The Defence of the Realm (75 page)

Though its criteria were never fully spelt out, the Service seems to have been relatively unconcerned during positive vetting by the presence of gays in the government service, provided that they did not actually identify themselves as homosexual and remained discreet about their sexual liaisons (which, until 1967, remained illegal). After the passage in 1967 of the Sexual Offences Act, which embodied the ten-year-old Wolfenden recommendation to legalize gay sex between consenting adults, C Branch recommended to Whitehall's Personnel Security Committee (PSC) that the issue of homosexuality should continue to be considered during the PV process because the risk of blackmail remained. The PSC agreed. In guidance to government departments, however, it was suggested that, since lawbreaking was no longer involved, they might now be able to decide in favour of individuals who would previously have failed positive vetting. Much of Whitehall none the less remained anxious. The Service continued to receive numerous requests from government departments for advice on whether individual homosexuals were security risks. As late as 1969 almost 50 per cent of the ‘character defect' cases passed to the Service concerned homosexuality.
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5

The Communist Party of Great Britain, the Trade Unions and the Labour Party

Pressure of work had forced the wartime Security Service to give up the attempt to keep a comprehensive database of all CPGB members. The Service told chief constables in 1942 that henceforth it would concentrate on maintaining records on Party officials and keeping track of Communist activity in the armed forces and other sensitive areas. That policy, reaffirmed in another circular to chief constables in December 1945, changed three years later with the onset of the Cold War. Attlee's announcement to the Commons in March 1948 of the Purge Procedure, designed to exclude Communists and Fascists from work ‘vital to the Security of the State', made it necessary to identify all Communists as well as the few remaining Fascists. The Service concluded in October 1948, ‘Our ultimate aim must be the keeping of accurate records of all members of the [CPGB].'
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In most respects the CPGB was ‘a political party like other political parties', with officials who spent most of their time on humdrum administration. But, because of its loyalty to Moscow, there was a danger that, in wartime, it would ‘prove a formidable fifth column'.
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The Service had extraordinary success in gaining access to Party membership records through both agents and a series of operations collectively codenamed STILL LIFE which gained covert entry into all British and Northern Irish local Party offices. The first major operation, RED KNIGHT in 1949, succeeded in copying Party registration forms for the London district.
³
An even more successful operation, PARTY PIECE, followed the discovery that a large collection of Party records were stored in the house of the Communist Berger family
⁴
at 5 Grove Terrace, Highgate Road, in north-west London.
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Roland Berger had first been identified as an undercover Communist and member of a Communist cell in the civil service during the Second World War.
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After working for the United Nations from 1947 to 1952, he established the British Council for the Promotion of International Trade, which at one point was believed to be a conduit for Soviet funding of the CPGB.
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An MI5 officer, who became
tenant of a flat in the Berger household, organized the first phase of Operation PARTY PIECE in June 1955, during which about 6,000 documents were copied inside the house. Three months later, 48,000 documents were secretly removed at night in suitcases to be photographed at Leconfield House and returned before their absence was noticed. Security Service files were regularly updated by further covert entries into local Party offices, at first every three years, later at five-year intervals.
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Such was the expertise of the STILL LIFE operations that they passed virtually undetected.

Sillitoe told Attlee in May 1949 that ‘we now had quite a number of agents in the Communist Party who were well-placed and gave us good coverage.' ‘The P.M.', noted Liddell, ‘seemed particularly pleased about this.'
⁹
Like Olga Gray in the 1930s,
¹⁰
the most successful penetration agent in the early Cold War was probably one of Maxwell Knight's women agents.
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She applied to join MI5 after the war but said she could not make ends meet on the salary she was offered and accepted a better-paid post elsewhere. Norman Himsworth, an officer in Knight's section who had himself successfully penetrated the Party early in the war, then recommended her recruitment as an agent.
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Knight invited her to lunch at Canuto's and told Dick White afterwards, ‘I feel very strongly she is the sort of agent for whom we have been looking for so long.'
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Himsworth, who became her case officer, called her his ‘Number 1' agent.
¹⁴

Within a year of joining the Party, the agent had been asked to work for it and, like Olga Gray, ‘was treated as part of the furniture, which is what she wanted'.
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For a decade she provided regular reports (eventually filling thirty-two volumes) as well as, intermittently, Party records. Though highly motivated, she eventually became depressed by the atmosphere within the CPGB: ‘When she saw it at close quarters she saw the deceit, ruthlessness and double standards of CPGB officials. She admitted that by working for “the elite” of the CPGB she might see these aspects more clearly than a rank and file member.'
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To maintain her cover, she lived in what she found depressing working-class accommodation, rarely went on holiday, lacked opportunities to make new friends, and had to fend off sexual harassment by a Communist colleague.
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Once it was clear that she had become burned out, it was mutually agreed that she should cease work as an agent.
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Probably with Kipling's
Kim
in mind, she wrote to the DG, ‘It has always been a deep satisfaction to me to be able to play a small part in the game.'
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As late as the summer of 1950, the CPGB leadership gave no sign of realizing either the level of Security Service penetration or that the Service had gained extensive access to its membership records. The Party's industrial
organizer, George Allison, told a closed (but bugged) meeting of Communist trade union officials that he believed:

MI5 coverage of the Party was extremely haphazard so far as the purge was concerned, and that they relied upon liaison with the heads of firms, etc, for their information [about Party membership], which, he thought, was obtained through suggestion boxes, i.e. in some factories and firms fellow workers put notes in these boxes, probably with malicious intent, saying that so-and-so is a Communist, etc.

Allison's misconceptions were greeted with delight by the Service leadership.
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At the end of 1950, however, the detailed knowledge of Party members displayed during the Purge Procedure at last led the CPGB leadership to conclude that the Service must have gained access to some of its membership records. Alerted to this discovery by agents and technical intelligence, the Service requested that the Purge Procedure be pursued less energetically. Attlee agreed to instruct permanent under secretaries to try for the time being to avoid purging Communists in some districts and merely move them to less sensitive posts.
²¹

In 1952 the Security Service reported that a comparison of its existing files on the CPGB with the latest sample of current Party membership records it had purloined indicated that it had identified approximately 90 per cent of the 35,000 CPGB members. The missing 10 per cent were thought to be mostly young or new members ‘who have not yet come to notice and who are so far of minor security significance'.
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The Service's main difficulty was in coping with the sheer volume of CPGB records it obtained. F4 reported in 1970 that over the past year it had ‘handled approximately 20,000 items of Still Life. Often Still Life from several districts may arrive together with a result that a backlog of valuable security information builds up in F4.'
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The Service's most reliable way of keeping track of the Party leadership was through hidden microphones and tapping telephones at the CPGB's London headquarters in King Street, Covent Garden. In 1943 Blunt revealed to his Soviet controller that a microphone had been placed in King Street. Soviet intelligence passed this report to the CPGB, which searched its premises but failed to find any eavesdropping equipment.
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After the war, eavesdropping detected ‘periodic scares about the presence of microphones'. On one occasion all the floorboards were taken up in an attempt to find them – but to no avail.
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From time to time eavesdropping in King Street revealed an awareness that the telephones were tapped. On 22 January 1948, for example, the future general secretary John Gollan was heard complaining to an unidentified Party member: ‘That bloody
phone there – the fact that you phoned me, they know. What I said to you, they know. They open our letters. They go to our meetings. We are spending more on the bloody Secret Service now than we ever spent in the years of British history. The spies are everywhere!' Gollan added that none of this would become public knowledge ‘until we've cracked the [intelligence] archives one day. Then you'll know what was going on!'
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‘In practice,' the Security Service noted in 1968, ‘the Party has never taken any prolonged counter-measures other than the development [in 1965] of Room 10 as a safe room.' The Party was unaware that Room 10 was also bugged, though sound quality from the hidden microphone was poor.
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The Security Service had ‘good coverage' of the secret Soviet funding of the CPGB, monitoring by surveillance and telecheck the regular collection of Moscow's cash subsidies by two members of the Party's International Department, Eileen Palmer and Bob Stewart, from the north London address of two ex-trainees of the Moscow Radio School.
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The Service was also well informed about the Party leadership's attempts to deal with ideological dissidence among its members. One of its best sources, apart from its coverage of King Street, was an HOW on the formidable Betty Reid, who from 1946 was in charge of ‘membership' issues – a euphemism for checking members' loyalty and identifying those who failed to follow the Party line. Even a sympathetic history of the CPGB describes her as ‘the party's witchfinder general'. In public Reid was uncompromising on the need to confront heresy: ‘Political differences, if they are not challenged and thrashed out, can over a period become so deep that in the end disciplinary action is the only solution.'
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Security Service surveillance revealed a more human side to Ms Reid. According to an assessment forwarded to the Home Office by the DG:

In spite of her bulk and apparent lack of beauty she is a feminine personality . . . [who] tends to have a disarming effect on comrades who have been summoned to see her, and have mounted the stairs to the Org[anisation] Dept. prepared for severity. As far as I know, she has been entirely responsible for the elaborate machinery for the vetting of party comrades . . . Her patience and robust sense of humour are more than a match for the leg-pulling to which she is constantly subjected, and her great weakness is a profound liking for cheese cake!
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Reid also had a weakness for cream cakes, which was regularly indulged by her contact at the Soviet embassy, Nikolai Timofeyev, whom she called her ‘cream cake pal'. Though playing a key role in Party security, Reid became convinced that her own security had been compromised, believing that the home help she employed from 1950 onwards was a Security Service agent.
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It did not require secret intelligence to detect the CPGB's subservience to Soviet dogma. The Party continued to perform almost instantaneous ideological somersaults at a word of command from Moscow. When the Yugoslav Communist leader, Josip Tito, was officially unmasked as a heretic, James Klugmann, his long-time friend and admirer, denounced him in a rapidly composed polemic entitled
From Trotsky to Tito
. The price of the Party's servility to Soviet interests at the beginning of the Cold War was electoral disaster. At the 1950 general election both the Communist MPs elected in 1945, Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin, lost their seats. The Party's general secretary, Harry Pollitt, went immediately to Moscow to seek advice from Stalin, whom he regarded as a friend, as well as from Soviet Communist Party apparatchiks. After a second trip to Moscow he returned with a document which formed the basis of a new Party manifesto,
The British Road to Socialism
, published in February 1951 and pledging it to a parliamentary route to power.
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At the general election eight months later, standing on this manifesto, all ten CPGB candidates lost their deposits.

Telechecks, eavesdropping and agent penetration gave the Security Service a secret ringside seat at the disputes within the CPGB provoked by Khrushchev's admission of some of the horrors of the Stalin era during his ‘Secret Speech' to the 1956 Soviet Party Congress, which was published in the West (though not in the Soviet Union). During a bugged conversation at the home of the Communist Berger family in Highgate, Nan Berger (Roland Berger's wife, née Whittaker) was heard to tell a Polish visitor that ‘A great many people had been completely knocked out by it [the Secret Speech] and just could not believe it. Another very large group were now saying “Well, really we've known this all the time. This is what the capitalist press have been saying, and we've been pretending it hasn't been so.” '
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The crushing of the Hungarian Uprising by Soviet tanks in the autumn of 1956 provoked an even greater crisis of confidence among Party members than the Secret Speech. In the course of the year, 7,000 people – over a quarter of the membership – left the Party.
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John Gollan, who succeeded Pollitt as general secretary, and the rest of the Party leadership, however, remained unswervingly loyal to the Soviet Union. Gollan ‘used to say in difficult moments that he could have done with a direct telephone line to Moscow'.
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