The Defence of the Realm (100 page)

FJ told Callaghan that the Czech StB defector to the United States, Josef Frolik, who had served in London in 1964–6, had revealed that he had been told to abandon his plan to cultivate Ernie Roberts on the grounds that he was already ‘in touch with friends' (the KGB). Roberts had subsequently apologized to Frolik for causing him trouble: ‘If Frolik did not form a mistaken impression this information would indicate that Roberts was a recruited agent by that time.'
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Callaghan did not challenge, or even query, the Service's assessment of
Jones and Roberts but was worried by the potential political fall-out of investigating either.
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On 28 November FJ was informed by Sir Philip Allen that, after long discussion, Wilson and Callaghan had decided not after all to authorize a telecheck on Jack Jones: ‘They felt that the case just fell short of what was required to justify such a delicate operation.'
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Had the case involved a civil servant rather than a trade union leader, it is unlikely that they would have hesitated. Oleg Gordievsky later reported that Jones had been regarded by the KGB as an agent from 1964 to 1968, providing confidential Labour Party documents which he obtained as a member of the NEC and the Party's international committee as well as information on his colleagues and contacts. Though the KGB believed that Jones's motives were ideological, his case officer noted that he accepted, without visible enthusiasm, modest contributions towards holiday expenses. Jones broke contact with the KGB after the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks in August 1968.
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Despite Labour's criticisms while in opposition of the laxity of Conservative policy on protective security, Wilson's government showed no great enthusiasm for it after its 1964 election victory. Wigg's intended role as a protective-security supremo who would ensure that ‘security procedures were efficient and were kept up to date' came to nothing. The main initiative emerged instead from the Security Commission, which had been set up in the wake of the Profumo affair.
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The Commission's first report
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followed the conviction in 1965 of two heavily indebted mercenary spies, Frank Bossard, a project officer in the Guided Weapons (Research and Development) Division of the Ministry of Aviation recruited by the GRU,
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and Peter Allen, a chief clerk at the MoD, who had contacted the United Arab Republic and Iraqi military attachés in London offering to supply top-secret documents for money.
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Though C Branch, then headed by the future DG Michael Hanley, approved of most of the Security Commission's proposals, it argued strongly against a few recommendations which ‘might be superficially attractive to the layman in that they might hamper or deter a spy, but which in practice the Public Service would find intolerable'. Chief among them was a proposal for periodic searches of civil servants. In January 1966 Harold Wilson announced that it had been decided not to pursue the Security Commission's proposal.
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The Commission returned to the charge in 1967 after the conviction of Helen Keenan, a secretary in the Cabinet Office, on charges of passing classified material to an agent of South African intelligence.
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As well as reviving the proposal for periodic searches of staff, the Commission proposed that, in order to prevent the unauthorized removal of documents,
officials should not be allowed to carry the keys to their own briefcases when they went to meetings in other government offices. Instead, designated officials in every government department would unlock briefcases at the beginning of every meeting and lock them at the end. C Branch believed that, as well as being remarkably cumbersome, these procedures also carried security risks. ‘God help us', minuted Furnival Jones, ‘if the Government accepts these proposals.' The government, however, required little persuasion from C Branch before turning the proposals down.
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The Security Commission was in action again after Douglas Britten, an RAF chief technician, was sentenced in 1968 to twenty-one years in jail for giving the KGB highly classified information from RAF signals units in Cyprus and Lincolnshire. Partly because Britten pleaded guilty, his case attracted only minimal publicity. A Security Commission inquiry after Britten's conviction, however, discovered a series of vetting failures. Twenty years earlier he had served six months' hard labour for fraud; since leaving prison he had had a history of financial problems and a record as an ‘accomplished liar'.
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By the time of the Commission's report, however, Whitehall had become seriously concerned by the cost of increasing protective security and was disinclined to fund further improvements. In 1968 a costing exercise, initiated by the head of the home civil service, Sir William Armstrong, estimated that the total cost might be £40 to £50 million a year, and that it was at present impossible to judge its cost effectiveness. At FJ's suggestion, a committee chaired by Armstrong's predecessor, Lord Helsby, was appointed in 1969 ‘to review the scope of protective security and review what changes if any are desirable'. The head of C4 (then physical and document security) was made secretary of the Committee – but to little effect. Though the Helsby Committee produced some radical proposals, few were implemented.
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Doubtless to Wilson's relief there were no spy cases during his first two administrations which came close to emulating the sensational publicity which had surrounded the trials of the Portland spy-ring and George Blake during the Macmillan government. The greatest espionage-related embarrassment of this period was Blake's escape from Wormwood Scrubs after serving only five years of his forty-two-year sentence. The escape, it was later discovered, had been made possible by three former prisoners who had befriended him in jail: the Irish Republican Sean Bourke and the peace protesters Michael Randle and Pat Pottle. On 22 October 1966 Blake knocked a loosened iron bar out of his cell window, slid down the roof outside and dropped to the ground, then climbed over the outer wall with a nylon rope-ladder thrown to him by Bourke. Blake was later driven,
hidden in the Randle family Dormobile, to East Berlin, where he was joined by Bourke before continuing to Moscow.
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Highly critical though press coverage of the jail-break was, Wilson was not greatly dismayed by it since the minister who attracted most press criticism was Roy Jenkins, whom he had identified as a potential rival. ‘That', the Prime Minister told Dick Crossman, ‘will do our Home Secretary a great deal of good. He is getting complacent and he needs taking down a peg.'
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Jenkins later tried to put some of the blame on the Security Service: ‘We thought Blake had probably been taken out through London Airport on the run, but in fact he went to ground in Paddington for several weeks. I consider that MI5 and the Special Branch contributed little skill to the attempt to find him.'
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Security Service records tell a somewhat different story. FJ rang Jenkins's private secretary on 28 October to say that it was believed ‘Blake had been in London at the beginning of the week' (not that he had made for Heathrow), and that information received by the Service had been passed to Scotland Yard.

Though spy scandals caused Wilson, unlike Macmillan, no significant political embarrassment, there were three cases involving Labour MPs (in addition to that of the as yet unidentified long-term KGB agent Bob Edwards) which would have caused a sensation if the media had discovered the Security Service investigation of them. The first was that of Bernard Floud, who had been elected MP for Acton in 1964. His case was part of a larger investigation into the possibility that before the Second World War Soviet intelligence had recruited a major spy-ring in Oxford as well as in Cambridge. One of the chief Oxford suspects was Floud, who had been an undergraduate at Wadham College from 1934 to 1937 and, though not formally a Party member, had been heavily involved in Communist campaigns. One of his Communist Oxford contemporaries, Jenifer Fischer Williams, revealed to the Security Service that Floud had advised her to join a civil service department from which she could secretly pass on valuable information to the CPGB, and had put her in touch with a Central European later identified as Arnold Deutsch, the recruiter and first controller of the Cambridge Five. (Ms Fischer Williams, who subsequently married Herbert Hart, wartime member of the Security Service and later professor of jurisprudence at Oxford University, also said that after a few clandestine meetings she had broken off contact with Deutsch.) The fact that in 1938 Floud had gone on a three-month visit to China with the leading Cambridge Communist James Klugmann strengthened D Branch's suspicions of him. D3 wrote in March 1966:

The case for suspecting that Floud may have worked for the Russians as a talent spotter when an undergraduate rests on his early association with James Klugmann – who is known to have so acted – and certain analogies between the two men's pre-war careers. It seems highly possible that what Klugmann was doing at Cambridge was echoed by Floud at Oxford. Floud's direction of Jenifer Fischer Williams . . . lends credence to this hypothesis.
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Further investigations concluded that, while Floud worked in the Ministry of Information from 1942 to 1945, the CPGB ‘regarded him as an intelligent and amenable source of information'. At the post-war Board of Trade, where he rose to become assistant secretary, Floud was ‘reported to have organised and taken part in secret meetings of Communist civil servants until some time in 1948', though there was no evidence of Communist involvement after 1952, by which time he had left the civil service.
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In May 1966 the DG, Furnival Jones, reported to the PUS at the Home Office, Sir Charles Cunningham, ‘On the face of it Mr Floud's record is disturbing and he may well be extremely sensitive about it.'
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In July 1966 Jenkins and Wilson authorized the Security Service to question Floud.
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An ingenious variant of the soft man/hard man technique was devised for the start of the questioning on 4 August in a Service flat in South Audley Street. In Operation ROAST POTATO, A1 concealed a microphone in the flat which enabled the interview to be both recorded and monitored in real time at Leconfield House. The interview was to be begun by F4 (who used the name ‘Derek Hammond') and listened to in Leconfield House by D3 (Peter Wright), who would turn up in the Service flat if he judged that a point had been reached at which Floud might be persuaded to confess by tougher questioning.
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In the event, no such point was reached and Wright did not put in an appearance.
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Floud began by asking if the interview was being taped. ‘Hammond' replied untruthfully, as he felt bound to do, that he was ‘not conscious of this'. Floud, who was apparently being considered for appointment as junior minister, was understandably anxious that the interview might prejudice his career prospects. He told ‘Hammond' that he hoped the Prime Minister would not be informed that he was being investigated. ‘After all,' he added, ‘one is not wholly without ambition.' ‘Hammond' found Floud ‘uneasy, evasive and less than frank' about his Communist activities at Oxford and in the civil service:

The explanation of his drift away from Communism has a ring of truth about it – unless it is a subtle cover story – and could be genuine. If this is so, his wish not to tell us the whole truth about his Communist past and about any work he may have
done for the R[ussian] I[ntelligence] S[ervice] could spring from a natural desire not to prejudice his new career as a politician.
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After two further interviews with Floud by ‘Hammond' and Wright, questioning was suspended in January 1967 after the death of Floud's wife, a former student Communist whom he had met at Oxford.
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Two final interviews took place in March. On the 17th Wright confronted Floud with Fischer Williams's account of his contacts with her at Oxford (largely confirmed by their Oxford contemporary Phoebe Pool, who had since become a colleague of Blunt at the Courtauld Institute).
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According to Wright, Floud immediately became ‘very agitated' and took some time to recover his composure, but did not ‘break'.
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At an interview three days later Floud was told that, because of lack of frankness about his past Communist associations, he was regarded as a ‘full security risk' and could not therefore be given security clearance.
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Floud can have been in little doubt that his prospects of a ministerial career had gone. Six months later he killed himself.
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Press reports made no mention of his questioning by MI5, and his family were convinced, probably correctly, that his suicide was the result of long-term depressive illness (of which the Security Service seems to have been unaware), exacerbated by his wife's death.
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The collapse of his ministerial ambitions, following his failure to gain security clearance, however, probably added to his despair.

Save for the personal tragedy with which it was associated, the investigation of Floud was of less importance than it seemed to the Security Service at the time. There was – and is – no evidence that he had any Communist contacts after 1952. His pre-war contacts with Soviet intelligence are also unlikely to have been of great significance, though it would have been very different if, after he had put Jenifer Fischer Williams in touch with Arnold Deutsch, she had decided to become a long-term penetration agent in the Home Office. She had been placed third out of 493 applicants in the 1936 civil service entrance examinations (the highest ranking so far obtained by a female candidate), quickly established herself as a high-flier, and in 1939 was appointed private secretary to the PUS at the Home Office, Sir Alexander Maxwell. In 1940 she was asked by the Director, Jasper Harker, who was unaware of her Communist background, to recommend the names of suitable recruits to the Security Service.
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Had Fischer Williams become an NKVD agent, Harker's request would have represented an extraordinary recruitment opportunity for Soviet intelligence. It had been reasonable to speculate, when the Security Service investigation of Floud began, that he might have been a member of a major
Oxford spy-ring recruited before the Second World War on the Cambridge model. The investigation, however, uncovered no evidence of an Oxford recruitment remotely comparable in importance to the Cambridge Five.
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