FOLLOWING OFFICIAL DISCLOSURES about the treachery of Anthony Blunt inside MI5, and, previously, about Philby’s activities inside the secret service, there were demands in Parliament for some form of inquiry into both organisations. MPs of all parties felt that Parliament and the public had need of reassurance concerning the loyalty, efficiency and accountability of the two services. I suspect that, following the disclosures in this book, there will be renewed demands for an inquiry of some kind, though after the debate on the Blunt case it was decided that none was necessary.
To anyone who has the genuine interests of MI5 and the secret service at heart, as I hope I have, there are basic objections to an outside inquiry of any kind. As regards MI5, it is an ‘illegal’ organisation, in that it has no basis as a government department that has ever been authorised and properly funded by Parliament. Although there is an official secret service vote, the secret service is largely in a similar position. So, insofar as their activities are concerned, especially in the field of counter-espionage, the security service can function with effect only by illegal acts, such as entering premises to search for incriminating documents or for objects that they can then photograph. Embarrassing legal problems could be set if they were caught perpetrating a ‘burglary’ even though, through the judicious use of watchers, communication devices and other means, this has never happened and is unlikely to.
On rare occasions, the services need to resort to the hiring of professional pickpockets to secure keys or documents. Caretakers and others may have to be bribed to facilitate the planting of microphones. They may have to exploit the facilities of customs to secure access in luggage to documents which they wish to photograph. They have frequent need for false pretences, purporting perhaps to be mechanics to gain entry to a foreign aircraft.
Governments of both the right and the left have seen advantages in retaining this degree of illegality, anomalous though it may seem. So long as MI5 remains ‘illegal’, it cannot be given powers of arrest, so there is no danger that it could become a secret police force and an agency of political repression like the KGB – which has powers of arrest and interrogation exceeding anything available to the British constabulary. As case records described in this book demonstrate, MI5 cannot force or require anybody to be interviewed, much less interrogated. This has enabled people to escape retribution for treachery, for the police cannot be called in to make an arrest until there is evidence of the kind that can be brought into a British court of justice, and, all too often, this is lacking. This inevitably reduces MI5’s capacity to catch spies or even to stop known spies from continuing with their activities against the national interest. MI5 is often powerless to prevent a spy leaving the country. It is doubtful, for example, whether it could have stopped Maclean and Burgess from going to France had they been approached and declined to remain in Britain. When these traitors reached Moscow, they drew money from their British bank accounts because, apparently, there were no powers to prevent them from doing so.
My attention was drawn to a further weakness of MI5’s position shortly before the big British trade exhibition staged in Moscow in 1961, a weakness that must continue so long as the service remains ‘illegal’. There was considerable concern – justified as it turned out – because MI5 knew that the KGB would do all it could to suborn young technicians, mainly from electronic and engineering firms, attending the exhibition. The firms they represented were for the most part involved in defence projects, and there would be a fair chance that anyone who could be recruited would, one day, find himself concerned with some secret contract. MI5 was therefore most anxious that the visitors to Moscow should first be warned, in as vivid a way as possible, of the dangers of blackmail through gifts and sexual indiscretions, which might be made easy for them. I asked an MI5 officer, who sought my help, why his organisation could not warn the visitors or their employers directly. He assured me that this was not feasible because, officially, MI5 did not exist.
To overcome this problem, I was asked to give prominence to a series of actual, and then secret, cases that showed how the KGB operated and how, by making a clean breast of matters at an early stage, its threats could be countered. This seemed a roundabout and uncertain way of issuing a most important official warning, for it was to be limited to the pages of the Daily Express, which, in spite of its large circulation, might not be read by those for whom it was intended. Apparently, though, it seemed to work to MI5’s satisfaction.
Such weaknesses have been considered preferable to the creation of a legalised security service with greater powers, and this remains the view of the government and of MI5 itself.
Over recent years, MI5’s powers to carry out routine procedures, such as tapping telephones, have been greatly reduced and controlled, contrary to sensational reports that they have been intensified. While any secretary of state can issue a warrant for the tapping of a suspect’s telephone, in practice this is now restricted almost entirely to the Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary. Each time MI5 puts forward a case for the surveillance of a suspect, the Home Secretary in person has to read the case file, and, if he agrees with the proposal, he signs a warrant giving legality to the procedures, which do not include entry to private premises. The Foreign Secretary is required to observe the same process with regard to surveillance requests made by the secret service. Each case is reviewed monthly and only if the counter-espionage authorities can substantiate their continuing need is a further warrant issued.
Previously, the security authorities did not require warrants to tap the telephones of foreign diplomats or Soviet bloc embassies, but now they do. Blanket warrants covering organisations rather than individuals are issued for this purpose, but they still have to be reviewed and reissued monthly.
The granting of a warrant for a combined bug and tap, that is, the tapping of a telephone in such a way that it also serves as a live microphone in the room so that conversations there can be recorded on tape even when the telephone is hung up, has been made more stringent.
The installation of taps and microphones is carried out by a special security division of the post office, where controls have also been tightened. The post office invariably refuses to carry out any surveillance work without a warrant except in very rare cases where an immediate tap is necessary before there is time for a warrant to be obtained. In such cases, the warrant still has to be produced within forty-eight hours.
Because it has no powers of arrest, MI5 has to work closely with its arresting arm – Special Branch, the police department that shares with it responsibility for protection of the royal family, as well as counterintelligence against the IRA and other terrorists. Being a ‘legal’ organisation, Special Branch has powers to require the post office to tap the telephones of suspected criminals simply by applying to a senior post office official. This power has been given to them because the requirements of the police as a whole in this respect may be so great as to put an impossible administrative burden on the Home Secretary. In theory, this substantially widens the scope of the security authorities, of which Special Branch must be considered to be a part in any inquiry.
Lord Denning was almost lyrical about the harmony and cooperation between MI5 and Special Branch in his report on the Profumo affair. No doubt this varies with the personalities involved, but in talks at Scotland Yard I have been given to understand that there is frequent friction. Special Branch complains about having to do too much of the ‘leg work’ in counter-espionage operations when its own resources are also overstretched, particularly because of the terrorist threats to the lives of the royal family, senior politicians and other prominent people.
In its work, MI5 shares with police the power to intercept and read letters, which again can only be done, as a rule, in collaboration with the post office. I am told that the legality of this derives from a royal prerogative dating from the days of Elizabeth I’s great secret service chief, Sir Francis Walsingham.
In the United States, the clandestine opening of mail is, of course, illegal and, when the counter-intelligence section of the CIA was discovered to be opening letters from and to the Soviet Union, this led eventually to the departure of James Angleton and others from the CIA, following contrived publicity about it in 1974.
In the United Kingdom, the task imposed by the authorised opening of letters in the interests of security is enormous, especially when they have to be searched for microdots – photographed messages reduced to such a minute size that they can be camouflaged as punctuation marks. In the past, letters were steamed open and competent ‘flaps and seals’ operators – women being more adept – could open and reseal envelopes without leaving a clue at quite remarkable rates. The operation is now largely automated, the envelopes being slit open, then resealed by a machine that ‘stitches’ the envelope back together again, using the fibres of the paper to do so.
Enshrined in the British Official Secrets Act is the further legal right to intercept and read telegrams and cables in the interest of national security. The author was responsible for drawing the public’s attention to this in 1967 with extraordinary consequences in Parliament. These led to the setting up of a committee of inquiry under three of the Queen’s privy councillors to decide whether I and my newspaper had transgressed a semi-official arrangement between the government and the press whereby certain secret matters remain suppressed. The inquiry reported that we had done no such thing and revealed that the regular practice of reading cables had gone on for forty years. Its report also revealed that senior Whitehall officials had instructed junior officers to lie about the practice in an attempt to preserve its secrecy and make the public believe that I was in error. (Similar decisions may have been taken to discredit the publicity about the much more serious matter of the Hollis affair.) The security authorities’ main purpose in reading private cables is to detect instances where the cable offices, including those of free-enterprise companies like Western Union as well as branches of the post office, are used by foreign embassies and others for sending intelligence messages.
The security authorities are forbidden to tamper with the mail of Members of Parliament, including the lords, under the rules introduced by Wilson, which also forbade the tapping of their telephones even when they might be suspect. This has limited their recent activities, particularly in Northern Ireland, where MI5 is deeply involved, along with the secret service. One American senator has long been in the habit of sending packages to a certain Ulster politician, and MI5 was curious to ascertain the contents, suspecting that they might be money. It was decided, however, that this would not only be a contravention of the rules but that the resulting political uproar, if the intervention was discovered, was too dangerous to risk.
In the United Kingdom, and I would guess in most other countries, the security authorities obtain maximum assistance from the customs and immigration control officers, who can so easily manufacture excuses to search baggage and packages in privacy, especially on the grounds of examining them for concealed weapons and explosives. Documents can be quickly photographed and replaced.
The secreting of microphones and other eavesdropping devices unconnected with the telephone system in private homes, offices and hotels used to be a facility freely available to the counter-espionage authorities, but a warrant is now required. (In the case of hotels, ships, aircraft and similar locations, the permission of the owners is invariably sought and is rarely refused.)
In an ideal world, all privacy should be sacrosanct, but, so long as the KGB is so aggressively hostile, the nation’s counter-forces must have some powers of retaliation. But my latest inquiries convince me that there is probably no country in the world where those powers are now so carefully controlled.
Surprisingly, perhaps, there is some degree of self-restrictive practice inside MI5. A device called the probe microphone, enabling an eavesdropper to hear through a party wall, was hailed as a great advance by MI5 surveillance men, but the legal department obstructed its use for a year on the grounds that it constituted trespass!
Much has been made of the fact that facilities have been established so that thousands of telephones can be tapped at the same time. The purpose of this precaution is purely defensive, for use in a war emergency when surveillance of thousands of known suspects would be essential and would be covered, legally, by emergency government powers. I have described how pro-Russian subversion units – of which many members are known, while others would have to be discovered – have been established to sabotage communications and other essential defence services. Nobody in his right mind can doubt the wisdom of setting up counter-measures to defeat them, but the manpower to tap thousands of telephones in peacetime would be prohibitive. The tapping and recording can be automated, but the results have to be analysed by MI5 case officers, of whom there are surprisingly few.
MI5 is the smallest counter-espionage organisation of any major military power. Its precise size is an official secret, but I would be surprised if its numbers exceed 2,000, including typists and doormen. There are some out-stations, but most of the staff are based in the new and imposing headquarters in Curzon Street, where the heart of the operation is the computerised filing system containing quickly accessible details of about a million individuals, plus a further million files on organisations and other matters of security interest.
In his speech in the Blunt debate, Edward Heath suggested that the hand of the security services should be strengthened. I would endorse that because, as Britain’s military inferiority increases, compared with Russia’s, the need for counter-intelligence is intensified if limited forces are to be used effectively. However, I can find no evidence that Heath’s government did anything much to increase the size of MI5.
Successive governments have kept MI5 small by restricting the money made available to it. This normally increases annually, save when the security services have to take their share of government spending cuts but only to keep pace with inflation. Admittedly, the published figure is not the true sum, which is larger and hidden in other votes for purposes of secrecy, but it is still only a tiny fraction of that available to the KGB.
There is a further disadvantage to the small size of MI5. Everybody knows everybody else at the officer level, so what cannot be learned through official channels can often be gleaned on the ‘old boy’ net. This is a situation that can be exploited by a spy who manages to gain entry, as both Blunt and Burgess showed. The same was true of the secret service during the war. Through friendly colleagues, Philby, whose ‘need to know’ was then restricted to matters affecting Spain and Portugal, managed to read the ‘source books’ giving the names of British agents in the Soviet Union, with terrible consequences for them.
Before Sir Percy Sillitoe, the former chief constable, was placed in charge of MI5 in 1946, the organisation was totally independent. Its staff was paid in cash and paid no tax, and salaries could be at the whim of the director general. There was an independent auditor to ensure against embezzlement, but no detailed returns were made to the government and recently retired officers can remember how the directors general of both MI5 and the secret service had hoards of gold sovereigns, which they could hand out for special operations.
That situation ended when Sillitoe demanded that MI5 be expanded. The Treasury agreed but only on condition that it could impose controls. As a result, MI5 now works largely to civil service rules and pay scales. Retirement is enforced at sixty, while in the secret service it is normally required at fifty-five because, by that time, it is virtually certain that an officer’s cover will have been blown, making it impossible to send him abroad on intelligence duties. Only in the case of the senior directors is exception made. The pay scales and career structure are not conducive to attracting top talent, as was shown by the few candidates prepared to take on the director generalship of either MI5 or the secret service when both jobs became vacant recently.
This has not stopped the ‘Permanent Secretaries Club’ – as the chief Whitehall mandarins are collectively called – from trying to grab both jobs for civil servants in need of promotion. When Sir Martin Furnival Jones retired from the director generalship of MI5 in 1974, his natural successor was Michael Hanley, his deputy. The ‘club’ immediately put up its own candidate, a deputy undersecretary at the Home Office, in the hope that it would then have more control over the security service. The Prime Minister, Edward Heath, chose Hanley, but the ‘club’ then came forward with another candidate from the Home Office. They exerted maximum pressure, which was overcome only when Heath was informed that the man being so strongly promoted had been a close friend of both Maclean and Burgess.
I suspect that the ‘club’s’ frustration was being expressed when a senior civil servant slyly told me that on Michael Hanley’s first visit abroad, to Cyprus, he had torn ligaments in both of his legs and would spend several months in a wheelchair. I kept that secret.
Many civil servants would support a proposition, frequently made in the past and likely to be resurrected, that there should be a ministry for security and intelligence – that is, uniting MI5 and the secret service – with a minister responsible to Parliament in control. There is something to be said in theory for such a union. When I telephoned Sir Maurice Oldfield, formerly director general of the secret service, when he was appointed controller of security in Northern Ireland, I asked him if he would also be concerned with intelligence there. ‘The two are inseparable,’ he replied.
Nevertheless, the objections to such a ministry are legion. MI5 and the secret service are already suffering from excessive bureaucracy, and the assumption of responsibility for security by a single ministry would almost certainly make penetration of all the other ministries much easier. Currently, each ministry is responsible for its own security, with a small staff for that purpose. Whitehall and its offshoots are now so vast that a single extra ministry trying to cope with the security problems of all the rest would be unwieldy and almost certainly less effective. Admittedly, the KGB, which is responsible for both security and intelligence, functions like an enormous ministry but succeeds, in spite of that, through its unlimited powers and total immunity from accountability to the Soviet people.
There has been much talk about other ways of making the security and espionage services more accountable to Parliament and to the public, but it is difficult to see how this could be done in view of the degree of secrecy necessary if they are to fulfil their functions. Even those intelligence officers who deplore the way the penetration of MI5 and the secret service by the KGB has been concealed are totally convinced that such organisations cannot operate except in total secrecy. The kind of public inquiry to which the American CIA was subjected following the Watergate scandal did enormous and probably irreparable damage to the defences of the western world, if only by discouraging the assistance given in the past by businessmen and other travellers abroad. No businessman is likely to volunteer valuable intelligence if the name of his commercial organisation operating behind the Iron Curtain is suddenly publicised, enabling the Russians to brand it as a nest of spies, with the consequent arrest of members of its staff, chosen at random by the KGB.
Presumably, any inquiry would concern itself with the efficiency of the secret organisations, and this would not be possible without some critical examination of their methods. The secret methods employed by MI5 and the secret service are regarded as being so sensitive that even Sir Derek Rayner, a close friend of the Prime Minister cleared for security at every level because of his business-efficiency work in the Defence Ministry and membership of the Security Commission, was barred from access to them. When he was given a free range among the Whitehall departments of state to recommend cost-saving improvements in efficiency, both MI5 and the secret service were excluded.
With the increasing reliance on technological advances, which give one side a valuable superiority until they are detected and countered, secrecy concerning methods of counter-surveillance and espionage is more vital than ever. Not long ago, the ‘sweepers’, employed by the Foreign Office to search for microphones and other concealed listening devices that might be planted by an adversary, asked MI5 for details of the ingenious ways in which it hides such instruments in its counterespionage operations, hoping that such knowledge would assist them in their work, which has the same end in mind. In the interest of security, MI5 declined to reveal its secrets and, when the sweepers induced senior Foreign Office officials to complain on their behalf to the Foreign Secretary, he upheld MI5’s objection. If sweepers, who are cleared for the highest security classifications, cannot safely be told such secrets, how could they be divulged to any lay inquiry board?
As MI5’s Jim Skardon maintains after his long experience, the most productive source of intelligence and of leaks is still the wagging tongue. For this reason, any efficient security service limits the number of people permitted access to its secrets on the principle of absolute need to know. Any inquiry would have to infringe this principle, for it also provides a convenient excuse for officials to cover up their failures and embarrassments.
A director general can all too easily convince himself that, concerning some particular event, neither the Home Secretary nor the Prime Minister really needs to know, a situation that has certainly been exploited in the past. After the navy secrets spy trials, Harold Macmillan was assured that no serious leakages of information to the Russians had taken place. He suspected that he was being bamboozled, and he was right. Later, when Adm. Sir Ray Lygo was vice chief of the naval staff, he told me that the leakages had been very severe and their ravages had taken years to repair. There was serious failure to inform Macmillan about the Profumo affair, while Sir Anthony Eden was kept in the dark about the Crabb naval espionage endeavour and Sir Alec Douglas-Home was not told about Blunt.
James Callaghan, when Prime Minister, was fully briefed on the cases of Hollis and other suspects only after he called in the heads of MI5 and the secret service to discuss another matter – an allegation by myself that Sir Harold Wilson had been under surveillance both while in opposition and while in office.
In their turn, of course, prime ministers and other politicians have convinced themselves that, particularly as regards spy scandals, the public has had no need to know.
There is a further reason, which is political as well as security orientated, why the need-to-know principle would have to be rigidly applied concerning methods. Because of the ever-increasing swing toward technical systems of espionage and counter-espionage, such as radio interception, code breaking and reconnaissance satellites, it would be necessary for any inquiry to include an examination of the work of GCHQ, with its huge headquarters at Cheltenham and numerous out-stations. This would not only involve an infringement of secrets of the highest order but a major difficulty would be created by the fact that the organisation runs in close collaboration with the US National Security Agency, which has stations in Britain.
Only those wishing to assist the KGB and its offshoots would want to impair that collaboration, which provides British intelligence with the results of American satellite reconnaissance beyond the financial means of this nation. In this context, the stupidity – or worse – of those Labour politicians who are agitating for the removal of American military bases from British soil deserves the fullest exposure. Not only would the expulsion of the Americans from Britain make the reinforcement of US troops in Europe almost impossible, but it would inevitably deprive the United Kingdom of satellite intelligence.
There is suspicion inside MI5 concerning the efficiency of the security arrangements at GCHQ. It is of major interest to the KGB, yet there is no evidence of recent efforts to insinuate any new recruits there, the implication being that there is sufficient penetration already.
A former senior officer of MI5, who worked at GCHQ for a couple of years after his retirement, has described the security situation there as ‘a shambles’, with people taking out secret papers and few checks at the gate to prevent espionage or sabotage. GCHQ is the heart of British intelligence work, and, though its costs are secret, they must run into hundreds of millions of pounds annually.
A further political problem would be created by the close links between the British security services and the CIA. Too close an inquiry would be interpreted as an infringement of Anglo–American agreements on security and intelligence, which require that no joint information shall be passed to any third party without joint agreement.
I have no doubt that left-wing MPs would be delighted to probe the CIA’s operations in Britain, which are modest but necessary in view of the huge American investment in bases and other defensive facilities here. In theory, the CIA cannot carry out any counterintelligence operations in Britain without informing MI5, but it is known to have done so.
The KGB’s intense interest in western methods of scientific intelligence gathering, some of which are incredibly ingenious, has been amply demonstrated by the upsurge and success of its espionage effort at establishments, installations and factories in the United States involving the suborning and recruitment of local-born traitors. In 1977, William Kampiles, a junior watch officer at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, stole a technical manual containing performance details of a highly secret reconnaissance satellite called the KH 11, which has since become popularly known as the ‘Keyhole’ satellite because of its close-up espionage capabilities. The satellite, which cost the American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, can take high-resolution photographs and transmit them instantaneously to ground stations, and was believed to be far in advance of anything available to the Soviet Union. The watch officer, then aged twenty-three, sold the manual to a Soviet agent for $3,000! For this, he was sentenced to forty years’ imprisonment.
In the recent spy case centred on another CIA officer, David Barnett, sentenced to eighteen years in jail, the KGB controller had been operating as a third secretary in the Soviet embassy in Washington. From Barnett, who had worked for the CIA for twelve years, the KGB received the names of CIA undercover agents and details of CIA operations abroad in return for about $100,000. His most damaging offence had been to sell the Russians an account of Operation Habrink, by which the CIA had secured valuable technical details about new Soviet weapons after they had been supplied to another country. The KGB pressed Barnett to rejoin the CIA, from which he had resigned, or to secure work with the Senate Intelligence Committee. Fortunately, its efforts in both directions failed.
An even more fertile ground for planting agents under diplomatic cover has been opened up and exploited by the KGB in the shape of the UN organisation in New York. Several defectors from that organisation have listed the spies active there. They include Viktor Lessiovsky, who is now a senior aide to Kurt Waldheim, the secretary general himself. In April 1978, the highest-ranking Soviet officer in the UN, Arkady Shevchenko, sought asylum in the United States and revealed the extent of the Russian conspiracy to manipulate the UN for espionage and subversion. Three months later, the FBI arrested three KGB agents using UN cover to obtain secret plans for American antisubmarine warfare. Soon afterward Vladimir Bezun, a GRU officer posing as a diplomat in the Soviet UN mission in Geneva, defected to London and named five KGB officers working under UN cover in Geneva and New York. Shevchenko stated publicly, ‘The UN became one of the best places for KGB intelligence activities. The KGB considers the UN the tallest observation tower in the western world for intelligence activity.’
This KGB concentration on the United States does not mean that its efforts against the United Kingdom have consequently been reduced. It is a canard, perhaps deriving from Soviet supporters, that Britain, having no defence secrets of any consequence, is no longer a target worth close KGB attention. British defence research, which continues to make a rich contribution to western defence, still attracts intense KGB interest. Almost every new defector provides evidence that the Soviet bloc embassies and trade missions are infiltrated with intelligence agents who still continue to recruit British traitors.
Leakages of information about British nuclear weapons have been suspected by both the Defence Ministry and MI5 because of information derived from radio intercepts and defectors. Investigations have so far yielded no names, but the information could only have come from a high-level Defence Ministry or Service source.
KGB interest in Britain has, in fact, been enhanced by its intensified activity in the United States. In the event of the military conflict in Europe, which some Kremlin politicians still believe to be inevitable, Britain would be the main reinforcement base for the American forces, without which NATO would have no hope of defensive success. It is therefore a key area – probably the key area – for sabotage, subversion and quick elimination.
Unquestionably, the Soviet leaders would prefer to remove the American component of NATO without the use of military force, and there are relentless political pressures to this end. Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Foreign Secretary, is known to have said privately in Moscow that the Soviet government is not much interested in the strategic arms limitation talks (SALT), which are mainly for stringing the Americans along and producing some concessions of value in Russia. For the Kremlin, agreement on a European Security Conference is far more important – as a step toward eliminating US forces from Europe on the spurious grounds that, since Russia means no harm, they are no longer needed.
Sadly, the Kremlin’s basic intentions are only too apparent, both from its behaviour and from the information imparted by defectors, military and political: to divide the western allies and then to rule.
In this endeavour, NATO has proved to be a productive hunting ground. Several high-ranking West German officers have been suborned, some of them committing suicide when about to face security interrogation. Copies of contingency plans have been stolen from NATO offices. In one instance, of which I have official knowledge, a copy of NATO’s entire nuclear targeting plans was removed from the office of the NATO supreme commander, then General Norstad. An RAF officer, who discovered the loss, told me that the document gave the places in Russia and the satellite countries that would be attacked with nuclear bombs in the event of a retaliatory raid, together with details of the squadrons involved and their routes. When he broke the news to Norstad, the supreme commander’s reaction was that, while he had little doubt that the document was in Moscow, it was perhaps just as well that the Russians should know what to expect if they ever attacked the West. The only necessary action, apart from a general tightening of office security, was to switch the routes.
The KGB’s most daring and most productive penetration of the NATO alliance was its planting of the Soviet bloc spy Guenther Guillaume as personal assistant to Willi Brandt, the West German Chancellor. When the full extent of his treachery was realised, one of the most senior officials at NATO military headquarters exclaimed, ‘My God, it’s all gone!’
The KGB’s Disinformation Department has been incredibly adept at sowing discord among the NATO allies, its most recent resounding success being the distrust of the American neutron bomb that it has implanted in the minds of West Germans, Dutch and Belgians. The neutron bomb is essentially a counter to an attack by massed tanks, Russia’s main weapon in Europe, but the Russians projected it as the capitalist bomb that kills people but preserves buildings. Though so patently fraudulent, this approach led European leaders to object to the presence of the weapon on their soil and induced former President Jimmy Carter to suspend work on it.
With a view to strengthening the United Kingdom’s capacity to resist the erosive activities of the KGB Jonathan Aitken, Tory MP for Thanet, has suggested that a committee of privy councillors could do a ‘quiet monitoring job’ on the security services, reporting in general terms. As Aitken said in the Blunt debate, this would be preferable to a select committee, which would inevitably include ‘some of the more controversial characters from the back-benches’, but even the privy councillors would have to be chosen with great discrimination. There are some among them who are considered unreliable by the security authorities.
In my opinion and in that of experienced security officers whom I have consulted, any inquiry except by people with personal knowledge of security and intelligence operations would be of little use in evaluating the efficiency and loyalty of the security services. This rules out the kind of judicial inquiry carried out into the Profumo affair by Lord Denning. A judge, used to the rules of evidence and experienced in normal legal cases, is not fitted to give an opinion on counter-espionage or intelligence operations that depend on methods quite different from those used by the police.
A tribunal of inquiry such as that set up to investigate the Vassall case, with officers and others giving evidence under oath and subject to the rules of contempt, would be too similar to the post-Watergate investigation into the activities of the CIA to be acceptable in the national interest. I am not greatly impressed by the argument that an inquiry of any kind would seriously damage the morale of the services, for the loyal officers would support anything designed to reduce the risk of harbouring traitors and prising out any already there. But, of all types of inquiry, a tribunal would be most likely to impair attitudes and morale.
In the Blunt debate, James Callaghan and Merlyn Rees both came out in favour of some kind of limited inquiry, while others, like James Wellbeloved, supported an inquiry wide enough to ‘clear the air of the stench of treason’. Margaret Thatcher won the day with her assurances that an inquiry was unnecessary following improvements in the accountability of MI5 and the secret service to ministers, increases in efficiency through better recruiting methods and intensification of precautions to prevent penetration by traitors. In the last context, Mrs Thatcher has been urged to announce an amnesty for all the old traitors prepared to come forward, confess their treachery in full and assist the security authorities to wrap up their cases in return for immunity from prosecution and, hopefully, from publicity. This has so far met with no positive result if only because the publicity given to the Blunt case as a result of the Prime Minister’s parliamentary disclosure has been off-putting to those who know that no action can be taken against them so long as they decline to cooperate.
I have established to my satisfaction that Mrs Thatcher’s assurances are well founded. There is much closer collaboration between MI5 and the Home Office at the highest official and political levels. When Merlyn Rees was Home Secretary, he instituted meetings with the director general of MI5 which are as regular as those held with the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Meetings between the director general of the secret service and the Foreign Secretary are also frequent. The Prime Minister makes it her business to see both men on occasion, so the days when either chief could deliberately keep himself aloof from political contact, as Hollis did, are gone.
With the able assistance of the Cabinet secretary, Sir John Hunt (now Lord), James Callaghan, when Prime Minister revised the recruitment procedures for MI5, bringing them into line with the improvements instituted in the secret service after the Philby affair. It was decided to broaden the social classes from which recruits were sought because MI5 had in the past been too ‘incestuous’ in this respect and major sources of former recruits were fast disappearing in the shape of the ex-members of the colonial and imperial police forces.
Talent spotters from both security services sit in when the Civil Service Commission interviews candidates for entry to the civil service as a whole, so that any who seem to be specially suited by qualifications and temperament for undercover work can be invited to join. Any candidates approaching the security services on their own initiative, and particularly those who are persistent, are now regarded as suspect until fully cleared by passage through positive vetting hoops, which have been made much more stringent.
Positive vetting means active investigation by trained officers, usually ex-policemen, into the background and activities of recruits. It has failed to weed out people like William Vassall in the past, and I have heard security officers say it would still probably have failed to put suspicion on Philby, had it been available in his day. It is certainly not as thorough as the system used in recruitment for the CIA, which involves the use of the polygraph – the so-called lie detector. While the polygraph, which records blood pressure, heartbeat and surface sweat during questioning, is fallible, I am assured by senior CIA officials that it is a valuable adjunct. It is also undoubtedly a deterrent, as the evidence of the recent trial in which David Barnett, a former CIA officer who was convicted of espionage, clearly shows. His Soviet controller had urged him to seek permanent re-entry to the CIA but Barnett was reluctant to do so ‘feeling that he could not pass the polygraph test’.
It is commonly believed that officers of the British services would object to the introduction of such a test, though when Maurice Oldfield was posted to Washington by the secret service he volunteered to undergo a CIA polygraph test to convince the American authorities that, as a bachelor, he had no homosexuality problem.
A further CIA insurance that could improve precautions against penetration of the British services is the principle of random recall. All officers know that they are subject to the possibility of sudden interrogation by security experts simply because their name has come up in the system. The recall includes another polygraph test. In Britain, positive vetting is supposed to be repeated every five years for each individual, so, having passed once, there is a five-year turn without further check unless suspicion is aroused.
The initial positive vetting process for the security services now takes several months, and nobody is allowed in until these have been satisfactorily completed. So far, this delay has not caused problems, though it has done so at the equally secret Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. Some promising recruits there have taken other jobs because the delay in waiting for clearance has been too long. A suggestion that badly needed recruits should be paid during the waiting period has been turned down by the government.
The universities are being used again as recruiting grounds, but in a much less haphazard way than in the ’30s, when they were such an easy avenue of entry for spies. University staff, who are themselves cleared as regards political reliability, are briefed by visiting representatives from MI5 and the secret service on the types of individual required. The kind of establishment background that enabled people like Burgess and Philby to penetrate the security screen so easily is no longer an automatic qualification. The field has been widened to include people of all social origins, including some blacks for special work among non-white communities.
There seems to be a much more pragmatic appreciation of the supreme importance of the security services in peacetime than existed in the recent past, when lip service was paid but little else, and they were left to themselves, often with results regarded as almost derisory. Though Harold Macmillan was deeply concerned with national security, he frequently complained to his Cabinet secretary about the futility and unreliability of many of the intelligence reports reaching him and, in his diary, was driven to refer to ‘our so-called security services’.
Those ministers, including the Prime Minister, who are in closest touch with the security services believe that their effectiveness has substantially improved in coping with the ever-increasing effort being mounted against Britain as a key member of the NATO alliance by the KGB. The appalling situation in which senior officials of both MI5 and the secret service were known, or deeply suspected, to be Russian spies no longer exists. Nevertheless, I find that doubt remains among some politicians and retired members of the services concerning the possibility that those who were traitors in positions of great influence in the past may have introduced successors who are still there. That the KGB would require them to try to do so, there can be no doubt. Care would have been taken to ensure that any senior spies in place within the security services served as talent spotters, providing the names of possible recruits among the more junior staff. The KGB would then do the recruiting, using whatever methods it considered necessary. The spies already in place might also be required to ease the entry of any new recruits spotted independently by the KGB and to ensure their allotment to sections of special interest to Russia.
Lord Trend was told by MI5 witnesses that Hollis might have recruited unidentified Soviet agents into the security service. That some of them may still be there was suggested by James Callaghan in his speech during the Blunt debate. ‘It is probably true to say that because of the effluxion of time those concerned in that penetration of the service have passed, or are passing out of active service.’
As I have said, I can find no evidence of the presence of spies at any high level in the security services, but there may be a case for an inquiry by some group that could reassure the community that ‘moles’ no longer exist at any level. The task of MI5, as publicly stated by Sir Martin Furnival Jones, is worth restating in this context: ‘The defence of the realm as a whole from external and internal dangers arising from attempts at espionage and sabotage or from actions of persons and organisations, whether directed from within or without the country, which may be judged to be subversive of the security of the State.’ In the nuclear age and in the current climate of East–West relations, a traitor in the security services is far more dangerous to many more people than a mass murderer at large. If he happened to be the top man during an attempted coup or a military emergency, such are his powers of command that he could do crucial disservice by ensuring failure to round up the subversion and sabotage units alone.
In my discussion of this situation with Sir Robert Mark, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, he drew a comparison with his force, and particularly the Criminal Investigation Department, when he joined it. It was well known within the force that corruption, in the sense that policemen were taking bribes to protect criminals, was rife. When Mark announced his intention of taking action to root it out, some of his Scotland Yard associates, honest men of good will, strongly advised against it on the grounds that the corruption had gone on for so long that it was accepted practice and that any prosecutions would do irreparable damage to the image of the police.
Mark went ahead, and many policemen, some at very senior levels, were prosecuted and dismissed. Now the public knows that the police force is at least far less corrupt than it was and that any officer taking bribes in the future risks heavy penalties. Nor is there any evidence that morale inside the police service has been damaged by Mark’s courageous action, a risk always raised when any far-reaching inquiry into the security services is suggested.
Treachery, for money or ideological motives, is a form of corruption and perhaps the public would be easier in its mind with a reassurance that, so far as can possibly be established, the trade of treachery, which has flourished so prolifically in the security services, has been abolished there. It is essential that any inquiry should not become a McCarthy-type inquisitorial witch hunt, as happened with the CIA, with results of inestimable value to the Kremlin both through the weakening of America’s secret defences and the damage to the image of western democracy. Nevertheless, if disquietude is to be allayed and confidence restored, full disclosure of the traitorous activities of the past may be necessary.