The Defence of the Realm (77 page)

The Service's access to the inner workings of both King Street and the ETU goes far to explain why Hollis felt able to assure the Home Secretary: ‘On the subversive side I thought we had the British Communist party pretty well buttoned up.'
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The climax of the media outcry which followed Haxell's re-election as general secretary was a television interview by the former Labour junior minister John Freeman (later ambassador in Washington) with the ETU president, Frank Foulkes, on BBC's
Face to Face
. The good offices of the Labour MP and television presenter Christopher Mayhew, who as a junior minister had helped to found the IRD, were used to arrange the interview. The Security Service was kept informed.
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Freeman challenged the evasive Foulkes to sue him and the BBC if the charges of election-rigging which he made against the ETU leadership were untrue. The TUC General Council also called on the union to take legal action to defend the good name of the labour movement. According to Chapple, the atmosphere on the ETU executive, of which he was still a member, ‘dripped with venom'.
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Victory in the campaign against Communist ballot-rigging came with the civil case brought in 1961 by Cannon and Chapple against Foulkes and others in the ETU leadership. Appearing for the plaintiffs, Gerald Gardiner QC (later a Labour lord chancellor), claimed that the defendants were guilty of ‘the biggest fraud in the history of trade unionism'. A Service officer spent what he later described as ‘a very enjoyable fortnight' attending the trial,
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during which the ten defendants who appeared in the witness box were discredited one by one. The judge, Mr Justice Winn, dismissed the evidence of Haxell and Frazer as ‘puerile mendacities', and condemned the other eight for their lack of truthfulness. He ruled that Haxell and his colleagues had rigged the ballot, and declared Byrne the winner of the election for general secretary. The CPGB was also implicated. Mr Justice Winn found that ‘not only was the ETU managed and controlled by Communists and pliant sympathisers, but it was so managed in the service of the Communist Party and the ideas of the Party.'
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Subsequent claims by sympathetic historians that there was in fact no ‘evidence implicating
King Street in the affair'
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are contradicted by the evidence of Security Service files. King Street, however, sought to distance itself from the ballot-rigging by holding an inquiry. Haxell, probably under CPGB pressure, resigned his Party membership. The TUC followed the court case by demanding that Foulkes, who had been named as party to the fraud by the court, submit himself to re-election for the post of ETU president. When Foulkes refused, the ETU was expelled from membership of the TUC.
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In fresh elections to the executive every Communist candidate was defeated.

By the beginning of the 1960s the leadership of the Labour opposition was probably more concerned about Communist subversion than the Conservative government. Ever since its landslide election victory in 1945, Labour leaders had been worried by the presence of what they believed were ‘crypto-Communists' on their backbenches. The
Daily Worker
news editor, Douglas Hyde, later recalled answering the phone on the morning after the election:

The man at the other end announced himself as the new Labour member for his constituency. He followed it with a loud guffaw and rang off. I had known him as a Communist Party man for years . . . By the time the list [of Labour MPs] was complete, we knew that we had at least eight or nine ‘cryptos' in the House of Commons in addition to our two publicly acknowledged M.P.s.
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Francis Beckett's history of the Communist Party concludes that, after the 1945 election, ‘About a dozen of the 393 Labour MPs were either secret CP members or were close to the CP, sharing its beliefs and enjoying the company of its leaders.'
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In November 1946, Attlee instructed the DDG, Guy Liddell, to inform him whenever ‘we had positive information that a Member of Parliament was a member of a subversive organisation'. Liddell believed that Attlee felt ‘he had a responsibility to the House and country to see that such members did not get into positions where they might constitute a danger to the state.'
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Morgan Phillips, general secretary of the Labour Party, kept a ‘Lost Sheep' file on pro-Soviet MPs who ‘used their positions and their prestige, as members of the British House of Commons, in a manner inimical to the work of the party and in support of policies which, time and again, had been rejected by the Annual Party Congress'. Information on the misbehaviour of the Lost Sheep came from a great variety of open sources: among them other MPs, Party members and the press.
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It also drew on material supplied by the intelligence communities on both sides of the Atlantic.
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In 1948–9 four of the Lost Sheep – John Platts-Mills, Konni Zilliacus, Hugh Lester Hutchinson and Leslie Solley –
were expelled from the Party by the Labour National Executive Committee.
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Platts-Mills, the first to be expelled, later acknowledged in his unpublished autobiography that he had ‘hurled himself at Ernie Bevin like a clenched fist whenever he appeared . . . to be acting . . . more abjectly servile than usual to United States foreign policy. This was only about once a day.'
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Morgan Phillips had another fifteen MPs
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on his Lost Sheep list marked down for possible expulsion, though none was in the end expelled.

Among the evidence in the Service's possession which suggests that Zilliacus may have been a secret member of the Communist Party in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War was a notebook belonging to Mrs Margaret Thornhill, who was suspected of involvement with ‘an undercover department of the C.P. run by [D. N.] Pritt and [Jack] Gaster'. Thornhill had written ‘Dues' on the cover of the notebook in which she recorded monthly payments from a list of individuals headed by Zilliacus. The next two names on the list appeared to be those of the pro-Soviet Labour MPs Stephen Swingler and William Warbey (though only their surnames were listed).
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Both were on Morgan Phillips's list of Lost Sheep. Attlee told Sillitoe in 1947 that he was ‘certain that Swingler was a C.P. member'.
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Zilliacus ceased to be a Lost Sheep after he sided with Tito against Stalin and was denounced as a Fascist by the Soviet press; he was readmitted to the Labour Party in 1952.
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The other three Lost Sheep expelled in 1948–9 were defeated in the 1950 election and did not return to the Commons.

The concern of the Labour leadership with the Lost Sheep on its backbenches declined somewhat after the Party's 1951 election defeat but revived in the early 1960s as it scented the prospect of a return to power after more than a decade in opposition. In August 1961 Hugh Gaitskell, the Party leader, agreed with George Brown, the deputy leader, and Patrick Gordon Walker, his closest associates within the shadow cabinet, that Gordon Walker should approach the Security Service to seek help in identifying secret Communists within the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). No other member of the shadow cabinet, including Gaitskell's eventual successor, Harold Wilson, was informed of their intention.
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Gaitskell and his colleagues knew so little about the intelligence community, however, that they had little idea how to approach MI5. Since they were unwilling to ask the Conservative government for fear of alerting it to their plans for a purge of crypto-Communists, it was decided that George Brown should approach the journalist Chapman Pincher, who supplied him with contact details for both Sir Roger Hollis and the Chief of SIS Sir Dick White.
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Following a letter to Hollis from Gordon Walker, Graham Mitchell, the
DDG, saw him on 5 September. Gordon Walker brought with him a handwritten list on House of Commons notepaper of sixteen Labour MPs who, he believed, ‘were in effect members of the CPGB pretending to be Labour members or men under Communist Party direction' and nine ‘possible' crypto-Communists.
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The name at the top of the list was that of Will Owen, who nine years later was put on trial for spying for the Czechoslovak security and intelligence service, the StB. Though Owen was acquitted, he was, almost certainly, guilty as charged.
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Ironically, in 1961 Owen aroused less suspicion in the Security Service than in the Labour leadership. According to a Service assessment, he was ‘not known to be CP but CP officials say he has no hesitation about being in touch with CP.' Owen was not one of the ten MPs whom the Service regarded as ‘of most significance' on Gordon Walker's list.
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According to Mitchell's note of their meeting on 5 September, Gordon Walker told him:

The Labour leaders were aware that there were quite a lot of Communists within their ranks in the House but they had in mind to expel only about 6 or 8. When it came to taking this action they would take it openly, expelling the Members as being Communists. They hoped that if they made these examples ‘the others would be very careful' . . .

Before he had got as far as this, Gordon Walker may have gathered from my expression that his project was not meeting with much enthusiasm. He said that the Labour leaders were very ready for us to say ‘no' and indeed half expected it. They would fully understand if the D.G. found that he could not comply with their request [for information on Communist penetration of the PLP]. In that event Gordon Walker would volunteer a one-way traffic, through safe channels, from him in person to any member of the Security Service whom we cared to nominate and whose identity he need not know, indicating without expectation of information in return Labour Party members whom the Party had reason to suspect of Communist sympathies.

Mitchell did not respond to Gordon Walker's offer but said that ‘it was incumbent on the Security Service to be very careful to do nothing which could be represented as partaking of a party political nature.' Its records ‘could be used only in the interests of the security of the realm as a whole' – and therefore, by implication, not to help the Labour Party conduct a purge. Though he did not mention it to Gordon Walker, Mitchell was also afraid that any secret project known to George Brown ‘might not stay secret for long'.
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Mitchell no doubt had in mind Brown's notorious indiscretions when ‘tired and emotional' (a euphemism for heavy drinking later invented for his benefit by
Private Eye)
. It was later discovered that, having been denied Security Service assistance in tracking down crypto-Communists, George Brown had turned instead to Chapman Pincher.
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Handwritten list on House of Commons notepaper given to MI5 by the Labour Party leadership in 1961 of sixteen (not eighteen as indicated bottom left) MPs who, it believed, were secret Communists and nine further ‘possibles'. The names of individuals to whom the list was sent have been redacted.

Pincher later alleged that, after being warned by the Labour leadership of the crypto-Communists on its backbenches, the Security Service began an investigation which lasted ‘many months' and involved ‘surveillance, the tapping of phones and the opening of mail'.
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Walter Terry also claimed in the
Daily Mail
that ‘15 Labour MPs were shadowed by security men and had their phones tapped.'
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In reality the Security Service made no investigations of any of the MPs on Gordon Walker's list and sought not a single HOW.
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Soon after Gordon Walker's approach to Mitchell, however, the Security Service discovered that Arthur Bax, chief press officer at Transport House, Labour Party headquarters, was working for several Soviet Bloc intelligence services. The discovery was the result of information from one of Bax's controllers, the Czechoslovak journalist Antonin Buzek (codenamed BROADSHEET), who worked for the StB as a co-optee.
*
Over the previous few years, while working in London, Buzek had been variously described in Security Service reports as a ‘communist devoted to his cups', having ‘national deviationist [Slovak] views' and being extremely fond of England. After unsuccessful attempts to use an elderly Czech émigré to contact him, Buzek was approached by an officer from D4 (which was responsible for counter-espionage agent-running), who offered to arrange for him to remain in England. Though Buzek did not accept the offer, he showed no hostility to the approach. In August 1961 an A4 officer personally delivered a letter inviting him to a rendezvous at a public house in Surrey and giving a phone number to confirm the meeting. A few days later Buzek met a D4 officer at the Jolly Farmer near Reigate. Following further meetings over the next few weeks, Buzek finally agreed to defect with his family in September. His most important counter-espionage lead was to Arthur Bax who, when questioned by the Security Service, confessed to working for the Russians, Romanians and Bulgarians as well as for the Czechoslovaks.
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In November 1961 Hollis had a series of meetings with George Brown at which he revealed details of Bax's espionage
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– some of which were subsequently passed on by Brown to Chapman Pincher.
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