The Defence of the Realm
Page 130
T. Driberg
S. Silverman
R. Parker
E. Fernyhough
S. Swingler
J. Rankin
H. Davies
L. Plummer
R. Kell[e]y
T. Swain
J. Hart
The fact that a seventeenth name has been crossed out suggests that, as indicated by the inaccurate pencilled total on the document, the CP list may originally have contained more names. The list is filed in Security Service Archives.
89 See below, pp. 542–3.
90 Security Service Archives. The Service believed that the twenty-five MPs on Gordon Walker’s list posed little threat and had limited influence. ‘The ten MPs who appear to be of most significance’ were:
Harold Davies (Leek): believed never to have been CP member but ‘in contact with leading members of the Party’.
S. O. Davies (Merthyr Tydfil): there was ‘evidence from LASCAR to show that if not of the Party, he is at least very close to it indeed’.
Richard Kelley (Don Valley): believed to have been a CPGB member 1932–55. There was some evidence that he left ‘on purely tactical grounds’ but ‘The CPGB have, and quite rightly, a low opinion of his intelligence.’
Julius Silverman (Aston): ‘He has, for a long time, had extremely close relations with the Soviet Embassy, and may well be considered a useful source of Parliamentary information, if nothing more.’
Stephen Swingler (Newcastle-under-Lyne): believed to have joined the CPGB c. 1934, left in 1940 and rejoined in 1945. ‘According to Douglas Hyde, he was a crypto-Communist when he was first elected to Parliament in 1945, but there is sufficient evidence to suggest that he finally left about 1951. He has, nevertheless, continued to associate with extreme left-wing and Communist-dominated concerns . . .’
Frank Allaun (Salford East): believed to have been a CPGB member 1936–44, after which he was variously assessed as a Titoist or Trotskyist and was still believed to have ‘Trotskyist sympathies’. There were ‘repeated reports that Allaun has been doing undercover work for the CPGB, though LASCAR reports that Peter Zinkin, the Daily Worker parliamentary correspondent, has no very high opinion of his integrity and considers that he usually follows a safe line, even though on the left’.
John Baird (Wolverhampton): ‘The CPGB’s assessment of him as a Trotskyist is probably correct.’
John Mendelson (Penistone): despite LASCAR evidence that he was a Party member in the 1940s, the CPGB ‘appears to think that he may have been working for the Foreign Office, the Security Service or the Police’. It was probably wrong on all counts. In 1956 he was described by Harry Pollitt as a ‘fishy’ sort of character. He later came under some suspicion of espionage and an HOW was obtained in 1962 – apparently as a result of his meetings with a suspected Russian intelligence officer. In 1960 he had had meetings with a Czechoslovak intelligence officer. Though only part of Mendelson’s file survives, no evidence of espionage appears to have been obtained.
Thomas Swain (North East Derbyshire): there were F4 reports alleging donations by him to the East Midlands district of the CPGB and the Daily Worker fighting fund. ‘He is also known to have passed Minutes of the Executive Committee of the NUM to the Party.’
Sir Leslie Plummer (Deptford): two LASCAR reports in January 1961 ‘suggest that the Party thinks well of his activities’.
91 Security Service Archives.
92 Security Service Archives.
93 Chapman Pincher, ‘Labour Made Loyalty Probe’, Daily Express, 15 Feb. 1967.
94 Daily Mail, 15 Feb. 1967.
95 Security Service Archives.
96 Security Service Archives.
97 Security Service Archives.
98 Chapman Pincher, ‘A Communist Spy in the Labour Machine’, Daily Express, 28 June 1968. Pincher’s article did not identify Bax by name.
99 Security Service Archives.
100 Security Service Archives.
101 Security Service Archives. Wilson became secretary for overseas trade at the Board of Trade in March 1947 before his appointment as president and cabinet minister in October.
102 Security Service Archives.
103 Security Service Archives.
104 Hennessy, Never Again, p. 417.
105 In April 1952 Bernard Buckman, a CPGB member who had been to a Moscow trade conference, boasted that he had ‘five MPs whom he has got together and is educating in progressive theory. The Party are very pleased with him for the work he has done. There is Harold Wilson, Sidney Silverman, Geoffrey Bing and so on.’ The claim that Wilson’s involvement in trade with the Soviet Union owed anything of significance to Bernard Buckman’s influence is deeply improbable. Security Service Archives.
106 Richard West, ‘Comments on the Week’s News: Moscow’, New Statesman, 14 June 1963.
107 ‘Harold Wilson Sees Molotov’, Daily Worker, 22 May 1953.
108 Security Service Archives.
109 Security Service Archives. A minute on 3 July 1954 noted ‘continued contact’ between Wilson and Skripov, who had been ‘identified almost with certainty as an Intelligence Officer’; Security Service Archives. Wilson’s last recorded contact with Skripov was in February 1956; Security Service Archives. Skripov was later expelled from Australia. Security Service Archives.
110 Security Service Archives. Belokhvostikov was stationed as counsellor at the Soviet London embassy from June 1952 to November 1955; Security Service Archives.
111 He made this claim at his first meeting as Prime Minister with the DG, Sir Roger Hollis, in November 1964. Security Service Archives.
112 Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive, p. 528.
113 Security Service Archives.
114 Daily Mirror, 18 Jan. 1956.
115 Sunday Dispatch, 20 June 1956.
116 Pimlott, Wilson, p. 199.
117 Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive, p. 528.
118 Ziegler, Wilson, p. 94.
119 Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive, p. 528. Allegations that Wilson was ever a KGB agent derive not from credible evidence but from unfounded conspiracy theories, some of them elaborated by the KGB defector Anatoli Golitsyn, who may have known of the existence of Wilson’s ‘agent development file’ and claimed after his defection in December 1961 that Wilson was a Soviet mole. When Gaitskell died suddenly in 1963, Golitsyn developed the bizarrely improbable theory that he had been poisoned by the KGB to enable Wilson to succeed him as Labour leader. Sadly, a minority of British and American intelligence officers with a penchant for conspiracy theory – among them James Angleton of the CIA and Peter Wright of MI5 – were seduced by Golitsyn’s fantasies. Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive, pp. 528–9. Wise, Molehunt, pp. 97–9. Mangold, Cold Warrior, pp. 95–7.
120 Security Service Archives.
121 Daily Worker, 21 Jan. 1963.
122 Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive, p. 529.
Chapter 6: The Hunt for the ‘Magnificent Five’
1 See below, p. 423.
2 See above, pp. 183–4.
3 See above, pp. 272–3, 280. Lyubimov, ‘Martyr to Dogma’, pp. 278–9.
4 Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive, pp. 202–3.
5 Security Service Archives.
6 Security Service Archives.
7 Security Service Archives.
8 Cecil, Divided Life, chs 6, 7. On Alger Hiss, see Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive, pp. 137–41, 176–7, 187, 189; Haynes, Klehr and Vassiliev, Spies, ch. 1.
9 Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive, p. 204.
10 Rees, Chapter of Accidents, p. 7.
11 Security Service Archives.
12 Security Service Archives.
13 Hill was a solicitor who had become the Service’s legal adviser in 1946.
14 Guy Liddell diary, 23 Jan., 16 Feb. 1950, Security Service Archives.
15 Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive, pp. 204–6.
16 See above, pp. 345–6, 3
49.
17 Guy Liddell diary, 11 Sept. 1950, Security Service Archives.
18 Philby, My Silent War, pp. 152–4. Cecil, Divided Life, p. 118. Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive, pp. 206–7.
19 This is acknowledged by Maclean’s controller, Yuri Modin; Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends, p. 199.
20 Philby, My Silent War, p. 156. The later KGB claim that the escapades which led to Burgess’s recall were pre-planned is deeply implausible and not corroborated by, among other sources, Mitrokhin’s notes from KGB files; the escapades were much in line with similar, unpremeditated ‘scrapes’ by Burgess over the previous few years.
21 Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive, p. 207.
22 Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends, pp. 199–204. Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, pp. 338–9.
23 Aldrich, Hidden Hand, p. 436.
24 Security Service Archives.
25 Security Service Archives.
26 Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive, p. 208. A4 stopped work at Saturday lunchtime until 1956; see above, p. 335.
27 Aldrich, Hidden Hand, p. 437.
28 Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive, p. 208.
29 Security Service Archives.
30 Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive, p. 208.
31 Ibid., p. 209.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., ch. 9.
34 Borovik, Philby Files, p. 294.
35 Philby, My Silent War, pp. 168–9.
36 Security Service Archives.
37 Security Service Archives.
38 Philby, My Silent War, p. 169.
39 Security Service Archives.
40 Security Service Archives. VENONA is not mentioned by name; there is reference only to ‘the secret sources which eventually led to the suspicions about Maclean’.
41 See above, p. 376.
42 Security Service Archives.
43 Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 406. Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends, pp. 213–18. Modin is apparently unaware that Colville had recorded his 1939 meetings with Cairncross in his diary, and is wrongly sceptical of his ability to identify Cairncross as the author of a note describing one of those meetings, found in Burgess’s flat.
44 Security Service Archives.
45 In the course of his eventual confession in 1964, Cairncross admitted that he had taken the initiative in arranging an emergency meeting with Modin on 7 April 1952 by making a chalk mark on a pre-arranged ‘signal site’. Security Service Archives.
46 Security Service Archives.
47 Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends, pp. 221–4, 229–32. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 406–7.
48 Security Service Archives.
49 Security Service Archives.
50 Security Service Archives.
51 Philby, My Silent War, pp. 151, 171. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 439–40.
52 Recollections of a former Security Service officer.
53 Philby, My Silent War, ch. 13.
54 Security Service Archives.
55 Security Service Archives.
56 Security Service Archives.
57 Knightley, Philby, pp. 192–4. Philby, My Silent War, ch. 13.
58 Security Service Archives.
59 Philby, My Silent War, ch. 13.
60 Security Service Archives. ‘B% Report’ in the intercept indicates that ‘Report’ was a likely but not certain decryption; C% indicated a lesser likelihood.
61 Security Service Archives. The Gouzenko case was also known to a small number of Security Service and Whitehall officials.
62 Security Service Archives.
63 Security Service Archives.
64 Director D, Graham Mitchell, initialled without comment de Wesselow’s note of 13 October commenting on the importance of the newly decrypted message, but there is no clear evidence that he saw the note of 18 October which specifically referred to Philby as one of the few possible candidates for STANLEY. Security Service Archives. Included in the case later mounted against Mitchell as a suspected Soviet agent was the unfounded claim that he had ‘suppressed’ the VENONA evidence. One paper setting out the case against him claimed that he saw de Wesselow’s note of 18 October 1955. However, a marginal annotation to this paper adds, ‘These facts are wrong!’ Security Service Archives.
65 See above, p. 380.
66 Security Service Archives.
67 Security Service Archives.
68 Security Service Archives.
69 Security Service Archives.
70 Security Service Archives.
71 Seale and McConville, Philby, p. 226. Knightley, Philby, pp. 191–2, 203.
72 Security Service Archives.
73 It is uncertain whether Philby realized that Burgess had accompanied Maclean to Moscow at the insistence of the KGB. He later gave a rather embarrassed explanation to Phillip Knightley of his failure to see Burgess in Moscow after his defection in 1963: ‘[The KGB] kept us apart to avoid recriminations. I didn’t get to see him before he died. I’m sorry we didn’t meet one last time. He’d been a good friend.’ (Knightley, Philby, p. 223.) The implication that the KGB was in some way to blame for Philby’s refusal either to see Burgess or to attend his funeral was a misleading attempt by Philby to excuse his own callous behaviour. Maclean, who had never been a close friend of Burgess, gave the oration at his funeral. Philby later had an affair with Melinda Maclean.
74 Security Service Archives.
75 Security Service Archives.
76 Security Service Archives.
77 See below, pp. 420–21, 426.
78 Wright, Spycatcher, p. 144.
79 Furnival Jones noted that ‘although we would have much preferred not to produce such a note for the Home Secretary, the [PUS] Charles Cunningham’s advice had been that this was inescapable – the Home Secretary would not forget his request . . .’ Security Service Archives.
80 Security Service Archives.
81 Rose, Elusive Rothschild, p. 230.
82 Borovik, Philby Files, pp. 344–5.
83 Security Service Archives.
84 Security Service Archives.
85 Security Service Archives.
86 Security Service Archives.
87 Security Service Archives.
88 Security Service Archives.
89 Security Service Archives.
90 Security Service Archives.
91 Security Service Archives.
92 Security Service Archives. In 1972 the URG was absorbed into K3.
93 A report of 29 August 1974, which shows the continuing influence of Golitsyn’s mistaken definition of the Ring of Five, concluded: ‘The fourth may have been Blunt although there remains some doubt as to whether he was an original member of the Ring.’ Security Service Archives.
94 See above, p. 380.
95 Security Service Archives.
96 Security Service Archives.
97 See below, p. 707.
Chapter 7: The End of Empire: Part 1
1 Security Service Archives. The files of SLO reports from New Delhi, as from most of the Empire and Commonwealth, were, alas, later destroyed because of shortage of space in the Security Service Archives. Extracts and copies of individual reports, however, sometimes surface in other files.
2 Security Service Archives.
3 Security Service Archives.
4 Security Service Archives.
5 Security Service Archives.
6 See below, p. 481.
7 Security Service Archives.
8 Guy Liddell diary, 31 May, 22 July 1949, Security Service Archives.
9 TNA KV 2/2509.
10 Guy Liddell diary, 22 July 1949, Security Service Archives.
11 Ibid., 6 Oct. 1949.
12 Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive II, pp. 314–15, 561 n. 20.
13 Security Service Archives.
14 Murphy, ‘Creating a Commonwealth Intelligence Culture’, p. 142. On the first Commonwealth Security Conference, see above, pp. 371–2.
15 ‘Sir Percy Sillitoe’s Visit to South Africa’, 14 Nov. 1949, TNA PREM 8/1283; cited by Chavkin, ‘British Intelligence and the Zionist, South African and Australian Communities’.
16 Sillitoe to SLO Central Africa, 20 Dec. 1951, TNA KV 2/2053, s. 148a; cited by Chavkin, ‘British Intelligence and the Zionist, South African and Australian Communities’.
17 De Quehen to DG, 31 Dec. 1951, TNA KV 2/2053, s. 152a; cited by Chavkin, ‘British Intelligence and the Zionist, South African and Australian Communities’.
18 Security Service Archives.
19 Security Service Archives.
20 Security Service Archives.
21 Security Service Archives.
22 Security Service Archives.
23 Security Service Archives.
24 Security Service Archives.
25 Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive II, pp. 323, 330.
26 Security Service Archives.
27 Security Service Archives.
28 Security Service Archives.
29 Security Service Archives.
30 On KGB operations in India, see Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive II, chs 17, 18.
31 DG (Hollis) to Sir Burke Trend (cabinet secretary), 18 Nov. 1965, TNA CO 1035/187, no serial number. Freeman was concerned by news that budget cutbacks, imposed by the Treasury, might put the SLO’s post at risk. Freeman was himself one of the targets of KGB active measures in India aimed at discrediting US and British policy. Before the 1967 Indian elections a bogus letter from Freeman forged by the KGB, claiming that the CIA was secretly giving vast sums to right-wing parties and politicians, appeared in the press. On this occasion, however, Service A (the KGB active measures department) slipped up. The latter wrongly identified Mr Freeman as Sir John Freeman. Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive II, pp. 317–18.
32 Rimington, Open Secret, pp. 66–7.
33 Louis and Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Decolonisation’.
34 In some posts SLOs/DSOs answered to the heads of SIME and SIFE.
35 A rare exception to the goodwill usually engendered by Sillitoe’s imperial tours was a bad-tempered clash in 1948 with the head of the Malayan Security Service from which he eventually emerged victorious. See below, p. 448.
36 Recollections of former Security Service officers.