The Defence of the Realm (74 page)

Far more remarkable than the distaste felt by the Diplomatic Service was the opposition within the Security Service to applying positive vetting to itself. Among the leading opponents was Roger Hollis, who minuted as DDG in 1954 his opposition even to seeking referees for Service staff:

The secrecy of one's employment influences one's private life, and I doubt if any of us who have spent a number of years in the Security Service could produce referees whose testimonial would be really valuable. I am sure I could not and I should not like to ask my friends to act as referees in a matter of this importance because I do not think it would be fair to them . . .
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At a subsequent Directors' Meeting Hollis was overruled and staff were required to provide the names of two referees.
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The requirement that all Security Service staff undergo positive vetting seems to have followed an embarrassing incident in its relations with the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, probably in 1957. Shortly before four of its officers were about to inspect security at Aldermaston, the Service was asked if all had been PV'd. They had not and rapid vetting had to be arranged. One of the four, who came from the north-east of England and had joined the Service two years earlier, recalls the irritation of Director B (personnel and organization), John Marriott, at his inability to provide London referees and the need to carry out hasty PV interviews in Newcastle.
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Even after the Aldermaston embarrassment, however, positive vetting of existing Security Service staff proceeded painfully slowly – so slowly that Hollis decreed as DG in 1957 that it was unnecessary to investigate staff who had joined before the introduction of PV, ‘if there is evidence that references were taken up'.
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Remarkably, Hollis also ruled that A4 (formerly B4) surveillance personnel and other staff members who did not have access to files need not be subject to the PV process.
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Positive vetting was not fully implemented within the Service until the early 1960s. Following spy scandals at the beginning of the decade,
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an inquiry headed by Lord Radcliffe ‘to review procedures and practices currently followed in the public service', which reported in 1962, led to an extension of vetting within the civil service. Hollis gave the cabinet secretary an undertaking that the whole Service would be PV'd. The Service officer who was asked to devise a PV system later recalled that John Marriott wanted nothing to do with it, and in any case ‘hated' Hollis. Marriott was overridden. The officer who devised the system recruited a team of interviewing officers, mainly retired senior officers from the armed services, and interviewed the officer grades himself.
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The Radcliffe inquiry was deeply impressed by a Security Service briefing paper which reported that in the major civil service unions one-third of the permanent and one-quarter of the elected officials were Communists or sympathizers.
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It concluded that Communist penetration of these unions was ‘most dangerous to security' and recommended that:

Departments should have the right in respect of establishments or staff employed on secret work to deny access to or refuse to negotiate with trade union officials whom they had reason to believe were communists. This would require a formal challenge, in each case, with a right of appeal to the Three Advisers [on the vetting Tribunal].

Nine trade union officials were identified by the Security Service under the Purge Procedure as Communists who should be excluded from civil service negotiations, though two names were withdrawn before they had been formally submitted to ministers. The three-man Advisory Tribunal, under a new head, Sir Henry Hancock, former chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue, and with a changed membership, no longer had the harmonious working relationship with the Security Service of a decade earlier. The union officials who were purged had no official access to secrets, were not government servants and their livelihood was at risk. The Advisers, perhaps understandably, seemed to find their task distasteful. Challenging some of the Security Service evidence, one Adviser claimed that he had experience of ‘distortion by security people'. At one of the hearings, when a photograph was produced as evidence of a union official's attendance at a Communist meeting, the Tribunal insisted on the appearance of a member of A4 who would be prepared to swear to the date on which the photograph was taken. It also became clear that the Advisers sometimes had their Security Service briefs before them when interviewing suspects, and put intelligence sources at risk by referring to surveillance photographs or to Communist Party registration cards. The Service none the less regarded the outcome of the Tribunal hearings as a success. Five of the union officials identified as Communists resigned their posts; two others were moved to jobs which involved no contact with sensitive departments.
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In the wake of the Radcliffe Report, the Security Service was anxious to limit the drain on its resources caused by increase in vetting. In October 1962 the DG, Sir Roger Hollis, attended a long meeting with the Chiefs of Staff to repel proposals that the Service should take over responsibility for vetting throughout Whitehall. In theory, each government department was responsible for organizing most of its vetting requirements in-house. In practice much vetting within Whitehall was done by the Ministry of Supply, which had accumulated relevant experience as a result of its
involvement in the nuclear field. Hollis spoke for the Service as a whole when he told the Chiefs of Staff that vetting was a thankless task which was likely to become steadily more onerous.
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The Security Service also had to resist pressure for increased vetting from the British Broadcasting Corporation.
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The main initiative for the introduction of vetting in the 1930s had come from the BBC's first director general, Sir John (later Lord) Reith, an authoritarian Calvinist, 6 feet 7 inches tall (aptly described by Churchill as ‘the wuthering height'), whose interpretation of the requirements of public service broadcasting led him to seek MI5 assistance in excluding Communists and Fascists from the Corporation.
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Kell agreed that ‘general vetting' was required. Initially informal, negative vetting was formalized in 1937
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and changed little over the next two decades. MI5 reported to the cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, in 1952 that it was responsible for vetting about 5,000 of the BBC's 12,000 staff: all those who received monthly salaries, all non-British employees and about half the engineering staff.
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The Security Service was then sending the BBC ‘adverse reports' on about 10 per cent of its applicants.
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Though it was up to the BBC whether to act on these reports,
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during the early Cold War it seems to have done so. The Home Office forwarded to the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, a 1952 MI5 report which concluded: ‘Our considered opinion is that communist influence in the BBC is very slight and does not constitute a serious security danger.' The Security Service calculated that less than 1.5 per cent of BBC staff were known or suspected Communist Party members or sympathisers.
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The appointment of Sir Hugh Greene as BBC director general in 1960 was followed by a ‘long dispute' with MI5. Despite his success in giving the Corporation a less stuffy image and his support for satirical programmes mocking establishment values such as
That Was The Week That Was
, Greene, according to a Security Service minute, ‘wanted us to vet far more widely than we were prepared to do because they did not wish to employ anyone who might damage their reputation for impartiality'.
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Hollis noted after a meeting with Greene that there was ‘an irreconcilable difference' between them over the purpose of vetting: ‘We were concerned with defence interests but they were really concerned with the avoidance of embarrassment.' The Home Office sided with MI5 and supported Hollis's refusal to extend vetting in the BBC.
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The fact that vetting occurred at all remained a closely guarded secret. Both Greene and his head of administration, John Arkell, steadfastly refused to admit its existence. Arkell told a senior colleague in 1968 that he ‘might like to gain a bit of
credit for the BBC next time you talk to MI5' by telling them that, despite ‘pointed and penetrating questions' in a recent press interview, ‘I still denied that we had any vetting procedures.'
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Though Sir Charles Curran, who became DG in 1969, lacked Greene's liberal reputation, he attached less importance to vetting. For the first few years of the Curran era, C3 complained that the BBC frequently ignored vetting advice: ‘it was their deliberate policy to offer jobs to some people with ultra left records whom they considered to be imaginatively creative and desirable.'
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The mood changed after Sir Michael Swann, former principal and vice chancellor of Edinburgh University, became BBC chairman in 1973. Swann told the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, in 1975 that, though the situation in the Corporation ‘was a picnic compared with Edinburgh University', he was concerned ‘about “hippie” influences in the BBC':

. . . He thought that too many young producers approached every programme they did from the starting point of an attitude about the subject which could be summed up as: ‘You are a shit.' It was an attitude which he and others in the management of the BBC deplored, and they would be using their influence as opportunity offered to try to counter it.
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C3 noted that the BBC now, once again, usually took its vetting advice.
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There was a case for some degree of vetting in the Corporation. It is scarcely imaginable, for example, that loyal adherents of the CPGB pro-Moscow line should have been employed in news rooms during the Korean War and the Hungarian Uprising. But the scale of the mass vetting of BBC staff (drastically cut back after it gave rise to public controversy in the mid-1980s)
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now seems seriously disproportionate – though at the time it was accepted by successive governments. The fact that, in contrast to the Whitehall Purge Procedure, BBC management refused even to admit that it practised vetting added to the sense of injustice felt by those who believed, sometimes with good reason, that their careers had been damaged by it.
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Probably the most pointless vetting for which the Security Service was responsible was of homosexuals in the public service. The initial criteria for positive vetting had identified homosexuals as inherently untrustworthy.
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In 1951, Graham Mitchell, then in charge of the Service' departmental security section, had produced the fi rst detailed case for the vetting of gays. Though acknowledging that ‘all lay generalisations are or should be suspect', Mitchell proposed as less suspect than other generalizations the claims that homosexuals were:

(a)  maladjusted to the social environment and may therefore be of an unstable character;

(b)  they stick together and are backward in giving information even though it is their duty to do so; and

(c)  in so far as their activities are felonious they are at least in theory open to blackmail by a hostile intelligence agency.
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As the 1957 report of the Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution made clear, at least the first two claims were ill founded.

Controversy over the alleged security risks posed by gays was revived by the case of John Vassall, who confessed in 1962 that, while working as a clerk in the office of the British naval attaché in Moscow, he had been blackmailed by the KGB and recruited as a Soviet agent after being secretly photographed (in his words) ‘having oral, anal or a complicated series of sexual activities with a number of different men'.
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In the aftermath of the Vassall affair, Director C (Bill Magan) was impressed by an alarmist report to the May 1963 Commonwealth Security Conference by Mr Kelly of the RCMP:

Kelly said that the Canadian Government has an absolute rule against the employment of homosexuals on sensitive work . . . A purge has been going on on an extensive scale. It has not led to embarrassment or administrative difficulty. Investigations point to some 10% of Government servants being homosexuals. The practice is not concentrated in any identifiable types of people; it is spread pretty evenly involving the highest and the lowest, administrative, executive, clerical staffs, service officers, other ranks and so on. A considerable number of high officials and armed forces officers have been purged. (One very senior Foreign Affairs official was thought to have had homosexual associations with one of HMG's ambassadors.) In Kelly's own words, ‘Shoals of people have been brought back from behind the Iron Curtain.'
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To assess the problem in Britain, HOWs were obtained for telephone checks in 1964–5 on four suspected homosexuals in the public service. Three were discovered to be relatively discreet in their relationships. The telecheck on the fourth, however, generated an ‘immense amount of material' involving over 250 men engaged in ‘long telephone conversations which were often of a revolting nature'. The transcribers found the whole exercise a stressful experience: ‘The regular members of [his] circle were much given to referring to each other by girls' names (Maud, Kitty, Alice and so on). This transposing of the sexes, and the use of other homosexual slang, at times made for difficulties of interpretation.'
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The Security
Service, however, saw no reason to follow the Canadian example: ‘It was concluded that the present criterion was right, i.e. that homosexuality raises a presumption of unfitness to hold a P.V. post but the presumption can be disregarded by the Head of the Department if he is satisfied in all the circumstances that this can be done without prejudice to national security.' In 1965 the Security Service successfully resisted the Treasury view that it might be necessary to treat homosexuality as an absolute bar against holding any post which required positive vetting.
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