The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
tensions. The strike came against a broader international backdrop of intensifying acrimony. The previous year, the local Communist Party in Prague had, with backing from Moscow, taken control of Czechoslovakia in a shocking coup which served to highlight the ambitions and dangers of Stalinism. Back in Britain, Attlee was suspicious that this strike coincided exactly with other strikes in the Commonwealth, and saw it as part of a plot by international communism targeted against him. On 11 July 1949, he declared a state of emergency, and at the end of the month sent in 12,792 troops, effectively a declaration of war on the British Communist Party.44
‘We are in a state of affairs quite unlike anything we have previously known in peacetime,’ Attlee said. He agreed with the JIC that Soviet foreign policy aimed to establish communism, directed from Moscow, throughout the world, and that Soviet leaders sought to ‘achieve this by methods short of open war’. Virtually quoting MI5 documents, Attlee stated that ‘the Russian technique in all countries is to infiltrate their sympathisers into key positions in all circles, official and non-official, and by this means to influence policy’. He convened an annual London conference of senior representatives of security services from Commonwealth countries ‘to counter the skilful and extensive infiltration measures which Russia is now carrying on’.45
Remarkably, Attlee also encouraged the monitoring of Members of Parliament. He instructed Sillitoe to tell him, and only him, the name of any MP who was ‘a proven member of a subversive organisation’. Going further than later prime ministers, he also ‘expected to be kept informed about signs of subversion amongst ministers’ families’.46 This opened a can of worms: what should be done if an MP had a clean bill of health, but their spouse was a communist and thought to be in touch with, say, the Romanian secret service? Once again, Attlee was taking counter-subversion extremely seriously, and making full use of his relationship with Sillitoe. It was he who began the long-standing tradition that after every general election, ‘MI5 informs the incoming prime minister whether there is evidence that anyone nominated for ministerial office is a security risk.’47
These sensitive topics were usually reserved for Attlee and Sillitoe alone. However, once or twice when Sillitoe was away, it fell to Liddell to have the conversation with the prime minister. On one such occasion, Liddell entered the Cabinet Room and found the sixty-three-year-old Attlee huddled in his chair and looking exhausted. Liddell asked the prime minister what action he wanted to take regarding Members of Parliament who had close contact with subversive movements. After an uncomfortable pause, Attlee brusquely stated that he, and he alone, should be informed in every case – regardless of the MP’s party affiliation. Another awkward silence followed, with the prime minister straining to avoid eye contact with Liddell. The conversation turned to the activities of British communists in the event of war with Russia. Again Attlee offered little reaction. He was, according to Liddell, ‘an extremely difficult man to talk to’. After a further painful pause Liddell got up to leave, and Attlee ‘bundled out of his chair in a somewhat confused state’.48
The outbreak of the Korean War heightened anxiety. Whitehall grew increasingly nervous about communist encroachment into the armed forces, the education system, industrial movements and the scientific community.49 In Parliament, Attlee’s front bench was being asked what steps it had taken ‘to ensure that Communist teachers are not employed by local education authorities’.50 In early 1951, in the dying days of Attlee’s administration, he agreed to establish a new and extremely secretive body of senior officials whose existence has only very recently become known. Its mission was to ‘focus all available intelligence about Communist activities in the United Kingdom, and to recommend to Ministers what action can be taken to counter such activities’. Demonstrating a more proactive approach, it was also tasked ‘to co-ordinate any anti-Communist activities in this country which may be approved by Ministers’.51 Known as the Official Committee on Communism (Home), it led the charge against domestic subversion into the 1960s, and formed another of Attlee’s important legacies in the intelligence and security sphere.52
Working closely with MI5, Attlee built the machine of Cold War counter-subversion. He was always painfully conscious of the tension between intelligence, security and liberty, acknowledging that the problem ‘bristle[d] with political difficulties’, and that ‘infiltration can regularly be defended by appeals based on democratic conceptions of freedom’.53 Possibly still haunted by the Gestapo fears, he emphasised that ‘we feel it essential to develop effective precautions’ against communist infiltration ‘whilst doing everything possible to maintain democratic liberties’.54 He later publicly wrote that the director-general of MI5 ‘has to have a very lively appreciation of the rights of the citizen in a free country’.55 Meanwhile, he spurned regular requests from Conservative backbencher Sir Waldron Smithers to establish a House of Commons select committee on ‘un-British activities’, similar to the McCarthyite movement gathering pace in the United States.56
Attlee was right to take domestic security and counter-espionage seriously. In addition to the wartime atom bomb spies, Stalin had other eyes at the heart of the British establishment. Now known as the notorious Cambridge Five, they included Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, and a fifth man – thought by many to be John Cairncross, who had worked at Bletchley during the war. Recruited at Cambridge University in the 1930s, they went on to become influential in secret and foreign policy circles, passing secrets to the Soviets throughout the Second World War and into the Cold War. Maclean and Burgess worked for the Foreign Office and MI6 respectively before defecting in 1951. Philby, who became known as ‘the Third Man’, was a high-flier inside MI6, at one point heading its anti-Soviet section before defecting in 1963. Blunt, revealed as the Fourth Man in 1979, had been an MI5 officer during the Second World War, and alongside Philby had helped Maclean and Burgess to escape.
‘Stalin’s Englishmen’, as they have also become known, managed to hide their communist pasts because they came from the right class. This smokescreen worked in Britain, but it held little sway in America. J. Edgar Hoover was amazed at some of their antics. Donald Maclean, for example, who had been in charge of the code room at the British embassy in Washington, ‘broke into the apartment of two American girls’ before being placed under the care of a psychiatrist in London. Dwelling at some length on Guy Burgess’s personal behaviour, Hoover told one of President Truman’s closest advisers that during his time in Washington Burgess had shared a house with Kim Philby, ‘a representative of MI6’, adding that Philby’s first wife Alice ‘was at one time a Communist’. Truman was getting better information on the British moles than Attlee.57 It was pressure from the Americans that finally persuaded Attlee to introduce a more proactive and intrusive system of ‘positive vetting’, which went further than merely checking names off against existing files.58
Attlee was stunned by the defections of Burgess and Maclean in 1951, and demanded to know why they were never turfed out of the Foreign Office for their debauchery and drunkenness. Understated as ever, he predicted ‘a lot of public criticism’. The Foreign Office responded that Maclean had an outstanding record before a drink-induced breakdown. He was moved to Washington because it was the ‘least heavily loaded’ of all the political departments. By contrast, it informed Attlee that Burgess had indeed been ‘irresponsible, displaying indiscreet behaviour with loose talk about secret organisations’. Attlee never did receive a reasonable answer as to why the Foreign Office did not eject these unsuitable characters earlier,59 but he was increasingly concerned about the ‘moral fibre’ in the Foreign