diary, 25 Nov. 1947, Security Service Archives.
10 See below, pp. 375–6.
11 The VENONA decrypts, together with some explanatory material, are accessible on the NSA website: http://www.nsa.gov:8080/. Benson and Warner (eds), VENONA, provide a valuable introduction to, and a selection of, the decrypts.
12 See below, pp. 375–6.
13 Security Service Archives. For some details of the Soviet decrypts which revealed the penetration of External Affairs, see Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, chs 12, 144.
14 Security Service Archives.
15 Off-the-record account of Chifley’s comments given by Shedden during a visit to London to Guy Liddell; Guy Liddell diary, 27 July 1949, Security Service Archives.
16 Security Service Archives.
17 Security Service Archives.
18 Andrew, ‘Growth of the Australian Intelligence Community’, pp. 226–7; Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, pp. 174–6, 286.
19 Security Service Archives.
20 Andrew, ‘Growth of the Australian Intelligence Community’, pp. 223–5. Guy Liddell noted after a meeting with Shedden in London, ‘There is clearly no love lost between Shedden and Evatt. Shedden fully realises how much Evatt’s pose as a mediator between East and West had done to Australian relations with the United States.’ Guy Liddell diary, 27 July 1949, Security Service Archives.
21 Both Evatt and the Secretary of External Affairs, Dr John Burton, had a general distaste for intelligence and had previously declined indoctrination into SIGINT, of which they appear to have had an imperfect understanding. Andrew, ‘Growth of the Australian Intelligence Community’, pp. 224–5; Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, pp. 150–53.
22 Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, pp. 288–90.
23 Andrew, ‘Growth of the Australian Intelligence Community’, pp. 226–9. The foundation of ASIO was, however, insufficient to restore US confidence in Australian security. The supply of US secret information (save for collaboration with the Australian SIGINT agency) did not resume until the mid-1950s.
24 Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, p. 290.
25 Security Service Archives.
26 Recollections of a former Security Service officer.
27 Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, chs 12–14, 17.
28 Security Service Archives.
29 Christopher Andrew, interview with Charles Spry in Melbourne, April 1987.
30 The SLO also arranged for the operational head of the ASIO investigation to study the VENONA material in London. Recollections of a former Security Service officer.
31 Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, chs 12–14, 17. Nosov was a TASS correspondent in Australia from 1943 to 1950, identified by Petrov after his defection in 1954 as an MGB co-optee. Though appointed head of the London TASS Bureau in 1952, he was refused a British visa. Security Service Archives.
32 Security Service Archives.
33 Guy Liddell diary, 4 May 1950. Security Service Archives.
34 Security Service Archives.
35 Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, chs 12–14, 17.
36 ‘At the persuasion of the C[ommunist] P[arty of] A[ustralia] acting, it is believed, on instructions from Moscow, Clayton and his wife were planning to leave Australia at the beginning of [April 1957]. They were booked by K.L.M. via Amsterdam to London but it was believed that their ultimate destination was an Iron Curtain country and that they might change planes for Eastern Europe at an intermediate stop.’ Security Service Archives.
37 A. S. Martin (B2B) wrote in April 1949 that ‘we guessed the [US VENONA] material existed some six months ago . . . as a result of our work on the Australian case.’ Security Service Archives.
38 Security Service Archives.
39 Security Service Archives. The USCIB was chaired by the Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral Inglis, and included the Director of Central Intelligence, Admiral Hillenkoeter (Security Service Archives). ASA was unwilling to share VENONA with either.
40 Security Service Archives.
41 Security Service Archives. Liddell noted that ‘The FBI are playing up extremely well, and Thistle is in almost daily contact with Lamphere in the FBI who has been making a detailed study of the whole matter.’ Guy Liddell diary, 21 April 1949, Security Service Archives.
42 Security Service Archives.
43 Security Service Archives.
44 Security Service Archives.
45 Security Service Archives. Inglis and USCIB had, however, been informed of the Australian VENONA.
46 H. B. Fletcher to D. M. Ladd, [FBI] Office Memorandum, 18 Oct. 1949. This important memorandum, which reports General Omar Bradley’s decision not to inform Truman of the VENONA decrypts, was declassified late in 1997 as the result of a determined campaign by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as chairman of the Commission on Reducing and Enforcing Government Secrecy; Moynihan, Secrecy, pp. 69–73. Fletcher’s version of events was confirmed by G. T. D. Patterson (SLO Washington); Security Service Archives.
47 Donovan, Conflict and Crisis, pp. 338–9.
48 Moynihan, Secrecy, pp. 69–73. Benson and Warner (eds), VENONA, p. xxiv.
49 Security Service Archives.
50 Andrew, ‘The VENONA Secret’. Christopher Andrew, interviews with Dr Cleveland Cram, September 1996. Because CIA employed very much stricter vetting procedures than OSS, it does not appear to have been penetrated by Soviet agents in the early Cold War.
51 See below, pp. 427–8.
52 Andrew, ‘The VENONA Secret’.
53 Since the intermittent Soviet reuse of one-time pads, the basis of the VENONA breakthrough, did not begin until several months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the messages intercepted and recorded up to August 1941 proved of little post-war value to GCHQ.
54 Security Service Archives.
55 Of the twenty-five telegrams sent by the Centre to the London residency in the period 15–21 September 1945, twenty-four were decrypted in whole or part; Security Service Archives.
56 See below, Section D, ch. 6.
57 Security Service Archives.
58 Security Service Archives. Material from KGB archives published in 2009 identifies QUANTUM as Boris Podolsky, a Russian-born US physicist. Haynes, Klehr and Vassiliev, Spies, pp. 73–5.
59 Security Service Archives.
60 Security Service Archives.
61 Benson and Warner (eds), VENONA, pp. xxviii, 167–70. KGB files show that Weisband had been recruited as a Soviet agent in 1934; Weinstein and Vassiliev, Haunted Wood, p. 291.
62 Interviews with Cecil Phillips and Meredith Gardner in the BBC Radio 4 documentary VENONA, written and presented by Christopher Andrew (producers: Mark Burman and Helen Weinstein), first broadcast on 18 March 1998.
63 Weinstein and Vassiliev, Haunted Wood, p. 291.
64 Security Service Archives.
65 Security Service Archives.
66 Benson and Warner (eds), VENONA, pp. xxvii–xxviii.
67 Interview with Meredith Gardner by Christopher Andrew, broadcast in the BBC Radio 4 documentary VENONA. Claims that Philby made further visits to AFSA and looked over Gardner’s shoulder as he decrypted VENONA are inaccurate. A Security Service report in 1986 concluded that, ‘apart from Weisband and Philby there are no known spies who had access [to VENONA].’ Security Service Archives.
68 Security Service Archives.
69 Security Service Archives.
70 A CIA study confirms that Philby regularly received translated VENONA decrypts and assessments from AFSA. www.cia.gov/csi/books/venona/preface.htm.
71 Security Service Archives.
72 Because of lack of usable evidence, Weisband was never prosecuted for espionage. After his suspension from AFSA on suspicion of disloyalty, he was convicted of contempt for failing to attend a federal grand jury hearing on Communist Party activity and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment (Benson and Warner (eds), VENONA, p. xxviii).
73 Some of the decrypts which identified Fuchs, Greenglass and the Rosenbergs are reproduced in ibid. On Fuchs, see below, pp. 386–8.
74 See below, pp. 431–2.
75 Security Service Archives.
76 Security Service Archives.
77 See below, p. 433.
78 Security Service Archives.
79 Security Service Archives.
80 Security Service Archives. The final total of KGB, GRU and naval GRU messages between Moscow and Stockholm decrypted in whole or part was over 450; www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00039.cfm.
81 Security Service Archives. The first published analysis of the X Group by Nigel West misidentifies NOBILITY as Ivor Montagu and INTELLIGENTSIA as Haldane; West, Venona, ch. 3. West was, however, the first historian to pay serious attention to the GRU decrypts.
82 Security Service Archives. Following a Commons question in 1997, an MI5 officer noted, ‘As far as I can tell from the VENONA records we have never seriously attempted to identify BARON.’ Security Service Archives. Peter Wright (Spycatcher, p. 238) identified BARON as ‘probably’ the Czech intelligence officer Karel Sedlacek, as does West, Venona, pp. 67–9. NSA regards BARON as unidentified; www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00039.cfm.
83 Security Service Archives.
84 Security Service Archives.
85 Security Service Archives.
Chapter 4: Vetting, Atom Spies and Protective Security
1 Security Service Archives.
2 A. J. D. Winnifrith, ‘The Evolution of the Present Security System in the Civil Service’, 5 Dec. 1955, Security Conference of Privy Counsellors, S.C.P.C.(55)4, 6 Dec. 1955, TNA CAB 134/1325. Winnifrith’s memorandum does not identify the Communist private secretary.
3 Ibid.
4 See above, p. 348.
5 Cabinet Committee on Subversive Activities, ‘The Employment of Civil Servants etc. Exposed to Communist Influence’, 29 May 1947, GEN 183/1, TNA CAB 130/20.
6 Minute by Attlee, 21 Dec. 1947, GEN 183/1, TNA CAB 130/20.
7 Security Service Archives.
8 Security Service Archives.
9 Security Service Archives.
10 Security Service Archives.
11 Initially the Treasury had envisaged that the cases of all those purged should be referred to a senior civil servant who would co-ordinate policy in the operation of the procedure. The other founder members of the Tribunal, in addition to Gardiner, were Sir Frederick Leggett and Sir Maurice Holmes, both retired civil servants. Holmes was soon replaced by W. J. Bowen, an ex-trade unionist, but continued to act as a reserve in the absence of any othe
r member of the board. Security Service Archives.
12 Security Service Archives.
13 See below, pp. 400–401.
14 Security Service Archives.
15 It was originally envisaged that those sacked in the ‘Industrial Purge’ would be given a right of appeal, similar to that enjoyed by government servants. However, this concept was abandoned on the advice of both the TUC and employers as represented on the National Joint Advisory Council. Sackings were rare and handled by the industrial section, C2, in consultation at first with B1D (Communism in industry). Security Service Archives.
16 Hennessy and Brownfeld, ‘Britain’s Cold War Security Purge’, p. 968.
17 Guy Liddell diary, 1 Jan. 1950, Security Service Archives.
18 Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only, p. 177.
19 Guy Liddell diary, 24 Sept. 1949, Security Service Archives.
20 Ibid.
21 Benson and Warner (eds), VENONA, p. xxv.
22 Guy Liddell diary, 20 Sept. 1949, Security Service Archives.
23 Details of the MI5 investigation into Fuchs are in TNA KV 2/1245ff. The most up-to-date secondary accounts include Gibbs, ‘British and American Counter-Intelligence and the Atom Spies’, ch. 3; Walton, ‘British Intelligence and Threats to National Security’, pp. 237–48.
24 Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 322.
25 Guy Liddell diary, 12 Sept. 1949, Security Service Archives.
26 James Robertson, ‘Progress report’, 16 Sept. 1949, TNA KV 2/1246, s. 124. TNA KV 2/1266–7 include telephone checks and eavesdropping reports on Fuchs.
27 TNA KV 2/1246; Walton, ‘British Intelligence and Threats to National Security’, p. 243.
28 Guy Liddell diary, 25 Jan. 1950, Security Service Archives.
29 Ibid., 29 Oct. 1949.
30 Ibid., 19 Dec. 1949.
31 Ibid., 21 Dec. 1949.
32 W. J. Skardon, ‘Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs. Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Interviews’, 31 Jan. 1950, TNA KV 2/1250, s. 443ab.
33 James Robertson, Note, 24 Jan. 1950, TNA KV 2/1250, s. 433a.
34 Walton, ‘British Intelligence and Threats to National Security’, p. 244.
35 Security Service Archives.
36 Security Service Archives.
37 Guy Liddell diary, 27 March 1950, Security Service Archives.