The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
late 1949, Attlee knew it could not have come at a worse time for the British.78 The test of a Soviet nuclear bomb in August that year had been a defining moment in Anglo–American intelligence collaboration on nuclear weapons – the most sensitive area of post-war spying. Until the Soviet bomb test was detected, the United States and Britain had exchanged a considerable amount of intelligence on the Soviet programme. More important, during the investigations that led to the detection of the Soviet test, American and British officials had co-operated not only in collecting radioactive samples but also in analysing them. As a result, talks on resuming full atomic technical exchange in the area of their own bomb production began in earnest in late September 1949. The discussions went so well that US secretary of state Dean Acheson explained to the British ambassador that ‘it should be possible to get Congress to make the necessary changes’, and the cabinet were told to expect a resumption of full cooperation. At that very moment, the Fuchs case broke. One American diplomat recalled: ‘We were getting very close to really going into bed with the British, with a new agreement. Then the Fuchs affair hit the fan and that was the end of it.’ The case destroyed any British hopes for a resumption of the wartime nuclear partnership, and even Attlee’s artful performance before Parliament could not rescue it.79
The Fuchs episode was actually a case of double deception. Although Attlee was not in possession of all the facts when he publicly defended MI5, neither was Percy Sillitoe. Indeed, Sillitoe was highly irritated that he had not been informed at the time when MI5 re-examined the Fuchs case back in 1947. He was angrier still when he learned that he had not given the prime minister the full story. Sillitoe called together his senior staff and asked some tough questions. He was particularly upset that he had not been shown the full file before he briefed Attlee. Guy Liddell believed that had his boss been in possession of all the facts, he ‘would have been extremely apprehensive’ about the prime minister’s response. If an inquiry had been ordered, Sillitoe felt ‘that he would probably have lost his job and the Department would have been split from top to bottom’. Furious, he privately criticised MI5’s performance during the investigation, and argued that his colleagues should have done more. He assured his staff that when he saw the prime minister nothing he imparted was ‘intended to be inaccurate or misleading’. But MI5 officers appear to have concealed the whole truth from their boss in order to escape scrutiny and recrimination.80
Klaus Fuchs was a genius who had done much to advance the British nuclear bomb project after Anglo–American atomic cooperation had tapered off at the end of the war. He was so admired by the American defence scientist Edward Teller, known as ‘the father of the H-bomb’, that in April 1946, less than a year after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Teller had invited Fuchs to a highly secret scientific conference, called to explore the possibility of creating something called a ‘Super’, which was in fact the hydrogen bomb. Within six weeks, Fuchs and an American scientist, John von Neumann, had come up with a new implosion device to ignite the H-bomb, ignition being one of the most technically difficult issues. When interrogated in early 1950 Fuchs ‘laughingly’ claimed that the Soviets might well already be working on the hydrogen bomb, since he had passed all this information to them. Predictably, this information was omitted from Attlee’s MI5 briefings.81
In late 1950, Attlee was misled again. The story was becoming depressingly familiar: another nuclear physicist, another Cold War defection. This time it was Bruno Pontecorvo. An Italian-born scientist working at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Pontecorvo disappeared on his way back to Britain from a family holiday in Finland. It seems likely that Philby had tipped off Moscow that the net was closing in on yet another atom spy.82 Growing increasingly concerned, Attlee had to endure another uncomfortable briefing with MI5. This time the task fell to Sillitoe’s deputy. Liddell tried to reassure the prime minister that, contrary to inflammatory press reports, Pontecorvo had in fact had very little contact with secret work. In doing so, he was simply parroting the views of Michael Perrin, the director of Whitehall’s Department of Atomic Energy. But Perrin, and perhaps MI5, knew this was not true, and that Pontecorvo’s ongoing access to classified information had earlier caused MI5 to recommend his dismissal.83 Sillitoe assured Attlee that detecting Pontecorvo’s actions had been impossible, because MI5 ‘had no magnet to find the needle in the body’. Attlee seemed unconvinced.84
In June 1951, Britain’s top nuclear scientists at Harwell and Aldermaston writhed in horror as the US Congress produced a report that threw ‘all the blame for leaks on British security’. American politicians lamented that the British had indeed been responsible for two out of the three known atomic spies and for one very probable spy. The exception among the known spies was Julius Rosenberg in New York, who had just been sentenced to die in the electric chair, along with his wife Ethel. MI5 earnestly hoped that the Americans would unearth a few more ‘dubious cases’ of their own, but conceded that espionage activities by US citizens did not seem to amount to very much: ‘They may well have had some real top-line atomic spies but there is no evidence at all of it.’85
Clement Attlee also embraced secret work overseas by MI6. Traditionally, he has been painted as a reluctant Cold Warrior, and certainly in the first two years of his government he needed persuading that Joseph Stalin, his wartime ally, was bent on world domination.86 The prime minister tended to resist the hawks in the military, and sided with intelligence assessments that the Soviets would not be in a position to risk a major war until the mid-1950s at the earliest.87 He consequently has a reputation for being cautious when it came to covert operations overseas – keeping MI6 on a tight leash. He liked to be kept updated about MI6 activities, and received a weekly report from its chief, Sir Stewart Menzies – something not matched even by his close relationship with Sillitoe.
In the post-war world, MI6 was sometimes referred to as Whitehall’s ‘pirates’. But it knew that Attlee was not in any sense a buccaneering figure. In the words of one disgruntled former deputy director of MI6, George Young, Attlee was ‘a sphinx without a riddle’.88 But there was more to ‘Little Clem’ than met the eye. He was not averse to using MI6 in covert pursuit of foreign policies abroad, especially when Britain was under severe pressure. In 1946 and 1947 he approved a scheme to kidnap German scientists, technicians and businessmen from the British-controlled zone of Germany. The aim was either to steal business information or to force them to work in Britain in an attempt to boost British industry. Herbert Morrison informed the prime minister: ‘It is most important at this formative stage to start shaping the German economy in the way which will best assist our own economic plans and will run the least risk of it developing into an unnecessarily awkward competitor.’89
In 1947 the Soviet press published a grotesque cartoon of a multi-headed beast that was part Ernest Bevin, Attlee’s bullish foreign secretary, and part Churchill. It was the work of a new and aggressive Moscow propaganda department called the ‘Cominform’. In response, Attlee and Bevin persuaded the cabinet to agree to the creation of a secret propaganda unit, the Information Research Department, which worked with MI6 to counter such attacks. Events in Eastern Europe, notably the Prague coup and the Soviet blockade of Berlin between 1948 and 1949, considerably stiffened Attlee’s attitude, making him increasingly convinced about the Soviet threat and the necessity of energetically prosecuting the Cold War.90 He gradually became willing for MI6 to play the communists at their own covert game of subversion and political warfare. Soon, however, the Information Research Department became a general covert tool beyond the Cold War, attacking by means of unattributable propaganda anything that was hostile to Britain. In its own words, it was the ‘anti-anti-British’ department.91
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