The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
man of few words. Loathing small talk and blushing easily, he radiated a shyness which he imparted to his visitors. Even the King privately referred to him as ‘Clam’.22 By contrast, Sillitoe was a burly, no-nonsense policeman who had cut his teeth suppressing hooliganism in Sheffield and fighting gangs on the mean streets of Glasgow. Despite physically towering over his new boss, Sillitoe also had a streak of shyness, apparently stemming from his lack of a university education. One therefore wonders how painfully awkward their meetings may have been.23 But meet they did – and on the ‘special instructions’ of Attlee himself.24 In fact the prime minister met Sillitoe more often than any other prime minister has met the director-general of MI5 before or since – perhaps with the exception of David Cameron.25 Sillitoe had ‘trenchant views on the danger of police states and the importance of restrictions on police powers’, and is a rare example of a director-general who inspired greater confidence in Number 10 than he did in his own service.26
Understandably, Guy Liddell, then deputy director of MI5, was less impressed. In his invaluable diaries, so secret that they were kept locked in a safe and had their own codename of ‘Wallflowers’, Liddell, perhaps deliberately, consistently misspelled ‘Shillito’s’ name in the weeks following his appointment.27 A once considerable man, ‘a great mimic, dancer and teacher of the Irish jig’, Liddell cut a sadder figure after his wife left him during the war. He increasingly found solace only in the cello, and spent his time working or in the clubland company of male friends.28 Given that the latter included various traitors and Soviet spies, including the bibulous Guy Burgess, his reputation became somewhat tarnished.29
Somebody within MI5 gave the new boss the wrong papers for his first meeting with Attlee, which Sillitoe furiously interpreted as a deliberate attempt to embarrass him. Other MI5 staff deliberately spoke in Latin to ridicule Sillitoe’s lack of intellectual pretension. After retiring from MI5, Sillitoe would work for De Beers investigating diamond smuggling. At their London headquarters he repeatedly briefed Ian Fleming on his adventures, and his exploits went on to inform the best-selling James Bond novel Diamonds are Forever.30
Attlee kept MI5 under his personal control. He delegated responsibility neither to the minister of defence nor, as would become customary, to the home secretary. This arrangement also suited MI5. Not only did it keep interfering ministers out of the day-to-day running of its affairs, it also allowed the service to have a ‘very convenient’ right of direct ‘appeal to the P.M.’ if attacked.31 Towards the end of Attlee’s premiership, MI5’s privileged position was challenged by Norman Brook, the tall, discreet and ever-unruffled technician of government who as cabinet secretary played an integral part in advising successive prime ministers on intelligence.32 At one point Attlee even considered merging the three intelligence and security services under his direct command. He knew that ‘in the past there was a good deal of friction and a tendency for separate empires to grow up’, and was ‘not yet satisfied that we get full value for our expenditure’.33 He would later return to this question.
The close relationship between the prime minister and his head of domestic intelligence would soon become paramount. The early Cold War was characterised not only by the tightening of the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe, but by fears of communist subversion within Western states. In September 1945, Whitehall linked fear of Soviet espionage with domestic Communism as a result of the defection of a humble Soviet cipher clerk called Igor Gouzenko. Gouzenko, who had been working for Soviet military intelligence in Ottawa, both exposed a Canadian spy ring and revealed that the Soviets had planted agents inside the top-secret Manhattan Project, the wartime programme that produced the first atomic bomb. His defection brought home the dangers of Soviet infiltration to the British, and also the use of local communist parties to recruit agents. It triggered a chain of events which saw Britain’s Alan Nunn May, one of the first atom spies, exposed and arrested; the arrest of the scientist Klaus Fuchs for passing top-secret information on the British nuclear programme to Russia; and the introduction of a controversial new government vetting process.34
Intelligence proved a vital factor in spurring Attlee into action.35 Drawing on revelations from MI5 and MI6 about the growing underground threat to Britain, the prime minister founded a Committee on Subversive Activities in spring 1947, and went on to personally organise counter-espionage collaboration between the UK and various Commonwealth allies.36 Although the new counter-subversion body was initially chaired by A.V. Alexander, the minister of defence, Attlee took personal charge when security matters grew in importance. Subversion was simply too dangerous to be delegated outside Downing Street. Discussing the need for vetting individuals who might have access to classified information, the prime minister’s security advisers came down in favour of a hard line. It was impossible to distinguish between those British communists who would spy for Russia and those who would not. Security arrangements therefore had to be tightened. After prevaricating for a few months, Attlee agreed that Communist Party members should not be allowed to work in such positions. Counting on public support, he decreed that ‘We cannot afford to take risks here.’37 A purge of the civil service based on ‘negative vetting’ – a simple check against existing records of communist or fascist affiliation – was accordingly announced to the House of Commons in March 1948.38 There was relief when MI5 found a closet fascist lurking in the War Office.39
Perversely, Attlee’s purge worried MI5. Despite instinctively wanting it, senior intelligence officers were concerned that their valuable sources on the inside would be fatally compromised if a target was removed for having links to the Communist Party or fascists. Worried that Attlee was not adequately considering this issue, MI5 felt the need to ask Edward Bridges, head of the home civil service, to ‘ram home’ the point to the prime minister.40 The impact of Attlee’s purge on MI5’s relations with the rest of Whitehall proved a further sticking point. Other departments did not like being pushed around by what they saw as ‘a bunch of autocrats’ with no authority. MI5 consequently came in for ‘a good deal of abuse’. Attlee had little sympathy, responding to Liddell’s protestations by saying, ‘I doubt whether you would ever get it out of peoples [sic] minds that your Department has overriding powers and is not subject to ministerial control.’ Liddell left feeling that Attlee ‘was his usual self, uncommunicative and unresponsive, but quite pleasant’.41
Still haunted by Churchill’s Gestapo accusations, Attlee blew hot and cold on the vetting issue. Fretting that it might be going too far, he set off from Downing Street late one afternoon for cocktails at MI5 headquarters. Talking through the issue over drinks, he was uncharacteristically on ‘extremely good form’, entertaining the spooks by ‘firing questions at everybody and telling stories’.42 The accelerating pace of the Cold War carried him along, and in July 1949 he made a particularly bullish public speech slamming the ‘sickening hypocrisy’ of communists accusing him of executing a purge.43
What had hardened Attlee’s position? In 1949, he dealt ruthlessly with a major strike by London dock workers, deploying the armed forces and emergency powers. This strike, he claimed, was secretly orchestrated by the British Communist Party, and was intended not only to unhinge the delicate post-war economic recovery, but to overturn social democracy.