The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  The Security Service reported to Churchill that during January 1945:

  TATE and ROVER have been successfully supplying misleading information about the fall of V.1. and V.2., and there is some reason to believe that their messages are having an effect on the places where these missiles are falling. TATE has also been used at the Admiralty for Naval deception with great success.143

  Masterman wrote later:

  Over a period of some months we contrived to encourage the enemy steadily to diminish his range; thus in the four weeks from 20 January to 17 February 1945 the real M.P.I. moved eastward about two miles a week and ended well outside the boundary of London region.

  … A captured German map shows a schedule of results for a fortnight based on agents’ reports and gives the M.P.I. in the Charing Cross area. This is, of course, exactly what we wished the enemy to believe.144

  The monthly report to Churchill for February 1945 concluded:

  TATE and ROVER have continued to supply misleading information about the fall of V.2 and it is now possible to conclude with some certainty that the shift to the north-east of London of the mean point of impact of V.2 is due to reports from Special Agents. The renewed use of V.1 was foreshadowed by a message sent to TATE a week before the event.145

  By the time the last V-2 was launched on 27 March 1945, a total of 1,054 of the rockets had hit English targets, about half of them in Greater London. Over 2,700 Londoners were killed.146 Later analysis for the Ministry of Home Security concluded that, if the MPI of the V-2s had not altered when it did, about 1,300 more people would have been killed and 10,000 more injured – in addition to the disruption which would have been caused to government and the economy by many more V-2s landing in the area between Westminster and the docks.147

  While sending misleading reports on the V-weapons, TATE simultaneously took the lead role in the most important naval deception of the war. During 1944 German U-boats were fitted with the Schnorchel (‘nose’) device, a combined air-intake and diesel gas-outlet which enabled them to remain submerged indefinitely and be virtually undetectable by radar.148 They were thus able to lie in wait for convoys in mine-free channels. In November 1944 TATE reported to his Abwehr case officer that he had learned from a Royal Navy mine-laying specialist, who sometimes spent the night at his flat, that mines of a new design were being laid near the sea bottom at depths which allowed convoys to pass over them unscathed but would trap submarines diving to avoid surface attack. The deception gained added credibility when TATE sent accurate reports of U-boat sinkings in areas where the non-existent mines had supposedly been laid.149 The Security Service informed Churchill on 19 February 1945 that TATE’s deception was having ‘great success’.150 Early in March, off Fastnet, a U-boat hit a real mine which was mistaken by the Germans for one of the imaginary deep-water mines reported by TATE. As a result, U-boats were instructed to avoid an area of 3,600 square miles south-east of Fastnet.151 Masterman later concluded: ‘On a modest estimate TATE must have ensured the safety of many of our vessels which would otherwise have run considerable risks in that area, and it is not impossible that his misinformation moved U-boats from areas where they were safe to areas where they emphatically were not.’152 TATE’s German controllers were so pleased with the reports which deceived them that they described him as a ‘pearl’ among agents. A few hours before Hamburg fell to the Allies on 2 May 1945, his case officer appealed to him by radio to keep in touch.153

  For some in the St James’s Street offices of the Security Service, the final weeks of the war, when they were no longer faced with any serious threat to national security, were an anti-climax. Hugh Astor, formerly the highly motivated case officer of BRUTUS and other double agents who had played a key role, found himself becoming bored as his case-work ran down.154 So did Guy Liddell, who wrote in his diary on 4 May: ‘The end of the war is falling rather flat, and VE Day is undoubtedly going to be a colossal bore, with no food and no transport. The only thing to do is to tie a Union Jack to the bedpost and go to bed.’155 The mood in Blenheim Palace, where most members of the Service were based, was different. On the last Sunday of the war, 6 May, the church bells, which earlier in the war were to have been the warning signal of a German invasion, rang out to celebrate victory. The double doors in the Duke’s dining room were thrown open and staff allowed on to the palace terrace to listen to the bells. One member of Registry, who had ‘sweated through four years of war’, recalls that for her and her colleagues it was ‘a very tremendous occasion . . . a real thanksgiving.’156

  Contrary to Liddell’s pessimistic expectations, ‘Victory in Europe’ (VE) Day on 8 May was one of the most extraordinary national celebrations in British, especially London, history. Churchill spent the morning in bed at Number Ten preparing his great Victory broadcast, having been assured by Scotland Yard and the Ministry of Food that there was no shortage of beer in the capital –though ‘individual public houses here and there may run dry’. At 3 p.m. the Prime Minister began his broadcast, announcing the unconditional surrender of all German forces. Some from MI5’s London offices were in the crowd in Parliament Square listening to the speech being relayed through loudspeakers. When Churchill spoke of ‘the evil-doers, who are now prostrate before us’, there was an audible gasp from the crowd. As he began his peroration, his voice broke as he declared, ‘Advance Britannia!’ But it was firm and confident once more as he ended with the words: ‘Long live the cause of freedom! God save the King!’ Churchill made his final speech that day from the balcony of the Ministry of Health to the vast crowds thronging Whitehall, some members of MI5 again among them. ‘This is your victory,’ he told them. ‘No –it is yours!’ they shouted back. Churchill continued: ‘It is the victory of the cause of freedom in every land. In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this!’157

  VE Day was the greatest day too in the history of the Security Service. Its members did not rank their own contribution to victory as high as those of the armed services and their allies who had risked, or lost, their lives in battle. But they were right to believe that, by their comprehensive victory over German intelligence, they had saved many lives. Few, if any, of those who knew the secret of the Double-Cross System believed that it would ever be revealed. When Sir John Masterman (knighted in 1959) published his now celebrated history of it in the United States a quarter of a century later, many past and present members of the Service were deeply shocked. The Director General, Sir Martin Furnival Jones, who had joined the Service a few months after Masterman, wrote to him: ‘I consider your action disgraceful and have no doubt that my opinion would have been shared by many of those with whom you worked during the war.’158 Though Tar Robertson was dead, his former deputy John Marriott refused to speak to Masterman again.159

  The wartime success of the Double-Cross System initially raised exaggerated expectations about the potential use of deception in the Cold War against Britain’s former wartime ally, the Soviet Union. As early as February 1944, the LCS argued that ‘organised deception should henceforth form an essential part of any modern war machine’;160 its Controlling Officer, Colonel Bevan, argued in some detail in a post-war report that strategic deception ‘may almost be classed as a new weapon’.161 The LCS was directed in 1949 to ‘lay the necessary foundations to ensure the immediate use of deception from the start of any future war’.162 Post-war service chiefs showed great interest in the use of double agents. Guy Liddell warned in April 1951: ‘Our main difficulty may not be so much to persuade senior officers to allow us to run double-agents, but to prevent them from making us run everything in sight as a double-agent.’ There was, however, never any prospect that a Double-Cross System directed against the Russians could achieve anything approaching the level of success achieved against the Germans. ‘It would’, wrote Liddell, ‘be extremely difficult to “do it again” on the Russians.’163 When his friend, the former MI5 agent Guy Burgess, and the diplomat Donald Maclean defected to Moscow the following month,164
Liddell must have realized that a Cold War Double-Cross System would be even more difficult than he had supposed.

  Section D

  The Early Cold War

  Introduction

  The Security Service and its Staff in the Early Cold War

  For the small circle of those indoctrinated into the Double-Cross System, the Security Service emerged from the Second World War trailing clouds of glory from the most successful deception in the history of warfare. But for many of the Labour MPs elected in the landslide victory of 1945, who knew nothing of MI5’s contribution to victory, its reputation was clouded with suspicions dating back to the Zinoviev letter of 1924, which they blamed for the fall of Ramsay MacDonald’s first Labour government.1 When Petrie retired as DG in the spring of 1946, the internal candidates to succeed him were passed over in favour of the Chief Constable of Kent, Sir Percy Sillitoe, whom the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, trusted to keep the Security Service, so far as possible, on the straight and narrow path of political impartiality. Sillitoe was a large man with a powerful physical presence and a reputation as a crimebuster.2 Attlee was far from his only supporter in Whitehall. At interview in November 1945 Sillitoe outperformed the rest of a strong shortlist which included General Sir Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, who had been Churchill’s Chief of Staff, General Kenneth Strong, Eisenhower’s British intelligence chief (to whom Ike was devoted), and William Penney, Mountbatten’s intelligence chief (also highly regarded). The PUS at the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, noted in his diary that the Whitehall interviewing committee ‘were unanimous in choosing Sillitoe . . . I certainly thought he was very good.’3

  Few senior officers in the Security Service agreed with the Whitehall committee. Apart from being disappointed not to become DG, Guy Liddell, head of B Division (intelligence),* believed:

  (1) It is a mistake to appoint a policeman since the work of this office is entirely different from police work.

  (2) It puts the stamp of the Gestapo on the office.4

  (3) It creates a false impression in the minds of police forces generally and of the Services that MI5 is a kind of police dept.

  (4) It generally down-grades the office.

  Liddell did not think Sillitoe had sufficient stature for his influence in Whitehall to compensate for his lack of intelligence experience. And it was ‘extremely discouraging for the younger members of the office and for others coming in, to feel that the head of the office is likely to be appointed from outside’.5

  Sillitoe made no secret of his distrust of ‘Oxbridge types’ and ‘long-haired intellectuals’. Since the two senior MI5 officers who were to succeed him as DG – Dick White and Roger Hollis – were both ‘Oxbridge types’ (though not long-haired), the omens were bad. Sillitoe’s son later recalled an occasion when, convinced that his directors were trying to humiliate him by quoting Latin epigrams he could not understand, the DG stormed out of the Security Service headquarters, white-faced with rage: ‘When we got into the car I asked, “What was that all about?” He said, “One word – bastards!” He would return home to the flat in Putney night after night and tell my mother, “Dolly, I can’t get to grips with a brick wall!” ’6 Even Bill Magan (later one of the Service’s leading directors), who got on well with Sillitoe personally, recalls that the DG ‘never understood MI5 and was surrounded by men more intelligent and better educated than himself’.7 According to Norman Himsworth, Sillitoe did not help himself by swearing ‘like a fishmonger’s wife’.8

  The powers which Sillitoe acquired on his appointment as DG were constitutionally remarkable by present-day standards with no basis in statute. A report by Sir Findlater Stewart, chairman of the Security Executive, had concluded on 27 November 1945: ‘The purpose of the Security Service is the Defence of the Realm and nothing else . . . There is no alternative to giving [the DG] the widest discretion in the means he uses and the direction in which he applies them – always provided he does not step outside the law.’9 Since the Security Service’s powers were not defined by statute, however, it was unclear what their legal limits were. Though it was supposed that the authority for the interception of mail and telephone calls through Home Office Warrants (HOWs) ultimately derived from royal prerogative, the precise origin of the power to conduct telephone intercepts was ‘a little hazy’.10 A Committee of Privy Counsellors twelve years later could find no basis for the power to intercept communications other than ‘long usage’, but recommended that the practice continue subject to HOWs. ‘This means’, Sir David G. T. Williams QC later concluded, ‘that the Security Service, itself a body unrecognised by law, continues to rely upon a practice which is also not recognised by law.’11

  Sir Findlater Stewart’s November 1945 report also called for the reform of the confused chain of ministerial responsibility for the Service established during the war:

  It was controlled by the Home Secretary so far as it used the special postal powers, and the Treasury was responsible for providing it with funds. But the responsibility for its direction as a Service was a more difficult matter. From the summer of 1940 it rested with Lord Swinton, as Chairman of the Security Executive (he was, of course, not a Minister), then with Mr Duff Cooper, while he was Chancellor of the Duchy [of Lancaster]. It then went to Mr Eden, but only in his personal capacity and not as Foreign Secretary.

  . . . I feel strongly that the time has come to regularise the position . . . The Minister responsible for it as a Service (though not for action taken by other Ministers on its advice) should be the Minister of Defence, or, if there is no Minister of Defence, the Prime Minister as Chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defence.12

  Probably because of his initial suspicions of the Security Service, Attlee wished to keep personal control of the Service rather than delegate to the Minister of Defence. Sillitoe was instructed before taking office on 1 May 1946: ‘You will be responsible to the Prime Minister to whom you will have the right of direct access. It will be your responsibility to keep the Prime Minister constantly informed of subversive activities likely to endanger the security of the State.’13

  Soon after his appointment as DG, Sillitoe told Liddell that ‘He would be seeing the PM at least once a fortnight on the latter’s special instructions.’14 Though they do not seem to have met quite so often, Sillitoe saw the Prime Minister far more frequently than any subsequent DG for the remainder of the twentieth century. Sillitoe’s right of direct access to Attlee was a considerable asset for the Security Service which, as Dick White later acknowledged, he and other senior officers with a low opinion of the DG failed to exploit adequately.15 Sillitoe was a rare (perhaps unique) example of a DG who inspired greater confidence in Number Ten than in his own staff. After succeeding Harker as DDG in October 1946, Liddell sometimes stood in for Sillitoe (notably during the DG’s lengthy visits to the Empire and Commonwealth) at meetings with the Prime Minister. He too won Attlee’s confidence but, like other visitors to Number Ten, sometimes found the Prime Minister’s taciturn manner disconcerting: ‘You say your piece and when you come to the end there is a long pause – you then begin the next item on the agenda. I think it is to some extent due to a curious shyness, which he radiates, and indeed imparts to his visitors. He does not often look you in the face.’16

  The traditional culture of the Security Service, however, was to keep ministers at arm’s length. Guy Liddell wrote dismissively in 1950:

  Intelligence matters were usually of such complexity that the less Ministers had to do with them the better. It was far better to get things settled, if possible, on a lower level; Ministers had not really got the time to go into all the details. If therefore they were required to make a decision, it is as likely as not that it would be the wrong one!17

  The head of the civil service, the cabinet secretary and the Home Office PUS were each far better informed about the Security Service than most of the cabinet. During the Attlee government and most of the three following Conservative administrations, the Service benefited fr
om the confidence of the immensely influential Sir Norman Brook, assistant cabinet secretary from 1945 and cabinet secretary from 1947 to 1963. In 1950 Brook was asked by Attlee to carry out an inquiry into the Service. He told Liddell afterwards that ‘there was really practically nothing that he could criticise.’ Brook had initially been ‘inclined to think that the manpower and efforts devoted to the work of B1 [counter-subversion] were perhaps out of proportion with those of B2 [counter-espionage] but in arguing his case with the officers concerned he had been entirely persuaded that this was not so.’18 Brook went on to become one of the closest confidants and advisers to both Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan.19

  Soon after Sillitoe’s appointment as DG, he was instructed to inform the Prime Minister and him alone about any MP of whatever party who ‘is a proven member of a subversive organisation’.20 Attlee also expected to be kept informed about signs of subversion among ministers’ families. When, under Churchill’s peacetime government in 1952, the DG was made directly responsible to the Home Secretary (then Sir David Maxwell Fyfe) rather than the Prime Minister, Sillitoe told him that he had been ‘accustomed to confide in the Prime Minister certain delicate matters which came to the notice of the Security Service from time to time and which concerned the personal affairs of Ministers’, such as the case of ‘a Minister’s son who had become involved with certain people under investigation by the Security Service and who had given information to these people in return for some kind of reward’.21

  The 1952 Maxwell Fyfe Directive (kept secret until it was published in the wake of the Profumo scandal a decade later), which the Security Service regarded as its charter, reaffirmed ‘the well-established convention whereby ministers do not concern themselves with the detailed information which may be obtained by the Security Service in particular cases, but are furnished with such information only as may be necessary for the determination of any issue on which guidance is sought’. The Service’s role was defined as follows: