The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
connections made by the press between premiers, politics and the secret world became deeply disconcerting. It was a wind of change he did not welcome.
Harold Wilson had enjoyed tormenting Macmillan over Profumo. As leader of the opposition in 1963, he recognised that this episode was about sex and high society as well as secrets – a gift in terms of media coverage. Entering Downing Street in 1964, he was determined to protect himself against the same fate, and noted that his predecessor, Alec Douglas-Home, had already established a Security Commission to which he could refer malodorous matters when they came before Parliament, giving the prime minister the welcome appearance of actually doing something. For Downing Street, the tactic of creating long-running inquiries into secret matters gradually became a central mechanism for containing toxic security issues. But Wilson also wanted his own ‘security enforcer’, and appointed his paymaster general, George Wigg, to sniff out potential scandals within government. Cabinet ministers and MI5 loathed the freewheeling security inquiries that Wigg made into the most sensitive parts of Whitehall. All this failed to protect Wilson from hideous embarrassment over the interception of telegrams during the ‘D-Notice affair’ in 1967, and then the public flaunting of MI6 secrets by Kim Philby in his waspish memoirs published in 1968.
Labour leaders faced a peculiar predicament. They often found themselves publicly defending domestic security services that they privately feared might be seeking to undermine them. Attlee faced the awkward position of being a socialist prime minister at the onset of the Cold War. The Labour Party and MI5 were not, at this point, natural bedfellows, and Attlee had to balance issues of positive vetting with backbench accusations of launching an anti-communist witch-hunt. Attlee was always conscious of the tension between intelligence, security and liberty. He agonised over investigation into the personal backgrounds of Whitehall officials, and introduced it only under the American threat of ceasing nuclear cooperation, passing this into law as almost the last act of his administration. By the 1970s, Labour prime ministers were inspecting MI5 files on their own MPs and wondering what level of risk was involved in appointing them to government. It was now known by Downing Street that some MPs – like John Stonehouse – had actually worked for Eastern bloc intelligence services. Indeed, one of the longest-serving MPs in the House of Commons, Labour’s Bob Edwards, who represented Wolverhampton South-East until 1987, was a fully-paid-up KGB agent. Other MPs had worked closely and enthusiastically with the CIA or Mossad.16
Jack Straw, one of the most prominent cabinet ministers of recent years, recalls his initial security vetting when he first joined the government. ‘A man in a mac, with a skin disease which meant he could not shake my hand … came to interview me … for three hours.’ Later the same man came back for another three hours, and in this second interview he suddenly leaned across the desk, looked his subject in the eye and asked, ‘Mr Straw, do you like men?’ This reflected the fact that historically, several people who had spied for the Soviets had been trapped by sexual blackmail. In 1974, when Straw was an adviser at the Department of Health and Social Security, his file was already two inches thick, and from their questions it was clear that MI5 had been collecting material on his family members since he was fifteen. Straw reflected on the scale of the surveillance operation that this implied. But, he recalls, this ‘neither surprised nor shocked me’. He saw it as part of everyday life on the strange planet that was Cold War Britain, where the KGB had to be kept at bay. Years later, when Straw became home secretary, MI5 was nervous that he might wish to see his own file. But he did not request this privilege, taking the view that he had no more right to see this secret material than any other citizen – and he gave the same response to Peter Mandelson, who was characteristically eager to peruse his own MI5 dossier.17
In the 1970s, Downing Street also lived in the shadow of Watergate, and was engulfed by growing paranoia about grand political conspiracy. Plots and bugging seemed to be almost normal. In March 1976, during the last days of the Wilson government, Tony Benn, then secretary of state for energy, attended a reception at the American embassy at which he chatted amiably to Cord Meyer, head of the CIA station in London. They reviewed the continuing fallout from Watergate, and Benn offered the opinion that Nixon was in fact quite charming, and that the media had been ‘unfair to him’. Meyer countered that Nixon was a ‘terrible man’, and had done a lot of damage to his service. But Benn took the wider view that given the catalogue of human error that went with the political experience, ‘bugging your opponent wasn’t so bad’.18 A year later, James Callaghan and the cabinet secretary were debating whether Benn himself could be trusted to see intercepts and ‘sigint’ material from GCHQ.19
Labour prime ministers also worried about plots. Ramsay MacDonald famously feared that MI5 was working against him. During the 1930s, Neville Chamberlain employed a former MI5 officer, Joseph Ball, to spy on both the Labour Party and his own rivals within the Conservative Party, using human agents and telephone taps. The Harold Wilson government rightly feared that a number of secret elements – both domestic and foreign – were seeking to destabilise his regime. For reasons yet unknown, Harold Macmillan had insisted that Downing Street be wired for sound to allow recording of conversations, much in the same style as the Kennedy White House. The extent to which this was used or abused during his time in office and subsequent administrations remains a mystery. The sensitivity of this subject was such that the Cabinet Office insisted that all references to it be cut out of what was otherwise a remarkably candid authorised history of MI5 published in 2009.
Harold Wilson was not the only senior figure who feared bugs. In 1973, in the final days of Edward Heath’s Conservative government, William Armstrong, the head of the home civil service, turned up in the Cabinet Office and demanded to speak to the cabinet secretary somewhere that was ‘not bugged’. Ushered into a suitably secure room, he took off his clothes, lay on the floor chain-smoking and talked ‘very wildly’ about the whole system collapsing and ‘the world coming to an end’. The next day he summoned a meeting of all Whitehall permanent secretaries and told them to prepare for ‘Armageddon’. ‘He was babbling incoherently’, and was ‘taken off to hospital for treatment’. He later spent a month recovering at Lord Rothschild’s private villa in Barbados. Although Wilson said almost nothing about the security services in his first volume of memoirs, penning a bizarre chapter of just two and a half pages on the subject, he later said much more to the press. Cabinet Office officials were by turns amused, embarrassed and then dismissive when these stories first appeared. But by 1979, evidence of interference by South African intelligence in London was mounting, and officials gradually came to accept that there was real substance to Wilson’s fears.20
Wilson’s public ramblings on intelligence required a new approach by Downing Street. Since the early 1960s, prime ministers had been forced to confront a new era of exposure. Now, a decade later, they had begun to manage their own gentle counter-offensive. Encouraged by the cabinet secretary, Burke Trend, with whom Wilson had enjoyed a good relationship, the intelligence agencies initiated a deliberate policy of emerging from the shadows. The Cabinet Office presided over the writing of the official history of wartime intelligence, and approved the release of the papers of Bletchley Park. This project was expressly about intelligence at the top, and traced the interaction between secrets and high strategy. Throughout the 1970s, British prime ministers were feeling their way towards a more public profile for the security agencies and their own engagement with them, pondering the possibility of public avowal of their existence and activities.
Margaret Thatcher hated this. Even as opposition leader in the late 1970s, she had repeatedly attempted to veto any public revelations about intelligence, however carefully controlled. Once she entered Downing Street, she was immediately confronted by the media frenzy surrounding the revelation that Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, was the ‘Fourth Man’. Tasked with explaining the decision not to prosecute him, she went against her instincts and, rather than saying as little as possible, made a detailed statement to the House of Commons. She soon regretted it. Each morsel of detail was picked over, and seemed to draw out further press revelations. Now confirmed in her personal commitment to absolute secrecy, Thatcher’s later years were partially