The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
wished, thus all-powerful and capable of dictating to Stalin’.80 This was so secret that it was never taken near the main intelligence machine. The JIC, which had not been told about America’s plan to use the atomic bomb on Japan, remarkably undertook very little work on the issue of the Russians after late 1944, precisely because Stalin’s future course was such a hot potato in Whitehall.81 Only in January 1946 did it feel able to revisit the explosive issue of Russia.82 By this time, Attlee, who became prime minister shortly before the nuclear bombing of Japan, had sought joint action with Russia to stave off an ‘imminent disaster’ in Allied relations. Taking over the helm at the Potsdam Conference of July–August 1945, Attlee wrote, ‘The time is short … I believe that only a bold course can save civilisation.’83
Churchill’s impact on intelligence at the beginning of the war had been formidable. At the end of the war it was negligible. He was simply exhausted, and increasingly overwhelmed by the complexity of post-war settlements. Many important questions about the future of British intelligence were now being pondered. They included the possible merger of MI5 and MI6, together with the future of SOE and sabotage. For over a year, Churchill and Eden had also discussed whether it might be a good idea to merge SOE and MI6, in an attempt to end their squabbling. Churchill had decided not, concluding that the ‘warfare’ between the two secret services was ‘a lamentable, but inevitable, feature of our affairs’.84
By 1945, senior officials were anxious to keep these discussions away from Churchill, judging him too tired to make sensible decisions. Alexander Cadogan, the senior official at the Foreign Office, agreed with the military that there should be a report on relations between MI5 and MI6. The logical person to do this was the cabinet secretary, but then it would come to the notice of the prime minister, who would ‘have wanted to know all about it’. Guy Liddell discussed this review with Peter Loxley, a young diplomat who helped Cadogan with intelligence matters, and said that ‘In my experience once things of this sort reached cabinet level it was the toss of a coin whether they went right or wrong.’ Loxley entirely agreed, and mentioned ‘off the record’ the bizarre atmosphere in which SOE’s future was being discussed. Churchill received minutes on these subjects at the end of a rather tiring day, and scribbled across them: ‘Let Major Morton look into this and advise. SIS [MI6] I know but who are SOE? I know S. Menzies. He is head of MI5.’85 Menzies was, of course, the chief of MI6. By this time, Churchill was in no state to be making important decisions about the future of intelligence.
With Churchill fading fast, square-minded individuals and bureaucrats did their level best to kill off SOE. Diplomats and staff officers, people who saw the world from behind a collar-stud, instinctively feared special forces and ‘funnies’ just as much as Churchill loved them. As the war drew to a close, Sir Esler Denning, Britain’s most senior diplomat in the Far East, insisted that some order must now be brought to the sprawling secret empire, adding tersely, ‘Reforms will be much appreciated by all of us who for our sins are in frequent contact with these organisations.’86 One senior staff officer lamented that SOE had been created outside the regular military, in a place ‘where imagination was welcomed and allowed to have full play, and where resources were readily obtainable. It is to be hoped that this will never occur again.’87
Over the course of the war Churchill had done much to expand and accelerate Britain’s secret state. He had personally driven the creation of most of the nation’s new raiding, sabotage and special operations forces, from SOE to the Commandos to the Chindits. He had boosted Bletchley Park, providing additional resources the instant they were needed. He had encouraged new mechanisms for distributing and integrating Ultra into British decision-making. It was under him that the JIC, the central machine of intelligence, came of age and was relocated close to Downing Street. Above all, he understood the importance of ‘intelligence at the top’, and was the first prime minister to have a special assistant dealing only with intelligence. Impressively, he reined in his impulsive love of immediate action to protect the twin secrets of Ultra and deception.
Ironically, Churchill’s last great Second World War battle involved crossing swords with his own security officials. In the interwar period, he had been deeply dependent on writing to stay afloat financially. As David Reynolds has shown, in the 1930s Churchill’s earnings from literary activities brought him about half a million pounds a year at current values. But it was never enough: he was always mortgaging ahead, and employed an army of accountants and legal advisers to help him avoid tax. Even with extraordinary deals for film rights, somehow he was always in deficit. Accordingly, his six-volume history of the Second World War was begun eighteen months after the end of the conflict by a syndicate of ghost writers and assistants, including R.V. Jones. The prime minister’s official salary in 1945 was £10,000, while this project earned around £600,000.88
Churchill omitted Ultra from his personal account of the war, and touched only lightly on deception and resistance work. But he enjoyed pushing the boundaries, giving detailed accounts of subjects like the ‘Wizard War’ and the passing of intelligence to Stalin. He discussed the Joint Intelligence Committee, something no other prime ministers would do in their memoirs for another half-century. He wanted to include the original texts of telegrams sent to leaders like Stalin, Roosevelt and Truman. This raised the immediate problem of cipher security, for verbatim texts could, in theory at least, compromise much of the other British cipher traffic sent on the same day. Bletchley Park had used just such ‘cribs’ to help break Enigma. Stewart Menzies had dinner with Churchill on the night of 9 June 1948 and explained the problem, trying to ‘tie him down’ to a formal arrangement for changes. Churchill was ‘not impressed’ by his arguments, but eventually caved in.89
As prime minister, Churchill had overseen an intelligence revolution. He had recognised the transformative power of intelligence both in support of policy and in shaping events themselves. He brought intelligence to the heart of government in a manner unknown to earlier occupants of Downing Street. However, his impetuosity at times bedevilled his relations with the secret world. He presided over an informal and personal system rife with impulsiveness. It could work well. But it could also lead to recklessness and acrimony. Churchill could therefore only take the revolution so far. To fully harness the power of intelligence, a prime minister needed to be better organised, to inject a sense of order and rationality into what was becoming an intelligence community. Churchill’s revolution required a straight man to form all this new activity into a central machine. Enter Clement Attlee.
PART THREE
6
Are they not possibly for sale?
Clement Attlee1
Clement Attlee spent his time in office busily scuttling between competing priorities. Labour’s first post-war prime minister is best remembered for successful domestic reform in the face of severe impecuniousness, and for engineering Britain’s miraculous ‘Escape from Empire’ while under pressure from nationalist unrest in India. Crucially, however, Attlee also presided over the early Cold War – a burgeoning conflict that would dominate the second half of the twentieth century. His choices, especially on security, had ramifications for generations to come. Following the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb in August 1949, the Cold War created increasingly serious responsibilities for the new prime minister. With the advent of the Korean War the following year, all-out confrontation seemed only weeks