The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
black gates prevented public access. Harold Wilson had resisted elaborate gates when they were suggested in 1974, but now they arrived, together with armed policemen.28 Several levels below Downing Street, technicians were putting the final touches to ‘Project Pindar’, a command bunker deep beneath the Ministry of Defence on Whitehall to which selected denizens of Downing Street could retreat in times of peril, at a cost of £126.3 million.29
By 2005, threats against the life of the prime minister had become an almost daily occurrence. The intelligence warnings of assassination attempts often landed on the desk of David Blunkett, the home secretary, who observed with delightful sangfroid that these plots did not worry him unduly – unless they related to an event at which he was likely to be sitting next to Tony Blair. Towards the end of Blair’s administration, simply moving outside the Whitehall government complex became a problem. Alastair Campbell gazed at the vast prime ministerial convoy of armoured vehicles proofed against nerve gas, the motorcycle outriders stopping the traffic amid a cacophony of wailing sirens, and wondered how many votes were lost every time this baroque parade of vehicles took the prime minister to the airport.
The personal threat to the prime minister is at its worst overseas. In October 2001, Blair set off on a trip to Russia, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and finally Egypt. The BBC ignored security guidance and announced the prime minister’s destinations to the world, thereby increasing security concerns. As a result, Blair’s entourage had to be ‘surrounded by outriders with machine guns and tanks carrying anti-aircraft missiles’.30 On their return to the UK, Blair’s team told the BBC director of news that Number 10 was ‘exasperated by their continued reporting of his movements’.31 Blair remains a high-profile target. In 2014, MI5 planted a listening device in the car of one terrorism suspect and listened in on his conversations for two weeks after searching the vehicle and finding Blair’s home address on a scrap of paper folded inside a Versace glasses case.32 MI5 had previously established covert surveillance of Ishaq Kanmi, the self-proclaimed leader of al-Qaeda in Britain. His stated aims included ‘the elimination of political leaders and capitalists Blair and Brown’.33 In the twenty-first century, British prime ministers value their intelligence and security services partly because they keep them alive.
No less worrying are the threats to visiting heads of state. Each premier on a state visit to Downing Street, whether from Russia, Israel, Sri Lanka or Saudi Arabia, has brought in his wake an exotic trail of would-be assassins. The grim prelude to every visit is the backstairs diplomacy of death. As the leaders make their way around London, they are shadowed by ambulances carrying copious supplies of their blood group. The most vexed discussions concern the intelligence precautions involved in each visit, with every drain and culvert along the routes taken by visiting dignitaries being searched for explosives. Defensive weaponry is an issue, with each American president asking to bring with him an increasingly formidable array of automatic weapons and ground-to-air missiles. George W. Bush was denied permission to bring an SUV containing an M134D mini-gun in an armoured pop-up turret. MI5 routinely regard the US president’s secret service as a more dangerous threat to the British public than potential assassins.34
Death has hovered over Downing Street for more than a century. While attacks and plots have become steadily more serious in recent years, enterprising amateurs have always abounded, and earlier prime ministers were more accessible to the public. On 28 August 1939, panic swept through a crowd of protesters immediately outside the door of 10 Downing Street when a London clerk called Laurence Hislam opened a small suitcase and scattered its contents, which resembled the deadly devices beloved of bearded bomb-throwing anarchists. Mayhem ensued, until the crowd realised that the ‘bombs’ were actually large black rubber balls inscribed with the message ‘Peace Conference Now’. Hislam was in fact a pacifist protesting against the mounting international crisis and the spectre of another major war in Europe. The police led him away, and despite his defence that he acted ‘in the cause of peace’, the court sentenced him to six months’ hard labour.35
No prime minister illustrates this interface between premiers and personal hazard more than Churchill. Britain’s wartime leader accepted the advice of the Special Operations Executive that assassinating Hitler would be counter-productive, since his strategy was increasingly incompetent and damaging to Germany. However, in 1943 Churchill did approve an assassination attempt against Mussolini, with female agents being dropped into Italy, together with aggressive kill missions against Rommel and other senior German generals. Meanwhile, lesser fascists were earmarked for mere bribery, with an initial £100,000 personally approved by Churchill and then passed over in a large bag to members of Franco’s circle on a Spanish golf course as an inducement to keep Spain out of the Second World War.36 Eden was appalled by the operation, but when more money was required for Franco, Churchill eagerly minuted in red ink: ‘Yes Indeed. WSC.’37
Britain’s wartime leader was oddly relaxed about his own personal safety, despite more than a dozen serious attempts on his life. Hitler certainly ordered his multiple secret services to target Churchill, the oddest such operation being a plot to attack Allied leaders at the Tehran Conference in 1943 using a team of Nazi agents transported by camel.38 Much of Churchill’s remarkable ability to survive the attempts on his life must be attributed to good fortune and his ever-vigilant bodyguard, Detective Inspector Walter Thompson. Occasionally Churchill insisted on carrying his own revolver, but for the most part brazen and carefree with only a single bodyguard, he travelled over 200,000 miles across Europe, America and the Middle East in the course of the war. No British prime minister will ever do that again, so in many ways Churchill stands at the turning point of security and intelligence in Downing Street, representing both the first of a new wave of premiers who exploited intelligence properly, but also the last of a dying breed.
Twenty prime ministers have led Britain since 1909. From Herbert Asquith to Theresa May and from Ramsay MacDonald to Gordon Brown, these premiers have held diverging political views, possessed wildly different leadership styles, and have confronted the full spectrum of problems, threats and crises. This book examines each prime minister in turn. It traces their personal approaches to intelligence and uses each premiership as a vehicle to explore the most pressing national security issues of the day. It reveals that despite the vagaries of personality and politics, intelligence has become increasingly central to all prime ministers. This was not always the case. Back in the first decade of the twentieth century, the secret world was alien to Asquith. Churchill and Attlee addressed this problem together, and forged a quiet revolution. Now, as a result, the prime minister presides personally over an organised intelligence community operating at the heart of Whitehall. This book traces that secret service journey from the periphery to the centre of power.
PART ONE
1
Herbert Asquith, David Lloyd George and Andrew Bonar Law (1908–1923)
A rumour spread next day in true war-time fashion that Lord Chetwynd had caught three German spies trying to signal the Zeppelin with lights, and had shot them out of hand.
David Lloyd George1
The British intelligence system was already immense by the dawn of the twentieth century. The entire British Empire, sprawling across more than half the globe, served as an intelligence machine – a veritable ‘empire of intelligence’.2