The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  Victory in the campaign against Communist ballot-rigging came with the civil case brought in 1961 by Cannon and Chapple against Foulkes and others in the ETU leadership. Appearing for the plaintiffs, Gerald Gardiner QC (later a Labour lord chancellor), claimed that the defendants were guilty of ‘the biggest fraud in the history of trade unionism’. A Service officer spent what he later described as ‘a very enjoyable fortnight’ attending the trial,71 during which the ten defendants who appeared in the witness box were discredited one by one. The judge, Mr Justice Winn, dismissed the evidence of Haxell and Frazer as ‘puerile mendacities’, and condemned the other eight for their lack of truthfulness. He ruled that Haxell and his colleagues had rigged the ballot, and declared Byrne the winner of the election for general secretary. The CPGB was also implicated. Mr Justice Winn found that ‘not only was the ETU managed and controlled by Communists and pliant sympathisers, but it was so managed in the service of the Communist Party and the ideas of the Party.’72 Subsequent claims by sympathetic historians that there was in fact no ‘evidence implicating King Street in the affair’73 are contradicted by the evidence of Security Service files. King Street, however, sought to distance itself from the ballot-rigging by holding an inquiry. Haxell, probably under CPGB pressure, resigned his Party membership. The TUC followed the court case by demanding that Foulkes, who had been named as party to the fraud by the court, submit himself to re-election for the post of ETU president. When Foulkes refused, the ETU was expelled from membership of the TUC.74 In fresh elections to the executive every Communist candidate was defeated.

  By the beginning of the 1960s the leadership of the Labour opposition was probably more concerned about Communist subversion than the Conservative government. Ever since its landslide election victory in 1945, Labour leaders had been worried by the presence of what they believed were ‘crypto-Communists’ on their backbenches. The Daily Worker news editor, Douglas Hyde, later recalled answering the phone on the morning after the election:

  The man at the other end announced himself as the new Labour member for his constituency. He followed it with a loud guffaw and rang off. I had known him as a Communist Party man for years . . . By the time the list [of Labour MPs] was complete, we knew that we had at least eight or nine ‘cryptos’ in the House of Commons in addition to our two publicly acknowledged M.P.s.75

  Francis Beckett’s history of the Communist Party concludes that, after the 1945 election, ‘About a dozen of the 393 Labour MPs were either secret CP members or were close to the CP, sharing its beliefs and enjoying the company of its leaders.’76 In November 1946, Attlee instructed the DDG, Guy Liddell, to inform him whenever ‘we had positive information that a Member of Parliament was a member of a subversive organisation’. Liddell believed that Attlee felt ‘he had a responsibility to the House and country to see that such members did not get into positions where they might constitute a danger to the state.’77 Morgan Phillips, general secretary of the Labour Party, kept a ‘Lost Sheep’ file on pro-Soviet MPs who ‘used their positions and their prestige, as members of the British House of Commons, in a manner inimical to the work of the party and in support of policies which, time and again, had been rejected by the Annual Party Congress’. Information on the misbehaviour of the Lost Sheep came from a great variety of open sources: among them other MPs, Party members and the press.78 It also drew on material supplied by the intelligence communities on both sides of the Atlantic.79 In 1948–9 four of the Lost Sheep – John Platts-Mills, Konni Zilliacus, Hugh Lester Hutchinson and Leslie Solley – were expelled from the Party by the Labour National Executive Committee.80 Platts-Mills, the first to be expelled, later acknowledged in his unpublished autobiography that he had ‘hurled himself at Ernie Bevin like a clenched fist whenever he appeared . . . to be acting . . . more abjectly servile than usual to United States foreign policy. This was only about once a day.’81 Morgan Phillips had another fifteen MPs82 on his Lost Sheep list marked down for possible expulsion, though none was in the end expelled.

  Among the evidence in the Service’s possession which suggests that Zilliacus may have been a secret member of the Communist Party in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War was a notebook belonging to Mrs Margaret Thornhill, who was suspected of involvement with ‘an undercover department of the C.P. run by [D. N.] Pritt and [Jack] Gaster’. Thornhill had written ‘Dues’ on the cover of the notebook in which she recorded monthly payments from a list of individuals headed by Zilliacus. The next two names on the list appeared to be those of the pro-Soviet Labour MPs Stephen Swingler and William Warbey (though only their surnames were listed).83 Both were on Morgan Phillips’s list of Lost Sheep. Attlee told Sillitoe in 1947 that he was ‘certain that Swingler was a C.P. member’.84 Zilliacus ceased to be a Lost Sheep after he sided with Tito against Stalin and was denounced as a Fascist by the Soviet press; he was readmitted to the Labour Party in 1952.85 The other three Lost Sheep expelled in 1948–9 were defeated in the 1950 election and did not return to the Commons.

  The concern of the Labour leadership with the Lost Sheep on its backbenches declined somewhat after the Party’s 1951 election defeat but revived in the early 1960s as it scented the prospect of a return to power after more than a decade in opposition. In August 1961 Hugh Gaitskell, the Party leader, agreed with George Brown, the deputy leader, and Patrick Gordon Walker, his closest associates within the shadow cabinet, that Gordon Walker should approach the Security Service to seek help in identifying secret Communists within the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). No other member of the shadow cabinet, including Gaitskell’s eventual successor, Harold Wilson, was informed of their intention.86 Gaitskell and his colleagues knew so little about the intelligence community, however, that they had little idea how to approach MI5. Since they were unwilling to ask the Conservative government for fear of alerting it to their plans for a purge of crypto-Communists, it was decided that George Brown should approach the journalist Chapman Pincher, who supplied him with contact details for both Sir Roger Hollis and the Chief of SIS Sir Dick White.87 Following a letter to Hollis from Gordon Walker, Graham Mitchell, the DDG, saw him on 5 September. Gordon Walker brought with him a handwritten list on House of Commons notepaper of sixteen Labour MPs who, he believed, ‘were in effect members of the CPGB pretending to be Labour members or men under Communist Party direction’ and nine ‘possible’ crypto-Communists.88

  The name at the top of the list was that of Will Owen, who nine years later was put on trial for spying for the Czechoslovak security and intelligence service, the StB. Though Owen was acquitted, he was, almost certainly, guilty as charged.89 Ironically, in 1961 Owen aroused less suspicion in the Security Service than in the Labour leadership. According to a Service assessment, he was ‘not known to be CP but CP officials say he has no hesitation about being in touch with CP.’ Owen was not one of the ten MPs whom the Service regarded as ‘of most significance’ on Gordon Walker’s list.90

  According to Mitchell’s note of their meeting on 5 September, Gordon Walker told him:

  The Labour leaders were aware that there were quite a lot of Communists within their ranks in the House but they had in mind to expel only about 6 or 8. When it came to taking this action they would take it openly, expelling the Members as being Communists. They hoped that if they made these examples ‘the others would be very careful’ . . .

  Before he had got as far as this, Gordon Walker may have gathered from my expression that his project was not meeting with much enthusiasm. He said that the Labour leaders were very ready for us to say ‘no’ and indeed half expected it. They would fully understand if the D.G. found that he could not comply with their request [for information on Communist penetration of the PLP]. In that event Gordon Walker would volunteer a one-way traffic, through safe channels, from him in person to any member of the Security Service whom we cared to nominate and whose identity he need not know, indicating without expectation of information in return Labour Party members whom the Party had reas
on to suspect of Communist sympathies.

  Mitchell did not respond to Gordon Walker’s offer but said that ‘it was incumbent on the Security Service to be very careful to do nothing which could be represented as partaking of a party political nature.’ Its records ‘could be used only in the interests of the security of the realm as a whole’ – and therefore, by implication, not to help the Labour Party conduct a purge. Though he did not mention it to Gordon Walker, Mitchell was also afraid that any secret project known to George Brown ‘might not stay secret for long’.91 Mitchell no doubt had in mind Brown’s notorious indiscretions when ‘tired and emotional’ (a euphemism for heavy drinking later invented for his benefit by Private Eye). It was later discovered that, having been denied Security Service assistance in tracking down crypto-Communists, George Brown had turned instead to Chapman Pincher.92

  Handwritten list on House of Commons notepaper given to MI5 by the Labour Party leadership in 1961 of sixteen (not eighteen as indicated bottom left) MPs who, it believed, were secret Communists and nine further ‘possibles’. The names of individuals to whom the list was sent have been redacted.

  Pincher later alleged that, after being warned by the Labour leadership of the crypto-Communists on its backbenches, the Security Service began an investigation which lasted ‘many months’ and involved ‘surveillance, the tapping of phones and the opening of mail’.93 Walter Terry also claimed in the Daily Mail that ‘15 Labour MPs were shadowed by security men and had their phones tapped.’94 In reality the Security Service made no investigations of any of the MPs on Gordon Walker’s list and sought not a single HOW.95

  Soon after Gordon Walker’s approach to Mitchell, however, the Security Service discovered that Arthur Bax, chief press officer at Transport House, Labour Party headquarters, was working for several Soviet Bloc intelligence services. The discovery was the result of information from one of Bax’s controllers, the Czechoslovak journalist Antonin Buzek (codenamed BROADSHEET), who worked for the StB as a co-optee.* Over the previous few years, while working in London, Buzek had been variously described in Security Service reports as a ‘communist devoted to his cups’, having ‘national deviationist [Slovak] views’ and being extremely fond of England. After unsuccessful attempts to use an elderly Czech émigré to contact him, Buzek was approached by an officer from D4 (which was responsible for counter-espionage agent-running), who offered to arrange for him to remain in England. Though Buzek did not accept the offer, he showed no hostility to the approach. In August 1961 an A4 officer personally delivered a letter inviting him to a rendezvous at a public house in Surrey and giving a phone number to confirm the meeting. A few days later Buzek met a D4 officer at the Jolly Farmer near Reigate. Following further meetings over the next few weeks, Buzek finally agreed to defect with his family in September. His most important counter-espionage lead was to Arthur Bax who, when questioned by the Security Service, confessed to working for the Russians, Romanians and Bulgarians as well as for the Czechoslovaks.96 In November 1961 Hollis had a series of meetings with George Brown at which he revealed details of Bax’s espionage97 – some of which were subsequently passed on by Brown to Chapman Pincher.98

  The most senior Labour politician on whom the Security Service held a file was Harold Wilson who, at the time of Gordon Walker’s approach to the Security Service, was shadow chancellor and chairman of the Labour Party National Executive Committee. In 1961 he had stood unsuccessfully against Hugh Gaitskell for the Labour leadership. The file had been opened soon after his election as MP in 1945 and appointment as parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Works. In 1947, at the age of only thirty-one, Wilson became president of the Board of Trade and the youngest member of the Attlee cabinet. Because of its unusual sensitivity, his file was kept under the pseudonym ‘Norman John Worthington’.99 Graham Mitchell, then B1a (responsible for studying Communism in the UK), noted when Wilson became a cabinet minister: ‘The security interest attaching to Wilson and justifying the opening a P[ermanent] F[ile] for him derives from comments made about him by certain Communist members of the Civil Service which suggested an identity or similarity of political outlook.’100 A telecheck on a Communist civil servant at the Ministry of Works recorded him bemoaning Wilson’s move to the Board of Trade in 1947: ‘He and I were getting you know – quite a plot, but it has all gone west now.’101 Such evidence, Mitchell minuted, did not establish that Wilson himself had Communist sympathies and he noted an attack on him in the Daily Worker for having ‘inexcusably failed to conclude a trading agreement with the Soviet Union’.102 In April 1951 Wilson followed Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan out of the Attlee cabinet in a bitter dispute over health service charges and defence expenditure which threatened to split the Party. In October 1954, a year before Attlee retired as Labour leader, a bugged discussion at King Street revealed that opinion at the CPGB headquarters favoured Wilson rather than Bevan as Attlee’s successor.103 (In the event, Attlee was succeeded in 1955 by Hugh Gaitskell, whose wife Dora had once amused King George VI by claiming that her husband was ‘rather right-wing’.)104

  King Street’s misplaced hopes in Harold Wilson doubtless owed much to his unusually frequent contacts with the Soviet Union.105 While at the Board of Trade, Wilson had paid three official visits to Moscow for trade negotiations, claiming after a game of cricket near the River Moskva ‘to be the only batsman ever to have been dropped at square leg by a member of the NKVD [KGB]’.106 His Russian contacts increased during his years in opposition after the Conservative election victory in October 1951. From 1952 to 1959 he worked as economic consultant for Montague L. Meyer Ltd, timber importers from the Soviet Union, paying a series of visits to Moscow, partly on Meyer business but increasingly with the main aim of meeting Soviet leaders and establishing himself as Labour’s main Soviet expert. In May 1953 the Daily Worker reported that he had had ‘Warm and Friendly Talks’ with Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister.107

  Though the Security Service never suspected Wilson of being a secret crypto-Communist or fellow-traveller, it looked askance at some of the Communist connections he developed in the course of his Russian travels and work for Montague L. Meyer. Among Wilson’s contacts was the veteran undeclared Communist Roland Berger, who figured prominently on MI5’s list of those selected for internment in the event of war with the Soviet Bloc. In 1954 Wilson suggested to Berger the names of businessmen who might join his British Council for the Promotion of International Trade (BCPIT), which, on Security Service advice, was later officially identified as ‘Communist controlled’.108 Surveillance as well as other sources revealed that Wilson was also in friendly contact during the 1950s with a KGB officer operating under diplomatic cover at the London residency, Ivan Federovich Skripov,109 and another Soviet diplomat later suspected of KGB affiliation, Nikolai Dmitrievich Belokhvostikov.110 Though Wilson did not know that either was a KGB officer, he must surely have suspected it. He later claimed that he had operated under the assumption that any Soviet diplomat with whom he had dealings might be working for the KGB.111 According to Wilson’s KGB file, his gossip on British politics, though it doubtless did not include classified information, was so highly valued by the KGB that reports on it were passed to the Politburo.112

  In January 1956, just back from his sixth visit to Moscow, Wilson told Skripov he was sure he would like an article he had written for the Liverpool Daily Post on his meeting with the Soviet First Deputy Prime Minister, Mikoyan.113 Skripov was probably even more impressed by two articles by Wilson in the Daily Mirror on his meeting in Moscow with the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. After denouncing those Western diplomats and journalists who wrote off Khrushchev as ‘garrulous, boorish, given to wild statements and even to clowning’, Wilson declared: ‘THEY ARE WRONG. THE WEST MUST NOT UNDERRATE THIS MAN. In a team of strong, able men, Khrushchev stands out as the undoubted chief.’ Wilson eulogized the extraordinary Soviet achievement in rapidly modernizing a previously backward economy which was now moving to ‘mechanisation
, electrification and automation’: ‘Let no one think that we can halt this industrial revolution inside Russia by our footling restrictions on exports from the Western world . . . In the next generation Russia’s industrial challenge may well dominate the world economic scene.’114

  In June 1956 Wilson was back in Moscow and had further meetings with senior Soviet figures. The Sunday Dispatch reported, probably accurately, that though his visit to Russia was ostensibly on Montague Meyer business, he was believed to be establishing his claims to become foreign secretary in the next Labour government by building up contacts with Soviet leaders.115 In order not to prejudice those contacts, Wilson rather cravenly refused to sign a letter by other left-wing Labour MPs condemning the Soviet invasion of Hungary in October.116 He appears to have gone even further in his campaign to establish himself as the British politician best qualified to conduct a dialogue in Moscow. According to his KGB file, one of the firms with which he was involved breached the Western CoCom embargo on ‘strategic’ exports to Soviet Bloc countries.117 Wilson’s official biographer, Philip Ziegler, accepts that this was probably the case: ‘The export of many items was forbidden; inevitably a grey area grew up in which trading might or might not be illegal. Some of Wilson’s associates strayed into that area or even beyond it.’118

  The high value placed in Moscow on Wilson’s political gossip, the dubious nature of some of his business contacts, his probable involvement in the breach of the CoCom embargo and his public praise for Soviet achievements probably explain the KGB’s decision in 1956 to give him the codename OLDING and open an ‘agent development file’ in the hope of recruiting him. The OLDING file records, however, that ‘The development did not come to fruition.’119 Though the CPGB leadership’s unfounded optimism earlier in the 1950s in its ability to influence Wilson had markedly declined by the end of the decade, traces of it still recurred in Security Service transcripts of discussions at the Party’s King Street headquarters. In October 1959: