Читать книгу The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers - Richard Aldrich - Страница 22

Are they not possibly for sale?

Clement Attlee1

Clement Attlee spent his time in office busily scuttling between competing priorities. Labour’s first post-war prime minister is best remembered for successful domestic reform in the face of severe impecuniousness, and for engineering Britain’s miraculous ‘Escape from Empire’ while under pressure from nationalist unrest in India. Crucially, however, Attlee also presided over the early Cold War – a burgeoning conflict that would dominate the second half of the twentieth century. His choices, especially on security, had ramifications for generations to come. Following the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb in August 1949, the Cold War created increasingly serious responsibilities for the new prime minister. With the advent of the Korean War the following year, all-out confrontation seemed only weeks away.

The Cold War placed a high premium on intelligence. Successive prime ministers needed to know the Soviet Union’s capabilities and intentions, including its nuclear arsenals and technological developments – and, crucially, whether it would use them. A great deal was at stake. Intelligence also had a more active, and potentially explosive, role to play. It became crucial in fighting a large-scale underground struggle. With open warfare now too dangerous to contemplate, conflict was forced into a lower key. Subversion, espionage, insurgency and propaganda became the weapons of choice. Clement Attlee was the first prime minister to be forced to adjust to this ‘hot peace’, and to recognise its implications for the active use of intelligence in peacetime. He was well aware of the difficulties. Spoilt by the Ultra material during the war, the new government had to adapt to a lack of high-grade intelligence, since it was not reading many Soviet communications. GCHQ, as GC&CS had become in 1946, could not provide direct insights into the mind of the enemy. Attlee himself privately acknowledged that ‘The difficulties in dealing with Communist activities are far greater than anything which we have had to face before, for the iron curtain is very hard to penetrate.’2

Attlee’s premiership was sandwiched between two governments led by Winston Churchill, an enthusiastic – even flamboyant – advocate of secret service. By contrast, Attlee is remembered neither as a natural Cold Warrior nor as an avid consumer of intelligence. He was a modest and sensible man; the last ever prime minister to be challenged to a duel – which he declined, telling the accuser not to be so silly.3 Yet, unlike prime ministers who had served during the interwar period, Attlee and his colleagues did not arrive in office ignorant of the workings of the secret world. As an integral part of the wartime coalition he had been aware of MI5 and MI6 long before being elected prime minister.4 As Winston Churchill’s deputy prime minister, he had been discussing reform of the secret services as early as 1940, and also experienced the vital contribution made by ‘most secret sources’, especially signals intelligence, first hand.5 During the war, Stewart Menzies had picked out Bletchley Park decrypts not only for Churchill, but also for Attlee.6

Churchill had asked his deputy to preside personally over some of the most sensitive wartime issues. In December 1943, Attlee had chaired a staff conference that looked at the ‘highly disturbing’ issue of German penetration of SOE in Holland.7 And he was not alone. His own deputy prime minister, Herbert Morrison, had been wartime home secretary, while his chancellor of the exchequer, Hugh Dalton, had run SOE. Attlee was therefore quite right to assert that he ‘had had full experience of high and responsible office’, and ‘understood the machinery of government’.8 As a consummate committee man, machinery was his strength. Churchill may have boosted Britain’s intelligence community, but it was Attlee who refined the secret structures that ensured its smooth running over the next half-century.

Clement Attlee had endeared himself to Churchill personally as Labour’s most vocal enemy of appeasement in the late 1930s. Indeed, it was his refusal to join a coalition government led by Chamberlain that had ushered in Churchill as premier in May 1940. Thereafter, Attlee, together with Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, completed the Churchillian intelligence revolution. Schooled in the importance of secret service during the long years of conflict with Nazi Germany, the need to integrate intelligence into the core business of government was second nature to them. The amazing achievements of MI5, MI6, SOE and especially Bletchley Park resonated with Britain’s rulers over the next two decades, a period during which 10 Downing Street was consistently run by ministerial figures from Churchill’s wartime coalition. Already well-versed in the clandestine workings of intelligence, as prime minister Attlee oversaw the growth of an intricate secret state prosecuting the Cold War both domestically and overseas.9 As Britain faced severe economic decline, intelligence was an area in which it could perhaps still lead the world, while secret service provided opportunities for fancy footwork that dodged imperial retreat.10

The new prime minister was no stranger to domestic counter-subversion. Churchill had inducted Attlee into this sensitive area almost as soon as he joined the coalition government in May 1940.11 Owing to his intense fear of fifth columnists, Churchill had wished to progress with the internment of enemy aliens, and he instructed Attlee to liaise with MI5 on the matter. Attlee agreed with its senior counter-espionage officer, Guy Liddell, that ‘the liberty of the subject, freedom of speech etc were all very well in peace-time but were no use in fighting the Nazis’.12

As prime minister, Attlee continued to value MI5, not least to ‘detect attempts to penetrate our defence organisation’. He also believed that MI5 should be free from political control, separate from government and police machinery.13 Yet upon his election in July 1945, he was cautious in his dealings with Britain’s security agencies. They were not natural bedfellows.14 Aside from Philby, Burgess and Maclean, senior British intelligence officers were hardly renowned for their love of socialism. According to one barbed remark in Liddell’s diary, the state socialism pursued by Attlee’s government ‘differed little if at all from Communism by evolutionary means’.15 Conversely, the Labour Party’s opinions of MI5 were framed by historic antagonism dating back to the Zinoviev affair. More recently, memories of internment, censorship and other infringements of civil liberties perturbed the new Members of Parliament who filled the government benches following Labour’s landslide victory – a victory which took MI5 by surprise.

Attlee was being watched carefully by both left and right. During an election broadcast in July 1945, Churchill had rather cruelly suggested that if Labour was elected, his former wartime colleagues would create ‘some form of Gestapo’.16 Where would ordinary people be, he asked, ‘once this mighty organism had got them in their grip?’17 Attlee feared accusations from the Labour left that he was mounting a witch-hunt if he took obvious measures to keep British communists away from sensitive material.18 His understandable caution over domestic security during the early years of his premiership frustrated senior figures in MI5. Within just months of the election, they began moaning about government prevarication.19

Towards the end of his first year in office, Attlee expressed strong concerns about MI5’s files on individuals, and demanded that they be kept clean of anything that did not come under the service’s terms of ‘defence of the realm’. In his usual brusque manner, he made it abundantly clear to all concerned that MI5 was not to have the names of anybody on its index cards who was not considered a threat to national security. The issue played heavily on Attlee’s mind over the early summer of 1946. After some weeks he summoned MI5’s director-general to his office to check if the records had indeed been cleared of irrelevant material. Despite the fullest assurances, Attlee remained concerned. Churchill’s pointed comment had clearly stung, and the prime minister ‘was still afraid that the Opposition might accuse him of running a Gestapo’.20

Everyone expected the talented Guy Liddell to be next in line for the top job at MI5. When David Petrie retired as director-general in spring 1946, however, Attlee controversially appointed an external candidate. After an impressive career in the police, Percy Sillitoe had hoped for a gentle retirement running a sweetshop in Eastbourne. He clearly did not expect to be catapulted into the murky world of international espionage, but Eastbourne’s loss was Britain’s gain. Sillitoe accepted the position, and the relationship between Downing Street and MI5 swiftly improved.21

Attlee and Sillitoe developed an excellent – if unlikely – personal rapport. ‘Little Clem’ was famously a slight 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. Because of MI5’s reports, he increasingly saw the Communist Party as doing the Kremlin’s bidding, and deliberately increasing Cold War 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 Office and its implications for national security.60

Issues of vetting were intimately connected to the Klaus Fuchs espionage case, the impact of which on internal security and transatlantic relations was enormous. More importantly, Attlee was not given the full truth about the intelligence failure by MI5 concerning Fuchs. The prime minister consequently defended the service’s performance to Parliament and the public under false pretences.

Klaus Fuchs was a brilliant theoretical physicist. Quiet and withdrawn, he wore round spectacles and had an uncanny ability to attract female sympathy. He was also a dedicated communist, and the most important atomic spy of the post-war period. Born in Germany, Fuchs settled within the British university system after fleeing Nazi Germany before the war. Becoming a British citizen and signing the Official Secrets Act in 1942, he worked on the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project in America. He was one of the few scientists with an overview of the whole project, including the perplexing problem of trigger design for detonation of the main device. After the war, he returned to the UK to work at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. But unbeknownst to the government, Fuchs had long been passing secret information to the Soviets. In America he would drive around in his second-hand blue Buick with a stash of papers on the passenger seat, containing closely guarded secrets about the most devastating weapon ever created. Still he was not caught. In England, he used prearranged signals to meet his Soviet contacts in pubs. To one he offered: ‘I think the best British heavyweight of all time is Bruce Woodcock.’ On cue, the contact replied: ‘Oh no, Tommy Farr is certainly the best.’ Following a ‘complete dog’s breakfast’ of an investigation by MI5 in late 1949, Fuchs finally confessed early the following year.61

According to Sillitoe, suspicions about Fuchs first arose in August 1949 as a result of ‘Venona’, a programme by British and American codebreakers to unravel wartime messages sent by the KGB that were proving uniquely vulnerable. The following month, J.C. Robertson, head of counter-espionage at MI5, and Arthur Martin, the MI5 liaison with GCHQ, began working with security officers at Harwell to investigate Fuchs’s background. Jim Skardon, an MI5 interrogator, questioned Fuchs, while MI5 listened in on his phone calls and followed him with teams of ‘watchers’.62 As is so often the case, intercept material, this time gathered from Venona, was too sensitive to be openly used in court. Under pressure from the FBI to act, MI5 needed to gather its own physical evidence, ideally based on his contacts with Soviet handlers.

Percy Sillitoe grew frustrated. By his own admission, the ‘investigation produced no dividends’. Running out of options and unable to use Venona, he even resorted to asking the senior official at the Ministry of Supply ‘to quietly arrange for Fuchs [sic] departure from Harwell as soon as decently possible’.63 Doing so, however, would have raised suspicious eyebrows from Fuchs’s colleagues and friends, since he was Britain’s star nuclear weapons scientist.

Sillitoe was furious when he learned how long Fuchs had been operating as a spy for the Soviets. Together with Dick White, a future head of MI5 and then MI6, he had to make the short but uncomfortable journey to Downing Street to break the bad news to the prime minister. White insisted that they had been thorough – four separate investigations had failed to find anything incriminating – but Attlee was unimpressed. The prime minister ‘could only reflect that, if MI5’s four investigations had produced no evidence, it was a reflection upon the investigation not the evidence’.64

In early 1950, Sillitoe delivered a brief to Attlee. It was described by the service as ‘merely factual’, but was clearly designed to defend MI5’s actions. A month later, when Sillitoe saw the prime minister again, he found him in ‘fighting form’ and proposing ‘to defend the department’. To aid the prime minister with this defence, Sillitoe left some ‘debating points’ in Number 10 and went away satisfied that he had Attlee’s support, that the prime minister ‘had no intention of allowing an enquiry into the activities of the Security Service’, and was ‘entirely satisfied with the work of the department’.65 He had guessed right. Just three days later Attlee stood in front of the House of Commons and stalwartly defended MI5, confidently asserting to the nation that ‘I do not think there is anything that can cast the slightest slur on the Security Services.’66 This was the first time a prime minister had discussed intelligence and security at such length in Parliament.

There was one snag. Sillitoe later admitted that he had not given Attlee the whole story. The MI5 brief was written in part by Roger Hollis, MI5’s expert in Soviet espionage and the man who had repeatedly cleared Fuchs.67 It contained certain strategic inaccuracies and misrepresentations, and these flaws shaped Attlee’s speech to Parliament. Unsurprisingly, it portrayed MI5 as having been proactive and vigilant by conducting numerous checks on Fuchs and unearthing no evidence. Fudging key dates, it tried to pass the buck to other government departments, including the Ministry of Aircraft Production and the Ministry of Supply.68 MI5 hoped to weasel out of its central role by insisting to the prime minister that ‘the responsibility of the Security Service is limited to tendering advice’.69 Yet the advice tendered was that Fuchs posed only a ‘very slight’ security risk.70

MI5’s brief informed Attlee that Fuchs had become ‘a close friend’ of a German while interned in Canada in 1940. Significantly, however, it stopped short of revealing the identity of this German friend. He was Hans Kahle – ‘such a notorious Communist that his name may well have been known to Attlee’.71 The significance of this had previously been dismissed by Roger Hollis.72 The fact that he strangely ‘over-looked’ the connections between one of Britain’s most damaging post-war spies and one of the decade’s most active communists would later become one of the drivers for lingering suspicions about the loyalties of Hollis himself, with some alleging that he had spied for Moscow. Moreover, the prime minister was informed that until 1949 there was no confirmation of Fuchs’s membership of the German Communist Party. Once again, this was not the full story – Attlee was not told that MI5 had ‘access to the Gestapo records since 1946 but had failed to consult them’.73

Sillitoe and his subordinates pointed to everyone except MI5. They went on to blame the police, the constraints of parliamentary democracy, and the importance of using skilled foreigners during the war. These arguments seemingly held weight with the prime minister, who adopted the parliamentary democracy line in his address to the House of Commons. Directly summarising MI5’s suggestions, he told MPs, ‘I am satisfied that, unless we had here the kind of secret police they have in totalitarian countries, and employed their methods, which are reprobated rightly by everyone in this country, there was no means by which we could have found out about this man.’74

MI5 also urged Downing Street to counter criticism of its performance in the press, Sillitoe complaining to Attlee, ‘There has been a great deal of uninformed criticism of the Security authorities in relation to the FUCHS case.’ In the circumstances, he felt, the prime minister ‘may consider it advisable that some statement should be made in the House of Commons putting the facts into their proper perspective’. MI5 even went on to suggest exactly what the prime minister should say.75 Arguably, MI5 was rather better at public relations than at security. Behind the scenes, it was successfully persuading documentary-makers not to make films about Fuchs.76 Influenced by his brief, Attlee did indeed argue that ‘there is a great deal of loose talk in the Press suggesting inefficiency on the part of the security services. I entirely deny that.’ He praised MI5 for acting ‘promptly and effectively as soon as there was any line which they could follow’.77

When the Fuchs case broke in 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

It was in the colonial sphere that Attlee felt most willing to apply the cosh. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Palestine became one of the worst trouble spots for the prime minister and his colleagues. In October 1946 the Zionist group Irgun bombed the British embassy in Rome, destroying half the building. Six months later, it placed a bomb in the Colonial Office in London, but it failed to detonate. Attlee himself had received death threats from Zionist extremists, and had already authorised the use of firearms against Jewish immigrants trying to escape from camps in Cyprus,92 because the accelerating flood of illegal emigration from southern Europe to the British Mandate appeared to be feeding a troublesome insurgency. He now sought more direct action, and authorised a covert war on the emerging state of Israel. Leading from the very top, Attlee asserted that ‘it is essential that we should take all possible steps to stop this traffic at source’. Recognising that any ‘general protests’ would be futile, he insisted that officials come up with ‘practical measures’ to stem the flow.93

Implementing Attlee’s directive, senior officials first looked at black propaganda. Devious ideas included clandestinely introducing leaflets into the refugee camps, spreading rumours, and ‘perhaps even setting up secret radio stations’. The plan was to paint such a dire picture of conditions in Palestine, and of the dangerous voyage across the Mediterranean, that potential immigrants would think twice before setting sail. This was soon abandoned as too complex and too slow; Attlee wanted quick results.94 An even more secret and controversial operation, however, was under way. In early 1947, a top-secret MI6 team was created to engage in deniable action to slow the flow of illegal immigration. Demonstrating a hangover from SOE activities, these measures included sabotage. Wartime veterans in special operations were quietly plucked from the clubs of Belgravia and despatched to the Mediterranean to launch ‘Operation Embarrass’.95

Initially, under the cover story of a ‘yachting trip’, they headed for the ports of France and Italy with limpet mines and timers. Joined by Colonel David Smiley, a former SOE officer who had only just recovered from burns inflicted by an exploding briefcase at the end of the war, they were soon marauding all over the Mediterranean in motor torpedo boats.96 Over the summer of 1947 and into early 1948 they attacked five ships in Italian ports, three of which were badly damaged. British-made limpet mines were found on the other two vessels, but Italian security assumed they had been planted by Arabs using stolen British stores. MI6 even considered blowing up the Baltimore steamship President Warfield