The Defence of the Realm (62 page)

While integrity is no doubt the first qualification, it is closely followed by stability, sense of responsibility and purpose, stamina, humour, tolerance and generosity which go to make a good colleague. A Security Service officer must work as a team. To be humourless, opinionated or personally over ambitious is a serious defect. Maturity is essential and a man will rarely be suitable before he reaches the middle twenties at the earliest . . . The hall mark of a good security officer is judgement, which is generally the product of a trained mind and well rounded personality.
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A sense of humour was regarded, as it had been since the earliest days of the Service,
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as indispensable both for preserving a sense of proportion when dealing with fraught issues of national security and for maintaining team spirit. A secretary who worked at Leconfield House from 1949 to 1958 still had vivid memories half a century later of ‘a lot of humour' in the Service.
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A member of the Registry in the 1950s remembers ‘endless laughter, particularly working with Dolly Craven, oh my goodness!'
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Many other female staff recall beginning the working day by listening to the extrovert Ms Craven, who was in charge of outgoing mail, frankly recounting to gales of laughter the latest episodes in her adventurous private life.
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A secretary who worked at Leconfield House from 1959 to 1965 remembers Service culture as a mixture of humour and hard work: ‘Life was fun for young secretaries, even on £9 a week.'
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After making due allowance for the fact that fond memories tend to become fonder still as the years go by, it is impossible to mistake the affection with which the Security Service is still regarded by so many of its surviving post-war veterans. Even the disaffected memoirs of Peter Wright, though permeated by personal grievances and conspiracy theories, record that ‘in the main, the 1950s were years of fun, and A Branch [of which he was an officer] a place of infectious laughter.'
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Post-war Service recruitment remained largely by personal recommendation. Following earlier informal contacts with the careers services (then called Appointments Boards) at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, formal contact was established in 1949. Ironically, in view of what later became known about the KGB's recruitment of Cambridge graduates in particular, the DDG, Guy Liddell, was not in favour of going further afield for university recruits with the possible exception of Edinburgh: ‘London is something of a breeding ground for Left Wingers and Manchester and Birmingham, as far as I know, produce specialists such as chemists, engineers, etc.' The Service preferred its officer recruits, however well educated, to have experience of the outside world and to be in at least their mid-twenties. It thus took relatively few direct from university. The
Oxbridge Appointments Boards were cultivated partly because their advice continued to be sought by some graduates when changing jobs in the course of their careers. A circular to Service officers in 1953 concluded that ‘a personal introduction . . . still remains the most satisfactory form of introduction'. Recruitment procedures were somewhat perfunctory. A preliminary interview with the Director of Establishments and Administration, if it was recorded at all, usually amounted to only a few lines, sometimes with dismissive comments such as ‘a small man of a retiring disposition'.
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Of the 164 officers in the Service in 1955, thirty had joined after demobilization from the wartime armed forces, twenty-three had come from the police, twenty-two from the professions, twenty-one from the regular armed forces, twenty from business, seventeen from the colonial and home civil services, nine from other parts of the intelligence community and one from the BBC. Eleven were listed in the statistics as ‘direct entry' (probably from university). By 1955 there were ten women officers (listed as a separate category), all of whom had achieved their rank as a result of internal promotion within the Service.
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The most influential of them was Milicent Bagot, the Service's first female Oxford graduate, who had joined the Service from the Special Branch during the 1931 reorganization.
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In 1949 she was promoted from administrative assistant to the rank of officer,
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in recognition of her extraordinary memory for facts and files on international Communism which passed into Service folklore.
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Bagot was a stickler for meticulously correct office procedure, terrifying some young officers to whom she pointed out their shortcomings.
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Though a powerful personality within the office, she was a quite different person at home. A male colleague, who for a time lodged at Bagot's house, later recalled:

Milicent had the most extraordinary domestic arrangements because she shared a house in Putney with her Nanny, and Nanny was boss . . . She looked after Milicent and was not afraid to correct or criticise her . . . Milicent, I think, adored her . . . Milicent in fact on her own could hardly boil a kettle of water.
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Officers who joined the Service early in the Cold War could expect to spend a quarter to a third of their careers on overseas postings in the Empire and Commonwealth.
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This, for many recruits, was one of the attractions of a Service career in an era before the invention of the package holiday had brought foreign travel within the reach of most of the British population. An officer who joined in 1949 remembers overseas postings as ‘definitely the cream on the pudding'.
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Most secretaries were equally enthusiastic. One of them recalls that, when offered a two-year posting in
Colombo soon after joining, ‘I could hardly believe my luck.' The cautionary advice given to women posted abroad by the last of the lady superintendents, Catherine Weldsmith,
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has passed into Service folklore. The warning most frequently attributed to her was ‘Beware of men in hot climates!' She also advised wearing a girdle at all times ‘just in case', though its precise function as a defence against hot-blooded males was never spelled out.
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At various times during the thirty years after the Second World War, the Service had forty-two outposts abroad, the great majority in the Empire and Commonwealth.
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By 1965, some 65 per cent of officers recruited during the previous ten years had come from the administrative services of newly independent colonies.
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The Indian civil service and police had long provided recruits to MI5, chief among them the wartime DG Sir David Petrie. In the spring of 1947, shortly before Indian independence, Liddell, then DDG, visited India
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and recruited eight policemen, three of whom later reached high rank in the Service.
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From the mid-1950s contact with the head of the Re-employment Bureau of the Sudan Political Service led to a stream of recruits nicknamed the ‘Sudanese souls'.
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In 1955 Director B, J. H. Marriott, wrote to the head of the Cambridge University Appointments Board:

What we want in fact is the sort of combination of brains and character that was looked for in the I[ndian] C[ivil] S[ervice] or the Colonial Service in its palmy days. Our chaps frequently find themselves in a position where, since they have no authority, their ability to put across the point of view of the Service depends almost entirely upon themselves.
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At the beginning of 1957 the DDG, Graham Mitchell, and B1 visited Malaya to make job offers to officers of the Malayan civil service, who were known after their arrival in MI5 as the ‘Malayan mafia'. Stella Rimington, the first female DG, later complained that, though some of the colonial recruits rose to senior positions, a minority, with the security of a pension and a lump sum to buy a house, ‘seemed to do very little at all, and there was a lot of heavy drinking.'
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Others claim that that heavy drinking was limited to a few notorious cases – chief among them a director whose alcoholism led to his early retirement.
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By the time Furnival Jones became DG in 1965 there was growing dissatisfaction among Security Service officers with their confused salary and career structure. Though many had pensions from previous employment in addition to their Service salaries, most were in their forties or fifties with poor promotion prospects. Some had remained at the top of their pay
scale for ten years or more. After an internal inquiry, FJ approved a new career structure in which officers in charge of sections were renamed assistant directors, and a new rank of senior officer was created as an intermediate grade. For the first time directors, hitherto paid at different rates, were to receive the same salary, and the DG's salary scale was raised to that of a deputy secretary in the civil service. Unusually, Treasury officials agreed to the proposals without a quibble. In fact they were so taken aback by the Service's confused salary scales that one official asked Director B, John Marriott, ‘Why haven't you had a mutiny?' Already privately distressed by the investigation of his predecessors as both DDG and DG on suspicion of working for the KGB, FJ seems to have been shocked to discover how far behind the times the Service had fallen in providing a coherent career structure for its staff. At a meeting of about twenty officers selected for promotion to the new-style senior-officer grade, Furnival Jones burst into tears in the middle of his announcement. Few members of the Service had previously realized the strong emotions concealed by FJ's stiff upper lip and shy exterior.
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During the early Cold War, the Security Service's training policy, like its management style, was old-fashioned. Ironically, when Training Section was set up in 1955, its job was to train not Service staff but police and administrative personnel in colonies on the verge of independence and other parts of the Commonwealth.
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Though new entrants were given two or three days' practical training on administration and the running of the office, there was no attempt to address broader issues.
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It was only during this brief initial training that some staff discovered the identity of the organization they had joined. An officer recruit relates how he had been in the office several days before he was told by Director B, John Marriott, ‘I suppose someone told you this is MI5?' In fact, no one had.
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One new entrant to the Registry recalls that she had been in the Service for several weeks before she was told. The training recollections of those officers who joined during the early Cold War are mostly very similar: ‘In all my career in the Service I had very little training – what I knew I picked up';
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‘Training was something you didn't have or you did it on the job';
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‘Training when I joined was sitting with Aunt Nellie . . . It was briefing not training.'
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By the mid-1950s most new entrants to the Security Service started in what was called the ‘Study Group', successively designated F1A, F2C and F1C. This section, also known as the ‘nursery', was responsible for identifying members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), using both intelligence and open sources,
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and was thus seen as an ideal
training ground for learning the basic investigative work of the Service, file-making, indexing, source evaluation, and liaison with local police forces. Newcomers lived in dread of the Registry Examiners who sent back files with green slips pointing out their errors. As Stella Rimington later recalled, ‘The arrival of files one thought one had got rid of, covered in green notes, was a sort of ritual humiliation that one was required to suffer as an embryo desk officer.'
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During the early Cold War the ‘watchers' of A4 (as they became in the White reorganization of 1953)
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came from working-or lower-middle-class backgrounds very different from those of most of the officers. Their social separation was emphasized by the fact that they were housed separately from most of the Service. By the time he retired in 1947, Harry Hunter, who had joined MI5 in 1917 and headed the surveillance department since 1937, was the longest-serving male member of the Service. In Hunter's view:

From experience it has been found that the ideal watcher should be 5' 7" or 8" in height, looking as unlike a policeman as possible. It is likewise a mistake to use men who are too short as they are just as conspicuous as tall men. We favour shadowers of a nondescript type; good eyesight is essential, also hearing, as it is often vitally important to overhear a suspect's conversation; active and alert, as it frequently happens that a suspect hastily boards or alights from a fast moving vehicle; hardy enough to withstand cold, heat and wet during the long hours of immobility in the street, and, more important, to escape being spotted by the suspect himself.
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Hunter's successor, David Storrier, was a former policeman. A4's total size in December 1946 was only fifteen (including a male secretary); by 1956 it had increased to fifty. Instead of dressing casually, the watchers were expected to wear suits, trilby hats and raincoats. In winter they were sometimes forced to stuff newspapers under their shirts in an attempt to stay warm. Brown envelopes containing their weekly wages were frequently delivered to A4 staff in the street by bicycle from Head Office. They worked a five-and-a-half-day week with no Sunday working until 1956 when mobile watchers were required to work one weekend in four (from 1963 two weekends in five).
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The main surveillance target was the Soviet embassy and intelligence residencies in Kensington Palace Gardens (KPG). Soviet personnel initially travelled mostly on foot, or by bus and taxi. So did A4 surveillance personnel, communicating with each other by hand signals. Immediately after the war, A4 had no car, though it sometimes pressed into service the DG's Wolseley. By the end of the 1940s it had acquired three or four Hillmans.
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When the Russians started to use embassy cars, a watcher (usually one who could not drive) would alert A4 surveillance cars to their movements by radio-controlled buzzers. Equipment allowing speech communication was not installed until 1951.
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The head of A4 from 1953 until his retirement in 1961 was William (known as Jim) Skardon, a former detective inspector in the Met whose record of service notes that, since joining the counter-espionage division of the Service in 1947, he had shown himself ‘perhaps the most foremost exponent in the country' of the interrogation of suspects.
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But for his ability to extract confessions, the atom spy Klaus Fuchs could not have been successfully prosecuted.
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It was an indication of the continued lowly status of A4 that, despite Skardon's achievements as interrogator and the crucial role of surveillance in Service investigations, he was never given promotion to senior officer.
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