Security Service vetting
During the war MI5 gave priority to catching German parachutists, Nazi sympathizers and fifth-column subversives, but its efforts to enhance national security were hindered by powerful challengers. In the 1950s Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express was (like its proprietor) furiously indignant about MI5’s previous failure to vet officials and catch spies. As Minister of Aircraft Production in 1940–1, however, Beaverbrook was equally angry with MI5 for using what he called Gestapo techniques to limit his access to expert manpower. On one occasion, in August 1940, Victor Rothschild was summoned to Beaverbrook’s ministerial room. The outer office resembled the antechamber of a capricious sultan, with a dozen supplicants and aides talking in undertones in separate huddles, while Beaverbrook left them waiting. Sir Cuthbert Headlam noted of Beaverbrook in 1941, ‘money is a great asset to success in this world – money, cheek, cunning and bounce’: the press lord was resentful that in the matter of millions Rothschild was the bigger man, and set out to cut him down to size.22
After keeping the MI5 officer waiting for more than an hour, he commandeered Rothschild to accompany him to 10 Downing Street, where he left his millionaire appanage waiting outside in the car for another ninety minutes. Once Beaverbrook had returned from seeing Churchill, he spent ten minutes browbeating Rothschild about some Germans, employed in a factory of strategic importance, whom MI5 had interned as possible Nazi informants or saboteurs. Beaverbrook repeatedly claimed that the eight detainees were Jews who deserved consideration. ‘They are not,’ Rothschild answered each time, ‘they are what is known as Aryan.’ Beaverbrook insisted, however, that he knew better than Rothschild in matters of Judaism. They also discussed John Archer of MI5: ‘I fired him because he said a terrible thing to me,’ declared Beaverbrook. ‘He said that if those poor Jews [the suspect Aryan businessmen] were let out, the public would hang them on every lamp-post. Anybody who says that to me gets fired at once.’ Beaverbrook told Rothschild, ‘you should not be involved in this persecution and you should not be in MI5 witch-hunting. You should be leading your people out of the concentration camps.’ He presented himself as the protector of Jewry: ‘I have not always been pro-Semitic, but … I am the only liberal member of the Cabinet, and I am sticking up for them everywhere.’ MI5, he told Rothschild, ‘ought to be abolished. I do not think there is any danger from Nazi spies in this country. I do not think it matters if they are at large.’23
Sir Alan Brooke, who was Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1941 and head of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, reflected in 1943, ‘Running a war seems to consist in making plans and then ensuring that all those destined to carry it out don’t quarrel with each other instead of the enemy.’ Hardy Amies, who continued to design dresses for his Mayfair couturier shop while an officer in the Intelligence Corps and in the Belgian Section of SOE, said that by the end of the war he realized that ‘there was no more intriguing, cunning and touchy person than a high-ranking officer’ in ‘the more secret departments’ of the government. The dissensions and rivalries between MI5 and SIS are undeniable; but they have been given undue prominence, either by vocal retired officers with embittered memories or by historian-journalists trying to make a good story. There was a reasonable level of respect and cooperation, despite the distracting snipers on both sides.24
On 11 May 1940 the Home Office declined to act on MI5’s recommendation that 500 members of the British Union of Fascists should be detained, but a fortnight later, as Operation DYNAMO (the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the Dunkirk beaches) got under way, there was panic reaching from xenophobic newspapers and chief constables upwards to the Cabinet about German women masquerading as Czech refugees, Jewish exiles succumbing to bribes or threats, and alien fifth columnists ready to welcome German parachutists and to begin work as saboteurs. ‘The essence of sound security policy is wise discrimination,’ insisted the Home Office under its remarkable PUS, Sir Alexander Maxwell. ‘A violent policy fitfully administered is not nearly as effective as a more moderate policy firmly and consistently applied.’ The Home Office warned that the general internment of aliens would gratify public opinion in the short run, but would soon bring misgivings.25
This sane approach was overwhelmed after Italy had entered the war on Germany’s side on 11 June 1940. There was large-scale internment of Austrians, Germans and Italians while the CPGB and its sympathizers were largely left alone. As early as mid-July, after interrogating internees and other intensive inquiries, MI5 accepted that there was no evidence of a fifth column of Nazi sympathizers primed for sabotage or espionage. Given the Russian Oil Products organization for which thousands of CPGB members worked, it is likely that a different conclusion would have emerged from investigations of communist sympathizers. MI5 advised that anti-communist measures would arouse the resentment of non-Marxist factory workers and trade unionists, and thus impair social cohesion and armaments production. ‘The Communist problem’, MI5 advised, ‘will be as urgent, or even more urgent, at the end of the War, and suppressive action now would sow the seeds of future ill-feeling.’26
Defence Regulation 18B suspended the right of suspected Nazi sympathizers to test the evidence against them before a judge and jury. Instead detainees could appeal to a Home Office advisory committee chaired by the eminent barrister Norman Birkett (afterwards Lord Birkett). According to this committee’s secretary, Jenifer Hart, Birkett regarded MI5 as ‘illiberal, disorganized and incompetent’. To Lord Hankey, a Cabinet minister inquiring into the wartime security services, he complained of MI5’s ‘pathological stupidities’. To MI5 it seemed that Birkett’s approach was sometimes contemptible, with MI5 witnesses being browbeaten as if they were petty criminals. The other committee members were the barrister John Morris (afterwards Lord Morris of Borth-y-Gest), whom Hart described as ‘patient, humane and vigilant to protect the freedom of the individual’, and a common-sense landowner and committee man Sir Arthur Hazlerigg (afterwards Lord Hazlerigg). Liddell thought that Birkett’s committee induced the Home Office to think of MI5 as unbalanced and narrow in its views.27
‘MI5’, Churchill’s adviser Desmond Morton said in 1943, ‘tends to see dangerous men too freely and to lack that knowledge of the world and sense of perspective which the Home Secretary rightly considers essential.’ This comment followed the assembly by MI5 officers of evidence that fifty-seven members of the CPGB were working in secret installations, actually or potentially remitting to Moscow secret material on armaments, aircraft production, anti-radar devices, jet engines and other strategic matters. The Home Office recommended that the fifty-seven should be moved to non-classified work, but Morton convinced Churchill to establish a Whitehall panel to consider on a case-by-case basis reports tendered by MI5 on communists in confidential positions. This panel had nugatory effect.28
At MI5 White and Liddell developed a plan to run double agents by letting Germans land in Britain, detaining them and turning them so that they supplied misdirection to Germany. The German agents who reached Britain after September 1940 were recognized by the Security Service as potential assets who could be used to deceive and manipulate their controllers in Germany. The politicians, however, wanted to make propaganda by publicizing the capture and execution of German agents. In October 1940 Churchill badgered Lord Swinton, the ex-Cabinet minister whom he had recently appointed as head of the wartime Home Defence (Security) Executive and who regarded himself as head of MI5 and to some extent of SIS, to explain why more captured German spies had not been shot. Liddell advised Swinton that painstaking interrogation and turning of such agents should be MI5’s priority. In Dick White’s words, ‘Intelligence should have precedence over blood-letting.’29
The Security Service strove – in its home territories, at least – never to stoop to Nazi or Stalinist methods: colonial field operations were another matter. Liddell’s comment was pragmatic and principled when, in 1940, a colonel from military intelligence was found punching a German parac
hutist who was under interrogation and being appraised for turning as a double agent: ‘we cannot have this sort of thing going on in our establishment. Apart from the moral aspect of the whole thing, I am quite convinced that these Gestapo methods do not pay in the long run.’ He was keen in 1942 to avoid embedding an informant in the War Registry to watch for possible leakages of information: ‘we should be laying ourselves open to accusation that we were employing Gestapo methods in the civil service’. The Home Office had strong objections to the use by MI5 of agents provocateurs.30
In 1942 Helenus (‘Buster’) Milmo, a barrister seconded to MI5, consulted Philby about Juan Gómez de Lecube, a Spanish footballer, greyhound-breeder and Abwehr agent, who had been arrested earlier that year in Trinidad on his way from Spain to Panama and been brought to MI5’s wartime interrogation centre, Camp 020, at Latchmere House in Surrey. At the time, London and other cities were recovering from an aerial bombing campaign that had killed 42,000 civilians and destroyed 130,000 houses. About fifty British merchant ships were being sunk each month. Millions of civilians were being subjugated, slaughtered or enslaved in mainland Europe. The British had no certainty of winning the war. But Camp 020 did not torture or psychologically disorientate its suspected adversaries, as in the twenty-first century was done at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Milmo devised a delicate scheme, ‘Plan Squealer’, whereby Lecube was told that another informant had betrayed him and that it was better to make a full disclosure. ‘This ingenious plan to trap LECUBE’, Philby agreed, ‘is undoubtedly worth trying.’ Lecube did not fall for ‘Plan Squealer’; but he was never subjected to what his captors called Gestapo methods. As Robin (‘Tin-Eye’) Stephens, the polyglot who ran Camp 020, wrote in his internal manual for running detention centres, ‘Violence is taboo, for not only does it produce answers to please, but it lowers the standard of information.’ He forbade the hitting of prisoners. ‘For one thing it is the act of a coward. For another, it is unintelligent, for the spy will give an answer to please, an answer to escape punishment. And having given a false answer, all else depends upon the false premise.’ He preferred to apply pressure rather than to punch. ‘Pressure is attained by personality, tone, and rapidity of question,’ Stephens said: it allowed ‘no respite, no time to recover, no time to plan’.31
Wartime London
After Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940, he was given the alias of BOAR in NKVD wireless traffic. Whitehall was converted into a war zone, with barbed-wire entanglements and machine-gun posts to prevent ministries being raided by enemy parachutists. The camouflage of one machine-gun redoubt in Parliament Square as a newspaper kiosk was compromised by the vendor, who was not the usual runt with a fag in the corner of his mouth and a muffler round his neck, but a spruce, erect young Hercules primed for armed combat. Sandbags were piled high in front of buildings, shops and monuments. Bomb-shelters and anti-aircraft batteries filled parks and squares. Anti-aircraft balloons, resembling fat porpoises with silver scales that sparkled in sunlight, floated in the sky. The evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk began on 26 May. ‘If we lose our empire, we shall become not a second-rank, but a tenth-rank power,’ the new Prime Minister’s son Randolph Churchill told Maisky. ‘We have nothing … So, there is nothing for it but to fight to the end.’ Maisky however thought that many Conservative leaders still hoped to divert Germany to attack Russia. This group was, he recognized, ‘scared stiff about the social and political consequences of the war, and is ready to conclude a “rotten peace” … in order to retain its capitalist privileges’. Soviet penetration agents in Whitehall could not relent in their espionage.32
German aerial bombing raids, known in England as the Blitz, began in London on 7 September 1940. Officers of the security services, like other Londoners, were placed under maddening strain on bombing-nights, and took daytime decisions when enervated by sleep deprivation. Norman Mott, who was head of security at the London headquarters of wartime SOE and peacetime SIS, kept his colleagues sane during bad air-raids with his imitations of Donald Duck. ‘Mott was a much liked, laconic pipe-smoker who was never seen to be anything less than cool and controlled,’ wrote an SIS colleague, before mentioning that prized virtue of Whitehall officials of his generation: ‘his sense of humour was always capable of relieving tension’.33
The clubs of St James’s Street and Pall Mall were so close to the prime targets of Whitehall, the Palace of Westminster and Buckingham Palace that bombs rained down on them. Late at night on 24 September Liddell left the Reform Club in Pall Mall, where he had dined with Burgess and Blunt, just after ‘a Molotov breadbasket’ (a high-explosive bomb, which scattered a cluster of incendiary bombs as it fell) dispersed its fiery load around him: ‘people were rushing about in dressing-gowns with bags of sand. When I got into the Mall the whole of St James’s Park was lit up as if by Roman candles.’ Malcolm Muggeridge and Graham Greene, both wartime SIS operatives, sometimes ventured out in the Blitz together. ‘This was not out of bravado or a wish to be killed; just an instinctive movement towards where the noise was loudest, as people on a seaside beach gather where the throng is greatest,’ Muggeridge recalled. ‘There was something rather wonderful about London in the Blitz, with no street lights, no traffic and no pedestrians to speak of; just an empty, dark city, torn with great explosions, racked with ack-ack fire, lit with lurid flames, acrid smoke, its air full of the dust of fallen buildings.’34
Hostile voices have long protested that the secret services were recruited to an excessive extent from the privileged class who were members of such clubs as White’s, Brooks’s, Boodle’s, the Athenaeum and the Travellers. Criticism focuses on the class exclusivity of the clubs, not on their gender exclusivity (the Reform first admitted women members in 1981, while the Oxford and Cambridge Club delayed admitting women graduates until 1996). In fact, many of the wartime recruits to SOE, SIS and MI5 were encouraged to join such clubs after their enlistment precisely because (unlike restaurants or public houses) it was impossible for outsiders to keep watch inside a club, and much harder to be overheard in a compromising way. Even so, Hugh Dalton, successively Minister of Economic Warfare and head of SOE, was ‘appalled at the amount of quack quack which goes on in West End Clubs’, he said in 1940. ‘Some tell me … that the Athenaeum is a little safer than some other Clubs, but I doubt even this. It is always observed, I say, who is with whom, and intelligent guesses are then made as to why they are together.’ This was also the view of Dick White who, as Chief of SIS in 1967 invited Hugh Trevor-Roper to lunch at the Garrick Club to discuss recent publicity about Philby, but then changed the venue to a French restaurant in Northumberland Avenue, off Whitehall. If they were seen together in the Garrick, White explained, speculation would be rife.35
Dennis Wheatley, the novelist of black magic who was recruited in 1941 to Whitehall’s efforts to deceive the German enemy, gave a rollicking account of lunching with intelligence officers in a St James’s club. With a novelist’s imagination, he claimed – and others believed – that the officers consumed two or three glasses of Pimm’s in the club bar, a shot of spirits laced with absinthe, then a meal of smoked salmon or potted shrimps, Dover sole, jugged hare or game, ending with a Welsh rarebit savoury, washed down by red and white wines, finished with port or Kümmel. The drab reality is that rich, lengthy lunches were rarities preserved by Victor Rothschild. A major in the Intelligence Corps, Rupert Speir, when he lunched with MI5 colleagues at his club Brooks’s, had hasty meals: ‘I merely flash in and out.’ At Philby’s club, the Athenaeum, there was no cocktail bar serving Pimm’s or absinthe. The rationed meals comprised snoek, whale-meat, frozen cod-fish, processed tinned meat, powdered potatoes and margarine. On three days every week no wines were served at meals. On other days there was a limit of one glass of sherry before the meal and one glass of port after. The wine served had the alarming description of ‘Algerian burgundy’. Sir John Sinclair, post-war head of SIS and like Speir a member of Brooks’s, had an identical lunch eve
ry day: a grilled herring and a glass of water.36
‘Better Communism than Nazism’
In the opening months of the war Churchill (newly appointed as First Lord of the Admiralty) had several talks with Stalin’s Ambassador, Maisky. ‘Your non-aggression pact with Germany triggered the war, but I bear you no grudge,’ Churchill told him. The jolt had been necessary to get the fighting started. ‘I’m all for war to the end,’ Churchill declared. ‘Let Germany become Bolshevik … Better Communism than Nazism.’ (This contrasted with Beaverbrook’s message to Maisky. ‘What concerns me is the fate of the British Empire!’ he exclaimed. ‘To hell with that man Hitler! If the Germans want him, I happily concede them this treasure and make my bow. Poland? Czechoslovakia? What are they to do with us?’)37
Enemies Within Page 38