The Defence of the Realm (78 page)

The most senior Labour politician on whom the Security Service held a
file was Harold Wilson who, at the time of Gordon Walker's approach to the Security Service, was shadow chancellor and chairman of the Labour Party National Executive Committee. In 1961 he had stood unsuccessfully against Hugh Gaitskell for the Labour leadership. The file had been opened soon after his election as MP in 1945 and appointment as parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Works. In 1947, at the age of only thirty-one, Wilson became president of the Board of Trade and the youngest member of the Attlee cabinet. Because of its unusual sensitivity, his file was kept under the pseudonym ‘Norman John Worthington'.
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Graham Mitchell, then B1a (responsible for studying Communism in the UK), noted when Wilson became a cabinet minister: ‘The security interest attaching to Wilson and justifying the opening a P[ermanent] F[ile] for him derives from comments made about him by certain Communist members of the Civil Service which suggested an identity or similarity of political outlook.'
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A telecheck on a Communist civil servant at the Ministry of Works recorded him bemoaning Wilson's move to the Board of Trade in 1947: ‘He and I were getting you know – quite a plot, but it has all gone west now.'
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Such evidence, Mitchell minuted, did not establish that Wilson himself had Communist sympathies and he noted an attack on him in the
Daily Worker
for having ‘inexcusably failed to conclude a trading agreement with the Soviet Union'.
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In April 1951 Wilson followed Aneurin ‘Nye' Bevan out of the Attlee cabinet in a bitter dispute over health service charges and defence expenditure which threatened to split the Party. In October 1954, a year before Attlee retired as Labour leader, a bugged discussion at King Street revealed that opinion at the CPGB headquarters favoured Wilson rather than Bevan as Attlee's successor.
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(In the event, Attlee was succeeded in 1955 by Hugh Gaitskell, whose wife Dora had once amused King George VI by claiming that her husband was ‘rather right-wing'.)
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King Street's misplaced hopes in Harold Wilson doubtless owed much to his unusually frequent contacts with the Soviet Union.
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While at the Board of Trade, Wilson had paid three official visits to Moscow for trade negotiations, claiming after a game of cricket near the River Moskva ‘to be the only batsman ever to have been dropped at square leg by a member of the NKVD [KGB]'.
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His Russian contacts increased during his years in opposition after the Conservative election victory in October 1951. From 1952 to 1959 he worked as economic consultant for Montague L. Meyer Ltd, timber importers from the Soviet Union, paying a series of visits to Moscow, partly on Meyer business but increasingly with the main aim of meeting Soviet leaders and establishing himself as Labour's main
Soviet expert. In May 1953 the
Daily Worker
reported that he had had ‘Warm and Friendly Talks' with Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister.
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Though the Security Service never suspected Wilson of being a secret crypto-Communist or fellow-traveller, it looked askance at some of the Communist connections he developed in the course of his Russian travels and work for Montague L. Meyer. Among Wilson's contacts was the veteran undeclared Communist Roland Berger, who figured prominently on MI5's list of those selected for internment in the event of war with the Soviet Bloc. In 1954 Wilson suggested to Berger the names of businessmen who might join his British Council for the Promotion of International Trade (BCPIT), which, on Security Service advice, was later officially identified as ‘Communist controlled'.
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Surveillance as well as other sources revealed that Wilson was also in friendly contact during the 1950s with a KGB officer operating under diplomatic cover at the London residency, Ivan Federovich Skripov,
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and another Soviet diplomat later suspected of KGB affiliation, Nikolai Dmitrievich Belokhvostikov.
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Though Wilson did not know that either was a KGB officer, he must surely have suspected it. He later claimed that he had operated under the assumption that any Soviet diplomat with whom he had dealings might be working for the KGB.
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According to Wilson's KGB file, his gossip on British politics, though it doubtless did not include classified information, was so highly valued by the KGB that reports on it were passed to the Politburo.
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In January 1956, just back from his sixth visit to Moscow, Wilson told Skripov he was sure he would like an article he had written for the
Liverpool Daily Post
on his meeting with the Soviet First Deputy Prime Minister, Mikoyan.
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Skripov was probably even more impressed by two articles by Wilson in the
Daily Mirror
on his meeting in Moscow with the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. After denouncing those Western diplomats and journalists who wrote off Khrushchev as ‘garrulous, boorish, given to wild statements and even to clowning', Wilson declared: ‘THEY ARE WRONG. THE WEST MUST NOT UNDERRATE THIS MAN. In a team of strong, able men, Khrushchev stands out as the undoubted chief.' Wilson eulogized the extraordinary Soviet achievement in rapidly modernizing a previously backward economy which was now moving to ‘mechanisation, electrification and automation': ‘Let no one think that we can halt this industrial revolution inside Russia by our footling restrictions on exports from the Western world . . . In the next generation Russia's industrial challenge may well dominate the world economic scene.'
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In June 1956 Wilson was back in Moscow and had further meetings with senior Soviet figures. The
Sunday Dispatch
reported, probably accurately, that though his visit to Russia was ostensibly on Montague Meyer business, he was believed to be establishing his claims to become foreign secretary in the next Labour government by building up contacts with Soviet leaders.
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In order not to prejudice those contacts, Wilson rather cravenly refused to sign a letter by other left-wing Labour MPs condemning the Soviet invasion of Hungary in October.
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He appears to have gone even further in his campaign to establish himself as the British politician best qualified to conduct a dialogue in Moscow. According to his KGB file, one of the firms with which he was involved breached the Western CoCom embargo on ‘strategic' exports to Soviet Bloc countries.
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Wilson's official biographer, Philip Ziegler, accepts that this was probably the case: ‘The export of many items was forbidden; inevitably a grey area grew up in which trading might or might not be illegal. Some of Wilson's associates strayed into that area or even beyond it.'
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The high value placed in Moscow on Wilson's political gossip, the dubious nature of some of his business contacts, his probable involvement in the breach of the CoCom embargo and his public praise for Soviet achievements probably explain the KGB's decision in 1956 to give him the codename OLDING and open an ‘agent development file' in the hope of recruiting him. The OLDING file records, however, that ‘The development did not come to fruition.'
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Though the CPGB leadership's unfounded optimism earlier in the 1950s in its ability to influence Wilson had markedly declined by the end of the decade, traces of it still recurred in Security Service transcripts of discussions at the Party's King Street headquarters. In October 1959:

Reuben [Falber] . . . remarked that he wished he knew where Wilson stood as he had been very quiet, and he rather felt himself that if there were a genuine possibility of the sort of more Trade Union and working class elements in the Parliamentary Labour Party ‘getting any place', then Wilson would be the leader of it. Wilson was a very, very clever manoeuvrer.

Betty Reid, more bizarrely, now believed that Wilson was a Trotskyist.
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After losing a leadership election to Gaitskell in October 1961, Wilson sought to position himself in the middle ground between the Gaitskellites and the left-wing Tribune Group led by Michael Foot. On becoming shadow foreign secretary in January 1962 he was much more guarded in his comments about the Soviet Union than during his visits to Moscow in the 1950s. When Wilson was elected Party leader after Gaitskell's sudden
death in January 1963, the
Daily Worker
was distinctly unenthusiastic. Since becoming shadow foreign secretary, it complained, ‘Mr Harold Wilson has moved steadily to the right.' It was particularly outraged by the fact that he had visited West Berlin and, standing at the Berlin Wall, had denounced the (East) German Democratic Republic.
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The KGB was equally outraged. So far from regarding Wilson as a potential recruit, as it had done in 1956, and probably for several years afterwards, once Wilson became prime minister in 1964 it inspired a number of press articles attacking his policies.
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*
Most co-optees were Soviet Bloc officials who agreed to combine work on behalf of their intelligence service with their declared jobs. Officials rarely became agents.

6

The Hunt for the ‘Magnificent Five'

Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – all recruited at, or soon after leaving, Cambridge University in the mid-1930s – were the ablest group of British agents ever recruited by a foreign power. It was not until the spring of 1951 that the partial VENONA decrypt of a seven-year-old NKGB telegram from the Washington residency to Moscow at last identified one of the Five.
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That discovery, which took the Security Service completely by surprise, began the most complex and longest-drawn-out investigation in its history, taking over thirty years to complete.

Aware since the unmasking of the atom spies of the extraordinary quality of some of the ideological agents working for Moscow, the Security Service formed a greatly exaggerated view of the sophistication of late-Stalinist foreign intelligence operations. In reality, Soviet agent-running in the West during the 1940s and early 1950s, though able to draw on an impressive pool of highly motivated Western recruits, was frequently of poor quality. After the recall to Moscow of their inspirational early case officers (Arnold Deutsch and Teodor Maly in particular),
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many of the remarkable successes of the Cambridge Five were achieved in spite, rather than because, of their controllers. For almost two years in the middle of the Second World War, the Centre, amazingly, believed that the Five were an elaborate anti-Soviet deception operation by British intelligence. Though that became a minority view in the Centre after the war, there were still senior Soviet intelligence officers who argued that the Five were part of a ‘fiendishly clever' British plot.
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In the early Cold War both Maclean and Philby were badly let down by their controllers at crucial moments. It is inconceivable that either the Security Service or SIS would have shown a similar level of incompetence in the running of such important agents.

After Maclean's posting to Cairo in October 1948 as counsellor and head of Chancery at the age of only thirty-five, apparently on a path which might take him to the top of the diplomatic service but with his double life
placing him under increasing strain, he became deeply depressed by the local Soviet residency's insensitive handling of him. In December 1949 he attached to his latest bundle of classified documents a note asking to be allowed to give up work for Soviet intelligence. The Cairo residency gave so little thought to running Maclean that it forwarded his note unread to Moscow. Incredibly, the Centre also ignored it. Not till Maclean sent another appeal in April 1950, asking to be released from the intolerable strain of his double life, did he at last succeed in attracting the Centre's attention. While the Centre was still deliberating on its response, Maclean went berserk. One evening in May, in a drunken rage, he and his drinking companion, Philip Toynbee, vandalized the flat of two female members of the US embassy, ripped up their underwear, then moved on to destroy the bathroom. There, Toynbee later recalled, ‘Donald raises a large mirror above his head and crashes it into the bath, when to my amazement and delight, alas, the bath breaks in two while the mirror remains intact.' A few days later Maclean was sent back to London where the Foreign Office gave him the rest of the spring and the summer off, and sent him to see a Harley Street psychiatrist.
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Atrocious though the Soviet handling of Maclean had been, it had helped to reduce him to such a desperate mental state that the last thing which either the Foreign Office or the Harley Street psychiatrist were likely to suspect was his involvement in espionage. The psychiatrist reported to the FO that Maclean's psychological problems were so serious that he thought they might have a physical origin which should be investigated at the Maudsley Hospital:

. . . I found it very difficult to believe the man I saw on Saturday morning has got on as well as he has in the Foreign Office. I thought for a man in his position he was somewhat slow and retarded, and, of course, I had no account either from his wife or from the other people in Cairo as to how bad he was.
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The Treasury's medical adviser told the Foreign Office Personnel Department, after examining Maclean: ‘Personally I think a solution is going to be difficult to find as the whole family . . . are definitely unbalanced & there is a marked alcoholic tendency which is surprising with such a family background.' Matters were made worse by Maclean's insistence on being treated by a psychoanalyst of his own choice, Dr Erna Rosenbaum, rather than by the Foreign Office psychiatrist, possibly because he feared he might give something away in meetings with a psychiatrist chosen by the Foreign Office.
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The choice of Dr Rosenbaum did not please the Treasury medical adviser; she was ‘not qualified in England and he therefore feared she might
be a quack.'
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Treatment by her, however, seems to have partly stabilized Maclean's condition. Remarkably, he was considered sufficiently recovered by the autumn of 1950 to be appointed head of the FO American desk. There, despite alcoholic evenings in the Gargoyle Club and a drunken description of himself as ‘the English Hiss' (a former Soviet spy in the State Department), Maclean's work in office hours, as his deputy later recalled, was meticulously efficient.
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