The Defence of the Realm (3 page)

The judgements and conclusions drawn by Professor Andrew in the History are his own, not those of the Security Service or the Government
as a whole. Giving Professor Andrew the independence to reach his own conclusions, however well or badly they reflected on the Service, was a key element of the project. In writing the History, Professor Andrew has drawn not only on Security Service records but also on a host of other material available to him. It should not, therefore, be assumed that his conclusions are based solely on material in our records which is unavailable to the public. This book is not an ‘official' history within the terms of the Government programme of research and publication of Official Histories on a variety of subjects relating to government activity.

I hope that you will enjoy the History and that you will consider as I do that it provides a striking new insight into an important element in our national life over the last century and into the work of the many dedicated members of the Service whose contribution has been, and to a large degree will remain, unsung.

Jonathan Evans

 

‘This is my first visit to MI5.'
Michael Heath's depiction (after Escher) of the mysterious public image of MI5 in the later years of the Cold War (
Spectator
, 29 November 1986).

Preface

For most of its history the Security Service (MI5) has seemed to outsiders a deeply mysterious organization. Successive governments intended it to be so. The Service, like the rest of the intelligence community, was to stay as far from public view as possible. The historian Sir Michael Howard declared in 1985: ‘So far as official government policy is concerned, the British security and intelligence services do not exist. Enemy agents are found under gooseberry bushes and intelligence is brought by the storks.' The past as well as present of the Security Service remained officially taboo. Even at the end of the Cold War, staff could scarcely have imagined that the Service would mark its hundredth birthday in 2009 by publishing this Centenary History.

The first century of the Security Service falls into six distinct periods (identified in the Contents) which reflect its changing priorities. For eighty years, the Service set out to ‘defend the realm' against, alternately, Germany and Russia – and their supporters inside the United Kingdom. Before and during the two world wars, MI5's chief priority was to counter German intelligence operations. For most of the interwar years and the whole of the Cold War, by contrast, the Service's main concerns were what it saw as the linked threats of Soviet espionage and Communist subversion. Though MI5 comprehensively defeated the British operations of both Kaiser Wilhelm II's and Adolf Hitler's intelligence services, it found Soviet intelligence a more difficult opponent. Not until the mass expulsion of KGB and GRU (military intelligence) personnel from London in 1971 did the Security Service gain the upper hand.

MI5's deputy head proudly declared on its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1934: ‘Our Security Service is more than national; it is Imperial.' During the quarter-century after the Second World War, its officers and many other staff could expect to spend a quarter to a third of their careers in the Empire and Commonwealth. The Service's overseas role adds another dimension to our understanding of British decolonization. Until the beginning of the ‘Troubles' in 1969, the Service knew far less about Northern
Ireland than about Anglophone Africa. It also had little experience of counter-terrorism. As late as 1974 only 7½ per cent of the Service's resources were devoted to counter-terrorist operations against both the IRA and international terrorist groups, whose emergence as a security threat nearly coincided with the start of the Troubles. Until 1992 the lead intelligence role in Britain against the IRA belonged not to the Service but to the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police.

The end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union transformed Security Service priorities. For the first time in its history the Service became primarily a counter-terrorist agency. Since then it has faced two serious terrorist offensives: from the IRA, which posed a more dangerous threat to mainland Britain for much of the 1990s than ever before, and from Islamist terrorists, who during the first decade of the twenty-first century emerged as an even greater threat. In 2007 thirty ‘active' terrorist plots were being investigated, more than at any previous point in British history.

The transformation of Security Service priorities was accompanied by a dramatic change in its public image. The Service began to realize in the closing years of the Cold War that, as British society became more open and less deferential, levels of secrecy which went beyond its operational needs damaged public confidence and bred conspiracy theories. For the first time, the recent history of the Security Service had become front-page news. The episodes which received most publicity, however, were entirely fictitious as well as damaging to its public reputation: the non-existent career of Sir Roger Hollis (Director General from 1956 to 1965) as a Soviet agent and the Service's equally non-existent conspiracy to overthrow the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

In 1989 the Security Service Act placed the Service on a statutory footing for the first time in its history. Three years later, Stella Rimington became both the first DG whose appointment was publicly announced and the first female British intelligence chief. Rimington believed that one of the achievements of her term as DG was ‘the demystification of the Service and the creation of a more informed public and media perception'. Demystification was encouraged by the establishment in 1994 of an oversight committee of parliamentarians, the Intelligence and Security Committee, which produced annual published reports on the intelligence agencies. Some of the simplistic headlines which had greeted Rimington's appointment in 1992 (among them ‘MOTHER OF TWO GETS TOUGH WITH TERRORISTS') were no longer imaginable by the time she retired in 1996. A year later the Service began advertising publicly for new recruits.

There remain strict limits to ‘the demystification of the Service'. Its
commitment to preserving the secrecy of current operations, as well as to concealing the identities of staff and agents, has changed little over the past century. By contrast, the Service has become much less secretive about its past record. Since 1997 it has released to the National Archives over 4,000 files on its first half-century, which have given rise to a growing volume of innovative historical research.

In 2002 the Service advertised for a part-time official historian to write its Centenary History and interviewed a series of applicants. I was fortunate to be selected and began work at its Thames House headquarters in 2003. Since then I have been given virtually unrestricted access to the Service's twentieth-century files as well as to the more limited number of twentyfirst-century records I have asked to see. No other of the world's leading intelligence agencies has given similar access to a historian appointed from outside. A significant minority of the files I have seen contain material on intelligence sources and methods which it was clear from the outset could not be published. I thought it important, however, to read these files in order to try to ensure that conclusions in
The Defence of the Realm
based on documents which can be quoted are not contradicted by files whose contents remain classified. Like previous official historians in Britain, I was given an assurance at the outset (which has been fully honoured) that no attempt would be made to change any of the judgements I arrived at.

Clearance of this volume has, unsurprisingly, been a protracted process. There is an inevitable tension between the needs of national security and the wishes of historians. My advocacy of the case for clearance on matters which I judge important has, as colleagues in the Security Service can confirm, not lacked vigour. The issues involved are sometimes difficult. There is much, mostly classified, evidence to support the view of the Security Service that retaining the confidence of current agents makes it necessary to conceal the identities of most of their predecessors as well as their own. The Service has, however, broken important new ground by making it possible for me to bring this history up to the present.

The most difficult part of the clearance process has concerned the requirements of other government departments. One significant excision as a result of these requirements in Chapter E4 is, I believe, hard to justify. This and other issues relating to the level of secrecy about past intelligence operations required by the current needs of national security would, in my view, merit consideration by the Intelligence and Security Committee (though that, of course, is a matter for the Committee to decide).

Acknowledgements

The sheer size of the Security Service Archive is both thrilling and intimidating. Almost 400,000 paper files survive, many of them multi-volume. Finding a path through this immense archive would have been impossible without two wonderful part-time research teams: the first, at MI5 headquarters, composed of one current and two retired members of the Security Service (who cannot, alas, be named); the second at Cambridge University, where I have been assisted by two academic colleagues, Dr Peter Martland and Dr Calder Walton. It has been a joy to work with them all.

Three successive DGs have provided indispensable support for the Centenary History: Sir Stephen Lander, whose idea it was, Baroness Manningham-Buller and Jonathan Evans. The History Team are very grateful also to the members of the Service who have made helpful comments on draft chapters and my talks on MI5 history, to the many retired members on whose memories we have drawn, and to those who have provided managerial, secretarial, computer and other support. Though current and retired members of the Service (except for DGs) cannot be named, our thanks go to them all.

Throughout the writing of this book I have benefited from the intellectual stimulation provided by the Cambridge University Intelligence Seminar, which brings together a remarkable group of postgraduates from around the world expert at identifying the role of intelligence in a variety of fields which more senior scholars have overlooked. I have learned much from them; their theses on topics related to the history of the Security Service are cited in the Notes and Bibliography. I am also grateful to Dr Tony Craig of the Intelligence Seminar for his research for the Centenary History in the National Archives. The debt I owe to the Cambridge history undergraduates I have the good fortune to teach is exemplified by Pete Gallagher's ground-breaking 2009 final-year dissertation which I cite three times.

Among my academic colleagues in the historical profession, I owe
particular thanks to Dr Nicholas Hiley, who combines an unrivalled knowledge of open-source material on the early history of modern British intelligence agencies with enviable expertise on British political cartoons.

Both I and the Centenary History have been remarkably fortunate in our editor at Penguin, Stuart Proffitt, in our copyeditor, Peter James, and in the Service's literary agent, Bill Hamilton – all leaders in their fields. At Cambridge Jane Martin and Kate Williams of Corpus Christi College have helped me with friendly efficiency to organize my academic and administrative responsibilities in ways which enabled me to find time to complete this History.

Throughout this exciting and demanding project my wife Jenny, our children, their spouses/partners and our grandchildren have, as always, been my greatest inspiration.

A note on the paperback edition

I have taken the opportunity of this paperback edition to correct various points of detail and remedy a significant omission which have been kindly pointed out to me by attentive readers of the hardback. I have also been able to update substantially the recent history of counter-terrorism in ways which, for legal and other reasons, were impossible at the time of hardback publication.

Christopher Andrew, 2010