The Defence of the Realm (124 page)

The Communist threat has become more insidious because of the ‘blurring of the edges between Communism and democratic socialism'. It is therefore more difficult to recognise and to counter. The job of identifying Communists outside the Party – generally known as ‘sympathisers' – has become more important. It requires in those responsible for it discrimination, judgement, investigating ability, a knowledge of Marxism and the ability to recognise the significance of an indication, which may often be fleeting, of Communist sympathy.
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Elwell's views, however, were those of a small and dwindling minority within the Service. They were opposed even by Elwell's deputy from 1976 to 1979, who believed that the ample flow of intelligence from technical
and agent penetration of the CPGB clearly demonstrated its declining political influence and that ‘the subversive threat as a whole was greatly over-hyped, particularly by Charles Elwell.' When he told Elwell, whom he liked personally, that he did not consider the Communists a serious subversive threat to the Labour Party, Elwell ‘hit the roof'.
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After the May 1979 election, the main pressure for more energetic counter-subversion came not from within the Service but from the new Conservative Prime Minister.
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7

The Thatcher Government and Subversion

Margaret Thatcher took greater interest in the intelligence community than any prime minister since Winston Churchill. But, as her Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, told the DG, Sir Howard Smith, at their first meeting after the Conservative election victory, much of Mrs Thatcher's information about the Security Service's counter-subversion role during her years as Leader of the Opposition had come from ‘people who knew little or nothing about our work'. Whitelaw told Smith that he wished to be sufficiently well briefed to be able to counter ‘some of the rather extreme advice' Mrs Thatcher had received.
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The Service's briefing was relatively reassuring. The rise in Trotskyism during the 1970s, it reported, was more than counterbalanced by the decline in Communist Party membership: ‘Taking the position as a whole, though the threat from subversion is serious and in some ways more evident, it is not greater than 10 years ago.'
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Mrs Thatcher was not convinced. Smith at his first meeting with the Prime Minister found, as he expected, ‘that Mrs Thatcher assumes a greater role and influence on the part of the Communist Party and Trotskyists in the trade union and industrial field than they did in fact enjoy'.
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The Winter of Discontent had strengthened the Prime Minister's belief in the importance of countersubversion in dealing with industrial disruption. Whitelaw, though more sympathetic to the Security Service view, also believed that secondary picketing and other militant activism during the strike wave ‘showed marks of skilled and highly-coordinated direction'.
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Mrs Thatcher demanded prompt action to deal with the ‘wreckers' in British industry, and summoned a meeting of the DG, ‘C' (Sir Arthur ‘Dickie' Franks) and Lord Rothschild (with whom she had discussed the problem),
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chaired by the cabinet secretary, Sir John Hunt, to come up with ‘solutions'. The Prime Minister, Hunt told the meeting, wanted all the ‘wreckers' to be identified – which would breach the Security Service charter (the Maxwell Fyfe Directive) of 1952, limiting its role to ‘the
Defence of the Realm as a whole, from external and internal dangers arising from attempts of espionage and sabotage, or from actions of persons and organizations whether directed from within or without the country, which may be judged to be subversive of the State'. Non-subversive industrial ‘wreckers' were not covered. Hunt suggested that the twenty-sevenyear-old directive, written at a time when subversion ‘loomed less large in the country's problems', might now benefit from revision. Smith's arguments in favour of the existing definition of subversion and against attempting to extend it to include all industrial disruption, however, carried the day. The meeting also failed to come up with the straightforward solutions for dealing with the ‘wreckers' which Mrs Thatcher wanted. The DG argued that ending industrial strife was far more an issue for government policy than for action by the Security Service.

Early in October 1979 Smith learned that Mrs Thatcher had summoned a meeting at Chequers later in the month with Whitelaw, the Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Sir Keith Joseph, Sir John Hunt and his successor as cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, to ‘consider action to counter hostile forces working for industrial unrest'. The DG was not invited. The meeting was so secret that all three ministers were forbidden to show the Prime Minister's summons to anyone except their permanent under secretaries.

The Chequers meeting on 21 October decided to set up a small unit in the Cabinet Office to use information from both open and secret sources to try to forestall industrial disruption. The new unit was to report to the cabinet secretary and be subject to the authority of the Home Secretary (with recourse, when necessary, to the Prime Minister). Whitelaw expressed his willingness to increase the number of HOWs to provide intelligence for the unit. In addition to the ministers present at the Chequers meeting, only the Secretary of State for Employment, Jim Prior, was to be informed of its existence. When it was necessary to give other ministers information from the unit, the source would be concealed. F2, John Deverell, then considered one of the Service's younger high-fliers, was seconded to run the unit, which Service records suggest became a one-man band.
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Sir Robert Armstrong agreed with Deverell that they would ‘firmly eschew any thoughts of black propaganda' as the risks would far outweigh the likely gains.
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Deverell was tasked instead with submitting proposals for countering specific cases of industrial subversion for approval by the Home Secretary and, if appropriate, the Prime Minister. Whitelaw was enthusiastic, telling Deverell to come and see him whenever he considered there were ‘political angles to be explored'. Mrs Thatcher too made clear her personal
interest in the new unit.
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Deverell devised the unit's first successful ‘ploy' in response to a strike-call by the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) at the government-owned British Leyland (BL) Longbridge plant, following the dismissal on 19 November of the convenor of the shop stewards, Derek ‘Red Robbo' Robinson, regarded by Thatcher as ‘a notorious agitator'. The strike, she believed, ‘threatened the very survival of BL'.
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Red Robbo, who regarded his nickname as a ‘badge of honour', had become synonymous with the repeated strikes and disputes which crippled much of Longbridge's increasingly uncompetitive car production.
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On 21 November 1979 Deverell devised a plan to publicize the record of a September meeting of the CPGB Midland District Committee, attended by Robinson and the Party's industrial organizer Mick Costello, held to discuss opposition to the BL recovery plan. Costello was horrified to discover that detailed minutes had been taken, believed they would do serious damage to the CPGB if they became public and ordered all copies to be recovered and destroyed. The Security Service, however, had obtained a copy, and, at a meeting with Thatcher and Whitelaw, Deverell gained their approval for it to be passed to the BL chairman, Sir Michael Edwardes. To disguise the source of the minutes, they were placed inside a brown envelope with a Birmingham postmark. Edwardes showed them to the president of the AUEW, Terry Duffy, who was sufficiently impressed to postpone strike action. Edwardes also contacted the
Sunday Times
, whose journalists tracked down some of those mentioned in the minutes. Eavesdropping and telephone-tapping in King Street provided ample evidence of the dismay of the CPGB leadership.
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Probably inspired by the success of the ‘ploy' against Red Robbo, Sir Keith Joseph returned to the idea that the Security Service, at least in the public sector, might warn employers when subversives applied for jobs with them. When Deverell ruled this out, Joseph suggested channelling warnings to employers through the Economic League, using the ‘dirty brown envelope technique we had used with Edwardes'.
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Deverell found fewer opportunities for ‘ploys' than Thatcher and Whitelaw had hoped. Sir Robert Armstrong, however, reported to the Prime Minister in May 1980 that, although comparatively few counter-subversion operations had been mounted, Deverell's work had had a ‘significant and beneficial effect on the course of events'. Since Deverell was not fully occupied in the Cabinet Office, he was allowed to return to the Security Service, on the understanding that his first priority, when opportunities arose, would remain counter-subversion operations.
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In July 1981, when Deverell was
posted out of F Branch, responsibility for these operations was taken on by David Ranson, who had been appointed Director F.
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Besides industrial disruption, the area where the Thatcher government – the Prime Minister and the MoD in particular – most feared the hidden hand of subversion during the early 1980s was in the peace movement, which organized mass protests over the deployment of US cruise missiles on British soil as a dangerous escalation of the nuclear arms race. Though Mrs Thatcher believed that support for CND had passed its peak in 1981, it remained, in her view, ‘dangerously strong'.
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Of especial concern was the possibility of KGB and Communist subversion within the peace movement. Though rarely alarmist in its assessments, the Security Service had taken the view that ‘as CND grew more influential, the potential for subversives to threaten national security through it also increased'. By the mid-1970s CPGB members occupied eight of the fifteen seats on the CND national executive.
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While monitoring Communist influence in CND was clearly within the Service's remit, the case for opening a temporary file on Monsignor Bruce Kent as a ‘possible Anarchist' when he became CND chairman in 1977 and for converting this into a permanent file on his election as CND secretary general from 1979 now appears distinctly dubious.
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In April 1982 F1A reported that CND was expanding at such a rate that Kent no longer knew precisely how large its membership was – possibly 30,000 in the national organization and as many as 250,000 in independent local groups. CND would remain a target for Communist and Trotskyist groups because it offered ‘not only access to a broad-based popular movement with growing influence in political fields, but also an opportunity to challenge Government policies in key areas'.
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The section of the peace movement which attracted the greatest international media attention was the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp set up in September 1981 outside the airbase near Newbury in Berkshire which had been selected as a site for cruise missiles. For the next two years, the women protesters attempted – in the end unsuccessfully – to disrupt the construction of the missile site by blockading the base and cutting down parts of the perimeter fence. In May 1983 a temporary file on the Camp was converted into a permanent file on the grounds that it was ‘subject to penetration by subversive groups'.
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No significant subversive penetration, however, came to light.
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The dominant element in the Peace Camp was believed to be militant feminists who saw nuclear arms as a problem created by a male-dominated world order. Though Communists, Trotskyists and their sympathizers (all members of male-dominated organizations) had an important role in organizing mass demonstrations in
support of the protest, they were reported to disapprove of the Camp's exclusion of men. F2R/1 (whose responsibilities involved investigating possible subversion in the peace movement) minuted in March 1984, four months after the first cruise missiles were deployed at the airbase, that ‘we are now able to state with some authority, that the subversive influence on the founding and continuing life of the camp has been slight'.
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KGB directives passed by Oleg Gordievsky to SIS after he arrived at the London residency in the summer of 1982
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demonstrated that Moscow regarded the anti-nuclear movement in Britain (as in the rest of the West) as ‘our natural allies' and believed it could exercise considerable influence over it.
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When ‘C' gave Mrs Thatcher her first briefing on Gordievsky on 23 December, at Security Service request he made no mention of his reporting on the peace movement – presumably because of fears that the Prime Minister would take too literally exaggerated KGB claims of its ability to influence the movement. After the briefing, however, ‘C' reported to Smith's successor as DG, John Jones, that the Prime Minister had herself in passing raised the issue of KGB involvement with the CND and the peace movement. In these circumstances he had asked SIS to discuss with Director K whether any of Gordievsky's reports needed to be rewritten and whether substantive desk comments should be added before they were presented to the PM. In the meantime Gordievsky would be asked to clarify and update his information on KGB attempts to manipulate the peace movement.
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On 25 February 1983 the DDG, Cecil Shipp, and the Deputy Chief of SIS presented to Sir Robert Armstrong, the cabinet secretary, a résumé of Gordievsky's intelligence on the Soviet Union and the British peace movement which they had jointly prepared for Mrs Thatcher.
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The Security Service added a commentary designed to emphasize the contrast between some KGB claims for its ability to influence the peace movement and what it had actually achieved. Gordievsky's intelligence on the paucity of effective KGB contacts in the movement, as well as the limited influence of the Soviet embassy, was, it reported, both reassuring and in line with previous Service assessments. When the London residency was urged by the Centre in the autumn of 1982 to increase its efforts, the only ‘confidential contact' it was able to cite with substantial influence on the peace movement was the ninety-four-year-old left-wing Labour politician Lord Brockway, co-founder three years earlier of the World Disarmament Campaign, whose efforts to persuade local authorities to declare themselves ‘nuclear-free zones' were applauded by the Centre. Brockway was estimated to agree with 70 to 80 per cent of Soviet policy decisions. He had monthly meetings
with Mikhail Bogdanov, a Line PR (political intelligence) officer operating under journalistic cover, and accepted presents from him – though it was thought that Brockway probably did not realize he worked for the KGB.
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Bogdanov, then in his early thirties and the son of a Leningrad musician, was rated by Gordievsky as ‘the most polished and sophisticated member' of the London residency.
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