The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  The Security Service had ‘good coverage’ of the secret Soviet funding of the CPGB, monitoring by surveillance and telecheck the regular collection of Moscow’s cash subsidies by two members of the Party’s International Department, Eileen Palmer and Bob Stewart, from the north London address of two ex-trainees of the Moscow Radio School.28 The Service was also well informed about the Party leadership’s attempts to deal with ideological dissidence among its members. One of its best sources, apart from its coverage of King Street, was an HOW on the formidable Betty Reid, who from 1946 was in charge of ‘membership’ issues – a euphemism for checking members’ loyalty and identifying those who failed to follow the Party line. Even a sympathetic history of the CPGB describes her as ‘the party’s witchfinder general’. In public Reid was uncompromising on the need to confront heresy: ‘Political differences, if they are not challenged and thrashed out, can over a period become so deep that in the end disciplinary action is the only solution.’29 Security Service surveillance revealed a more human side to Ms Reid. According to an assessment forwarded to the Home Office by the DG:

  In spite of her bulk and apparent lack of beauty she is a feminine personality . . . [who] tends to have a disarming effect on comrades who have been summoned to see her, and have mounted the stairs to the Org[anisation] Dept. prepared for severity. As far as I know, she has been entirely responsible for the elaborate machinery for the vetting of party comrades . . . Her patience and robust sense of humour are more than a match for the leg-pulling to which she is constantly subjected, and her great weakness is a profound liking for cheese cake!30

  Reid also had a weakness for cream cakes, which was regularly indulged by her contact at the Soviet embassy, Nikolai Timofeyev, whom she called her ‘cream cake pal’. Though playing a key role in Party security, Reid became convinced that her own security had been compromised, believing that the home help she employed from 1950 onwards was a Security Service agent.31

  It did not require secret intelligence to detect the CPGB’s subservience to Soviet dogma. The Party continued to perform almost instantaneous ideological somersaults at a word of command from Moscow. When the Yugoslav Communist leader, Josip Tito, was officially unmasked as a heretic, James Klugmann, his long-time friend and admirer, denounced him in a rapidly composed polemic entitled From Trotsky to Tito. The price of the Party’s servility to Soviet interests at the beginning of the Cold War was electoral disaster. At the 1950 general election both the Communist MPs elected in 1945, Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin, lost their seats. The Party’s general secretary, Harry Pollitt, went immediately to Moscow to seek advice from Stalin, whom he regarded as a friend, as well as from Soviet Communist Party apparatchiks. After a second trip to Moscow he returned with a document which formed the basis of a new Party manifesto, The British Road to Socialism, published in February 1951 and pledging it to a parliamentary route to power.32 At the general election eight months later, standing on this manifesto, all ten CPGB candidates lost their deposits.

  Telechecks, eavesdropping and agent penetration gave the Security Service a secret ringside seat at the disputes within the CPGB provoked by Khrushchev’s admission of some of the horrors of the Stalin era during his ‘Secret Speech’ to the 1956 Soviet Party Congress, which was published in the West (though not in the Soviet Union). During a bugged conversation at the home of the Communist Berger family in Highgate, Nan Berger (Roland Berger’s wife, née Whittaker) was heard to tell a Polish visitor that ‘A great many people had been completely knocked out by it [the Secret Speech] and just could not believe it. Another very large group were now saying “Well, really we’ve known this all the time. This is what the capitalist press have been saying, and we’ve been pretending it hasn’t been so.” ’33 The crushing of the Hungarian Uprising by Soviet tanks in the autumn of 1956 provoked an even greater crisis of confidence among Party members than the Secret Speech. In the course of the year, 7,000 people – over a quarter of the membership – left the Party.34 John Gollan, who succeeded Pollitt as general secretary, and the rest of the Party leadership, however, remained unswervingly loyal to the Soviet Union. Gollan ‘used to say in difficult moments that he could have done with a direct telephone line to Moscow’.35

  Late in 1947 the cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, had initiated a review of the 1939 Government War Book, which included preparations for internment.36 In the early Cold War the Security Service used its extensive records on the CPGB to identify the Moscow loyalists most likely to support the Soviet Bloc in a conflict with the West. Some, undoubtedly, would have done so. The editor of the Daily Worker, William Rust, declared at the beginning of 1948, ‘There are now two camps in the world: the imperialist camp and the democratic camp.’37 His loyalties and those of his comrades, he declared, belonged to the ‘democratic camp’, led by the Soviet Union. By August 1950 the Security Service had identified about 980 British men and 100 women (one-third of them in London), 150 Soviet citizens and ‘at least’ 1,500 male and 1,300 female other ‘enemy aliens’ for internment ‘when the flag falls’.38 As in the Second World War, the main internment centre during war with the Soviet Bloc was to be the Isle of Man, where two holiday camps ‘could be made available at 48 hours notice by arrangement with the owners’. The core of the Service’s list of British detainees was its Category A list of Communists, defined as:

  All full-time employees of the Communist Party, the Young Communist League and the Daily Worker (editorial and reporter staff only); all members of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party; all members of the National Committee of the Young Communist League; and all members of the District Committees of the Communist Party. 39

  The JIC, as well as the Security Service, was confident that internment would prevent the emergence of a significant British Communist fifth column supporting the Soviet war effort.

  Organised sabotage before the war is most unlikely because the Soviet leaders will be unwilling to give away their plans to Communists in the United Kingdom. No organised sabotage will take place after the outbreak of war because, as at present planned, the whole known organisation of the British Communist Party will have been smashed [by internment].40

  The elaborate preparations during the 1950s for wartime internment looked back to the experience of the Second World War rather than forward to the unprecedented horrors of thermonuclear warfare. The JIC calculated in 1955 that the Soviet Union would not use H-bombs against Britain until it could launch a devastating nuclear attack against the United States, which, it estimated, was unlikely before 1960.41 Defence reviews in the later 1950s produced a fundamental change in internment policy. The Service’s Legal Adviser noted after a meeting at the Home Office in March 1959:

  We were now to plan for a war of very short duration and complete devastation, and we were not to plan for any long-term war. In the circumstances it seemed to the Home Office that it was quite impracticable to carry out any detention and internment policy involving the present number of persons . . .

  Plans for internment camps were abandoned because of the impossibility of installing their inmates before the bombs started falling.42 Detention was to take place in prison instead. As in the preparation of previous internment plans, the cabinet played no part. Sir Charles Cunningham, PUS at the Home Office, wrote to Hollis: ‘The present arrangements do not seem to have been approved by any Official or Ministerial Committee. You may agree, therefore, that arrangements for implementing any revised plans can similarly be made without submission for any formal approval.’43 Hollis approved, indeed doubtless welcomed, the continued lack of ministerial interference.44 By May Day 1959, the Security Service had reduced its list of wartime internees to 110 British subjects (mostly Communists) and eleven aliens. The total included ten women.45 The drastic scaling down of plans for internment meant that, for the first time, the Security Service had no major role in the preparations for war set out in the current War Book.46

  By the 1950s the Service no longer saw the CPG
B as a major subversive political threat. Norman Himsworth wrote dismissively in January 1951:

  The British Communist Party at the moment is led by a group of old men unable, or unwilling, to pass on the responsibilities of office to younger and more energetic comrades. Never before, perhaps, in the history of the Party has the leadership been so poor, so incapable of carrying the masses with it, as it is today.47

  The Service regarded the main subversive threat from the CPGB as industrial rather than political. Attlee too was deeply concerned about Communist influence in the trade unions. By 1947 the government had a tendency to identify all industrial stoppages with Communist subversion.48 At the height of post-war shortages and rationing in November 1947, Attlee was counting on popular enthusiasm for the wedding in Westminster Abbey between the heir to the throne, Princess Elizabeth, and Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten to help lift the spirits of the country, and he feared the CPGB was planning to depress them. The Prime Minister ‘expressed great anxiety’ to Sillitoe ‘about the Communists; he thought they were promoting strikes to threaten the Royal Wedding.’49 In May 1948 the Security Service warned the cabinet that the CPGB aim was ‘to secure control of each individual union and, through the union, of the General Council and the Annual Assembly of the Trades Union Congress, potent forces in political life’. In view of the fact that only 30,000 of the 8.7 million union members were Communist, the Service believed that the CPGB had acquired astonishing influence in the labour movement, thanks, in part, to the ‘apathy’ of most non-Communist trade unionists. It had adopted an insidious strategy of entryism into the trade union movement, sometimes flagrantly falsifying ballot papers. The Service claimed to have abundant evidence of electoral malpractice. It gave the example of a recent ballot of the Boilermakers Society when only 4,000 of the 80,000 members cast their vote and many blank ballot forms were ‘filled in at Party headquarters’.50

  Attlee was alarmed by such reports and turned for assistance to the Foreign Office Information Research Department (IRD), founded in January 1948 to expose the aims of Soviet Communism and its Western disciples. In June 1948 the Minister of Labour, George Isaacs, told a cabinet committee that one of ‘the most urgent tasks was to organise effective opposition to the election of Communists to key positions in the Executives of the Unions’.51 The International Department of the Labour Party, then headed by the former Communist and future deputy Labour leader Denis Healey, proved adept at passing on anonymous IRD briefing materials to trade unions and other sections of the labour movement.52

  In October 1948 the TUC General Council accused the CPGB of pursuing a strategy of industrial disruption on orders from Moscow.53 Vic Feather, assistant secretary (later general secretary) of the TUC, gave a well-received address to a joint MI5–SIS Russian Studies Weekend at Worcester College, Oxford, in September 1951 on ‘Communism in the Trade Unions’:

  Mr Feather said that the TUC ‘had tabs’ on all those known to it as Communists . . . Though Mr Feather said nothing that was new from our point of view, he reflected the feeling of confidence of the TUC in its powers to handle the situation and shewed that it is very much alive to what is going on. He obviously did not disclose all that he knew and it seems that the TUC have good sources of information, at least on the more purely industrial side of Communism. Probably it runs a few agents.

  Feather believed that, in the midst of the Korean War, the CPGB was out to disrupt British rearmament by making its priority targets for strike action:

  (1) Engineering (the hub of the rearmament programme)

  (2) Docks (the focal point of rearmament transport, since railways are not concentrated and can be operated by troops, or replaced by road transport)54

  The Security Service agreed. Following Churchill’s return to power after the Conservative election victory in October 1951, the Service reported that the CPGB was trying to promote a new strike wave. In July 1952, Sillitoe told the Home Secretary, David Maxwell Fyfe:

  Since the end of 1951 the Communist Party has been following a militant policy in industry. The Party instructions to its followers in British industry are that strike action must be achieved where possible.

  A disturbing feature of Communist Party tactics in industry is their apparent concentration on engineering firms engaged on work affecting the rearmament programme.55

  The Industrial Desk of F1 supplied the Ministry of Labour and its successor, the Department of Employment and Productivity (DEP), with intelligence on Communist and Trotskyist penetration of the executive committees and full-time official positions of major unions and involvement in industrial disputes – mostly derived from a mixture of eavesdropping at CPGB HQ, telephone checks and F4 agent reports.56 In May 1953 the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions demanded a 15 per cent wage increase. Sillitoe informed Maxwell Fyfe at his room in the Commons: ‘Communist inspiration for and interest in the demand is clear; and, though we do not know the full story, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that, but for the Party’s efforts, the present demand might never have been formulated.’57

  In the spring of 1956 the Security Service circulated to the Official Committee on Communism (Home) a memorandum on ‘Communism and the Trade Unions’ which set out what became a recurrent theme in its reporting on the subject: that CPGB strategy was to use industrial unrest as a means of capturing and consolidating positions of power and influence in the trade union movement. Partly as a result of this strategy, one in eight union officials and members of executive committees were either Party members or Communist sympathizers. The Minister of Labour discussed this report with three leading anti-Communist trade unionists, who argued that the most effective means of countering Communist influence in the union movement would be to publicize evidence of Communist ballotrigging. A working group with representatives of the Security Service was established under the aegis of the Official Committee on Communism (Home) with the aim of publicizing such abuses and halting the run of Communist successes in union elections.58

  During his brief and ill-fated term as prime minister in succession to Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden took a close interest in the Service’s work on counter-subversion.59 In June 1956 he formally commended the Service memorandum on ‘Communism and the Trade Unions’. The Home Secretary told the DG, Sir Roger Hollis, that ‘M.I.5’s reputation stood very high, and that in discussion with the Prime Minister about the frogman case [the bungled SIS attempt to use ‘Buster’ Crabb to inspect the hull of the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze during its goodwill visit to Portsmouth in April], the Prime Minister had told the Home Secretary he was sure M.I.5 was much more disciplined than M.I.6 and that we would be unlikely to take any risky action without Ministerial authority’.60 One ‘unfortunate’ risk was, however, taken in 1957. Intelligence on a leading Communist railwayman, obtained in anticipation of a Home Office Warrant which the Home Secretary was expected to sign, was given to the chairman of the British Transport Authority, who used it to help settle a dispute. The Home Secretary, however, then declined to sign the warrant. Such incidents were very rare. According to a memorandum of 1970, there had also been no subsequent example of industrial intelligence being passed directly to an employer.61

  From 1957 onwards, the Service provided much of the material which was covertly used by Whitehall to orchestrate publicity campaigns against Communist influence in the union movement. By far the most successful of these campaigns was against Communist ballot-rigging in the Electrical Trades Union (ETU),62 which was exposed by two ETU officials, Les Cannon and Frank Chapple, who left the CPGB in protest against the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. Though ousted from his job as the ETU education officer, in 1957 Cannon beat a Communist candidate, John Frazer, for a place on the ETU executive. The election results, however, were falsified and Frazer declared the winner.63 Cannon was barred for five years from holding union office, but began a long, exhausting and eventually victorious battle against ETU ballot-rigging. Two BBC Panorama programmes pr
esented by the Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt made the ballot-rigging scandal front-page news.64 Cannon’s main ally within the ETU was Frank Chapple, who succeeded in gaining a place on the executive in 1958 and survived a campaign of intimidation to force him out.65

  The ETU scandal reached its peak when the Communist general secretary, Frank Haxell, was declared to have been re-elected in 1959. Eavesdropping at King Street revealed that, in reality, his anti-Communist opponent Jock Byrne had won the election. Haxell was heard reassuring Party comrades that he would fix the result.66 The Security Service was able to listen in on a series of meetings between the Communist members of the ETU executive and Party leaders. Hollis informed the Home Office early in 1960:

  We know from our coverage of Party Headquarters and of two or three of the private meeting places chosen by it that twelve meetings were held during 1959 of the Party’s Advisory Committee for the E.T.U. This committee consists of 9 communist members of the Union including the President, General Secretary and Assistant General Secretary, and is chaired by [Peter] Kerrigan, the Party’s National Industrial Organiser. On one or two recent occasions [John] Gollan himself has attended. This information has been made available to the Ministry of Labour.67

  The Service’s access to the inner workings of both King Street and the ETU goes far to explain why Hollis felt able to assure the Home Secretary: ‘On the subversive side I thought we had the British Communist party pretty well buttoned up.’68

  The climax of the media outcry which followed Haxell’s re-election as general secretary was a television interview by the former Labour junior minister John Freeman (later ambassador in Washington) with the ETU president, Frank Foulkes, on BBC’s Face to Face. The good offices of the Labour MP and television presenter Christopher Mayhew, who as a junior minister had helped to found the IRD, were used to arrange the interview. The Security Service was kept informed.69 Freeman challenged the evasive Foulkes to sue him and the BBC if the charges of election-rigging which he made against the ETU leadership were untrue. The TUC General Council also called on the union to take legal action to defend the good name of the labour movement. According to Chapple, the atmosphere on the ETU executive, of which he was still a member, ‘dripped with venom’.70