The Defence of the Realm (98 page)

Soskice's embarrassment reinforced the Lord Chancellor's suspicions about the Security Service. Gardiner later revealed that he ‘thought it more likely than not that MI5 was bugging the telephones in my office'. When he had really confidential business to discuss with the Attorney General, Sir Elwyn Jones, he would ask his chauffeur to drive them around during their discussion, confident that ‘she would never have allowed the car to be bugged without my knowledge.'
²³
The law officers' naivety was as breathtaking as their ignorance. Had the Security Service really decided to break the law and bug the Lord Chancellor's car, it is scarcely likely that the chauffeur would have seen them do it. Most extraordinary of all is the fact that, though the law officers thought it ‘more likely than not' that the Security Service was acting illegally in breach of its charter, they believed themselves powerless to prevent the Service breaking the law. From such bizarre delusions by Labour ministers, Tony Benn drew the alarming conclusion ‘that there is no political control whatsoever over the
security services. They regard a Minister – even the Home Secretary – as a transitory person, and they would feel under no obligation to reveal information to him.'
²⁴

The most senior minister on whom the Security Service did have a file (though not one based on active investigation) was the Prime Minister himself.
²⁵
Hollis must have been relieved when, at their first meeting on 9 November, Wilson failed to follow the Lord Chancellor's example and inquire about his file. The DG tried to allay Wilson's suspicions by insisting that the Service strictly observed the restrictions of its directive and avoided ‘Party political matters'.
²⁶
Wilson is unlikely to have been entirely convinced. Though he probably did not know the full story, he may well have discovered from Wigg that in August 1961 the then Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, and his closest associates had sought Security Service assistance in tracking down ‘crypto-Communists' on Labour benches.
²⁷
Wilson questioned Hollis about ‘an official at Labour Party Headquarters who claimed to be in contact with the Security Service and to be compiling a black list. Did I know anything about this? I said I did not and that I would be very surprised if it were true.'
²⁸
The official whom Wilson had in mind was probably John Franklin Clarke, administrative officer at Labour HQ in Transport House, whom – doubtless with Gaitskell's approval – Gordon Walker had suggested in 1961 as a reliable workinglevel contact for the Security Service. The Service, however, did not take up the suggestion.
²⁹

Soon after Wilson took office, Sir Burke Trend ‘told him in general terms about the use of microphones and similar techniques to obtain intelligence in the U.K.'.
³⁰
Wilson was ‘anxious that Ministers should not be told about the techniques although some, including the Home Secretary, the Foreign Secretary and the Commonwealth Secretary, should occasionally see the product'.
³¹
Wilson's developing fascination with bugging, which a decade later was to become an obsession,
³²
was reflected in his belief that, when he was on holiday in the Isles of Scilly, a Russian SIGINT-gathering trawler was monitoring his phone calls – as indeed may have happened. Wilson amused himself by devising cryptic messages, such as ‘The fox has a black cloak,' designed to confuse Soviet intelligence. When the zip on his shorts jammed after swimming, he declared for the benefit of any KGB eavesdropper: ‘You can tell the Russians there are no flies on the British Prime Minister.'
³³

Early in 1965 Wilson raised the question of telephone checks on MPs. On 3 March Hollis told Soskice that ‘during the last few years 4 M.Ps had been on check, 3 from the Labour Party and 1 Conservative.'

We then proceeded to No. 10 and saw the Prime Minister, who said he was very strongly opposed to tapping the telephones of M.Ps. The Home Secretary said that he was satisfied that the Security Service had asked for such facilities in the case of M.Ps only in the most exceptional circumstances and that, in each case, the Home Secretary had been consulted and had authorised interception for a strictly limited period only. He mentioned the fact that 4 M.Ps had been on check and the proportion as between the political parties, and the Prime Minister accepted his advice that it would be wrong to ask for names . . . In reply to a direct question [from the Prime Minister], I gave him an assurance that telephones to the Houses of Parliament were never tapped.
³⁴

Soskice had just signed an HOW on the left-wing Labour MP Bob Edwards, who was later revealed by Oleg Gordievsky to be a long-term KGB agent. Wilson, however, countermanded the warrant, thus probably delaying Edwards's discovery by over a decade. Late in 1965 Edwards became chairman of the Defence, Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Sub-Committee of the Parliamentary Estimates Committee and in 1966 vice chairman of the Western European Union (WEU) Defence Committee. The Security Service later concluded that ‘Both would have been of interest to the KGB and there is no doubt Edwards would have passed on all he could get hold of. We know Edwards' motivation was ideological, though he occasionally accepted money . . .'
³⁵

Despite his reluctance to allow the investigation of MPs and trade unionists suspected of links with the KGB and his slighting references to what he called MI5's ‘gentlemen in raincoats and black boots', Wilson came to depend on Security Service intelligence on industrial subversion. In May 1966, two months after an election victory had raised its majority in the Commons from three to ninety-seven, the Labour government was ‘blown off course' by a strike called by the National Union of Seamen (NUS) which threatened to cripple overseas trade and wreck the government's prices and incomes policy. Wilson's last-minute attempt to avert the strike by summoning the seamen's leaders to Number Ten on 13 May ended with acrimonious accusations that he was supporting capitalist shipowners against the workers.
³⁶

F1A (counter-subversion) later recalled that the Security Service initially regarded the seamen's strike as ‘a straightforward industrial dispute – nothing to do with us'. Then two NUS militants were overheard by A2A transcribers visiting the CPGB's King Street headquarters to ask the Party's chief industrial organizer, Bert Ramelson, for advice on how to run the strike: ‘From the day-to-day coverage of King Street it was clear they were
getting quite a lot of advice.'
³⁷
The advice they were given was decided by Ramelson in consultation with the Party leader, Johnny Gollan, and the Political Committee.
³⁸
A4 began surveillance of several NUS leaders to obtain evidence of their contacts with Communist ‘trouble makers'.
³⁹
Following two reports by F1A to the Cabinet Office on CPGB involvement in the seamen's strike, he and the DG, Furnival Jones, were summoned to see Sir Burke Trend, who then decided to inform the Prime Minister of the intelligence the Service was obtaining. F1A, Furnival Jones and Director F briefed Wilson and Wigg in the Cabinet Room.
⁴⁰

From 24 May onwards, the Security Service provided both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary with regular reports on the seamen's strike,
⁴¹
which convinced Wilson that the NUS was controlled by an inner core of Communist militants who were manipulating the strike for their own subversive purposes. No previous Prime Minister had shown such enthusiasm for regular up-to-the-minute Service reports during an industrial dispute. He was sometimes briefed daily, or even twice daily, by varying combinations of Furnival Jones, Director F and F1A.
⁴²
The briefings were conducted in the greatest secrecy with the door between Wilson's office and that of his political secretary, Marcia Williams, kept locked.
⁴³
Director F already had a reputation as a popular briefer with a more extrovert manner when dealing with Whitehall audiences than most of his Service colleagues; Wilson's private secretary Michael Halls, who had heard him speak on previous occasions, called him ‘Comic Cuts'.
⁴⁴
Director F was worried by the ‘danger that the Government would look at these problems through Communist eyes as we were forced to do' and take too little account of the non-Communist influences on the strike which MI5's charter did not allow it to cover.
⁴⁵

On 26 May, following Wilson's decision to declare a state of emergency, eavesdropping in King Street revealed that the CPGB Political Committee had set up a secret committee, headed by Ramelson, to co-ordinate Party activities in support of the strike.
⁴⁶
The first meeting of this committee monitored by the Service decided to campaign for the recall of the NUS Executive Council with the aim of persuading it to transfer control of the strike, so far as movements of ships within port were concerned, from the National Disputes Committee, on which the Party was not represented, to the strike committee which had Communist members. It was announced a few days later that the Executive was to be recalled.
⁴⁷
On 3 June the bugging of King Street revealed the decision of the CPGB Political Committee that, for the strike to succeed, it had to be expanded. Ramelson was also overheard reporting that he was to meet the Communist chairman of the
NUS Negotiation Committee, Gordon Norris, at 4.30 p.m. that day, and would press on him the need for the militants on the NUS Executive Council, whatever the outcome of a court of inquiry into the strike, to oppose any return to work without ‘a satisfactory agreement' – one, in other words, which defied the government's prices and incomes policy. Norris was also to be told that the Executive Council must be persuaded as a matter of urgency to ‘black' all oil tankers arriving in the UK and ask the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) to black all British ships arriving in foreign ports. Whether or not as a result of Norris's persuasion, the Executive Council did indeed declare the court of inquiry's proposals insufficient to justify a return to work, and agreed to black the use of foreign oil tankers to replace strike-bound British tankers, as well as to appeal to the ITF to black all British ships in foreign ports.
⁴⁸

On 10 June, at a meeting attended by Wigg, Trend, the DG and F1A (but not by Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary), ‘The Prime Minister opened the discussion by expressing his satisfaction with the series of intelligence reports submitted . . .'
⁴⁹
When passing on Wilson's warm thanks to the Service, FJ singled out for praise the secretaries, transcribers and officers of A Branch: ‘I know that many have worked early and late during the past three weeks.'
⁵⁰
By 10 June eavesdropping revealed that King Street realized that its efforts to extend the strike on behalf of the NUS through the other unions, notably the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), had failed, and that it must concentrate its efforts on bringing about a stoppage in all British docks with or without official union support.
⁵¹

Despite the fact that the Security Service played a more active part in briefing the government than during any previous industrial dispute, Roy Jenkins as home secretary was scarcely involved.
⁵²
George Wigg played a much more active role. When Director F took the latest situation report to Sir Burke Trend in the Cabinet Office on the morning of Saturday 11 June, the day of the Queen's Birthday Parade, Trend asked him to wait until after the parade (of which he had an excellent view) to speak to the Prime Minister and Paymaster General. Wigg was the first to arrive and briefed Director F on his use of the media in an attempt to discredit the strike. Impressed by John Freeman's celebrated television interview with the ETU president Frank Foulkes during the ballot-rigging scandal six years earlier,
⁵³
Wigg reported that, as well as arranging for ITV coverage of a strike meeting in the docks that morning, he had made ‘tentative' arrangements for Gordon Norris, and possibly Ramelson as well, to be interviewed on television that evening. Wigg had ensured that he would supply all the questions for the interview. Director F was appalled:

I said I thought this was not a very happy project and compared it with the ETU case. There were two main difficulties. In the ETU case they had a first-rate interviewer in the form of John Freeman and although Foulkes had, in fact, stood up well in the beginning he finally cracked because he was trying to hide corruption in his union. In the present case, Norris and, for that matter, [the dockers' leader, Jack] Dash, who are quite open Communists, had nothing to hide because they behaved with reasonable correctitude throughout the strike. Norris, moreover, was something of a personality and, if he was put on TV, the result might be in his favour instead of the other way round.

The probably crestfallen Wigg accepted Director F's arguments but said that he had ‘already made certain overtures to the Press, which he could not withdraw'. When Wilson arrived after a party which followed the Birthday Parade, he agreed with Director F and ordered that no further action be taken until after the weekend. In Director F's view, however, Wigg's influence on coverage of the strike in the following day's
Sunday Times
was ‘obvious'.
⁵⁴

On 20 June, after the strike had dragged on for six weeks without an end in sight, Wilson denounced the seamen's leaders in the Commons as a ‘tightly knit group of politically motivated men' – a phrase, like other parts of his speech, coined by the Security Service.
⁵⁵
F1A, the chief drafter, was present in the Chamber, occupying one of the three seats below the Speaker's chair reserved for civil servants who may be needed to brief ministers. He remembers it as ‘one of the most fascinating days of my life'.
⁵⁶
The Communists, Wilson declared, had at their disposal ‘an efficient and disciplined industrial apparatus controlled by headquarters':