A file at the National Archives in Kew gives an insight into how seriously Harold Wilson took security as prime minister – although his idea of security was not so much protection of people and information, but preservation of his position at the head of power.
The file BA 19/47 opens ahead of a meeting between the minister of technology – the ambitious young Anthony Wedgewood Benn – and Wilson, on Thursday evening, February 16, 1967. A letter from 10 Downing Street staffer Michael Halls to the head of the civil service Sir Laurence Helsby quoted the PM’s comment that ‘at the slightest breath of trouble in the ministry of defence’, the paymaster-general – George Wigg, who less formally acted as Wilson’s eyes and ears for any trouble among Labour MPs – knew ‘within minutes’.
While the PM accepted that a minister had responsibility for security within his department, ‘he [Wilson] regards both the ministry of defence and the ministry of technology as specially sensitive and in consequence he feels that he himself must take special precautions’. As signs that Wilson’s oversight was out of the hands of cabinet ministers – and the very secrecy would add to Wilson’s power – the file stated that the civil servants did not want anything said to a minister ‘that would indicate that the arrangement may not come wholly as a surprise to his officials’. Helsby pointed out that Wigg advised the Ministry of Defence on security, informally, and Helsby recommended that the PM should not give any written instructions (that could inform others).
As for the meeting between Benn and Wilson, Halls typed a record. Wilson said he was ultimately responsible for government as a whole, including ‘PV teams’, who carried out ‘positive vetting’ of employees, ‘which provided a common service for departments and which vetted civilians in industry employed on classified work’, such as weapons of war for the MoD; and the first computers, as championed by Benn at Mintech (for short). Wilson told Benn of Wigg’s informal arrangement with the MoD, usually through one of the second secretaries (senior civil servants), whereby Wigg would be told, ‘within minutes’, ‘of any security problem or issue’. Wigg kept Wilson informed of any important matter. PM wanted the same of Benn’s ministry, ‘even if it were only a breath of suspicion’, that a civil servant was a Communist (and potentially a spy). Wigg urged Benn to invite the security service to carry out an inspection of Mintech’s security.
Wilson and Wigg got their way because in a letter of March 6, 1967 Benn said that after ‘discussing’ with Wigg, Benn would inform Wigg of any ‘betrayal or leak of classified information’, any serious weakness in departmental security procedures, any security ‘problem, issue or occurrence of whatever kind which is likely to become the subject of public or press comment’. Benn would indeed invite the security services to review his department’s security.
The head of the civil service at Mintech, the permanent secretary Sir Richard Clarke, duly wrote in March 1967 to Sir Martin Furnival-Jones, the director-general of MI5, at its offices at Millbank. MI5 had completed a security inspection of the department when it went from the Ministry of Supply to the Ministry of Aviation. The junior minister for aviation, John Stonehouse, crops up in the file; ironically, long after the event he was revealed to be a spy in the pay of the Soviet bloc. As of 1967, however, aviation was judged secure by MI5 whereas Mintech was not. Some of Mintech’s research and procurement was secret (about defence), whereas much of its work in the field of civil aviation was not. “Our problem,” Clarke wrote to MI5, “will be to find ways of reconciling the two so that neither the security essential to the defence element nor the freedom with which we can help industry is impaired.”
You might think that having secret and non-secret under the same departmental roof was a bad idea in the first place. In any case, Furnival-Jones in his reply mentioned ‘difficult timing’; ‘we have a full programme for several months’, and could not begin an inspection of Mintech before November; which would mean postponing another already-arranged inspection, for the autumn. An inspection, in other words, took months. Indeed in a letter of February 1968, MI5 wrote that another inspection had proved ‘a great deal more complex than we had expected’, and MI5 was free to begin its inspection of Mintech in May 1968.
A memo of March 1968 reported a five-year residence rule for NV (negative vetting) and an upcoming ten-year residence rule for positive vetting; which raised the question of how to vet someone whose home country was not particularly reliable in terms of paperwork. A note of April 2, 1968 by the Mintech security officer (who had MC after his name, suggesting he was a Second World War veteran) contrasted a ‘necessarily highly restrictive approach’ on the aviation side, and yet Mintech ‘was imbued with a very liberal spirit’. Physically, he reported, the Mintech headquarters should be regarded as secure ‘within the next month or so’. The security officer also raised the question of how to control information given to Iron Curtain countries, in the course of discussions about technological cooperation.
Another file, BA 19/74 takes the story further into the 1964-70 Wilson government. The case of an employee of an electronic contractor to Mintech was important enough for the head of the civil service department, Sir William Armstrong, to be rung up about it in May 1969. The man was an immigrant from Poland after the Second World War, who was naturalised as British in 1961. He was refused security clearance in 1952, but given it in 1966. He never did classified work. At an interview with the security services, he admitted being in touch with the Polish intelligence services. On a warrant police searched his home and found a mass of work papers, including three marked secret (later downgraded to ‘restricted’ and then reclassified again, to ‘unclassified’). Prosection of the man was unlikely. The man’s employer had reviewed their security and was satisfied there was no breach of security. The security services had not analysed the documents for whether they had ‘commercial espionage’ material. Sir William was told because the case ‘might conceivably get publicity’; and time and again the files show that bad publicity or embarrassment was behind the civil service and Wilson’s hunt for leakers and breaches, as much as any actual loss or threat.
One example of a ‘leak’ was during the British ‘invasion’ of the Caribbean island of Anguilla in March 1968, which prompted ridicule. A report in the London Evening Standard was singled out for seemingly using an official ‘leak’. In May, Wilson referred to Anguilla as suggesting the procedure for investigating leaks was inadequate. A June memo admitted that a ‘leak procedure’ seldom turned up a culprit, despite ‘an inordinate amount of wasted effort’. Yet ‘no more satisfactory method of handling the difficult problem of leaks has yet been proposed’. Still, Government did not want those deemed to leak to feel their offence would be undetected. Sir Denis Greenhill of the Foreign Office wrote to Armstrong about a Peterborough diary column in the Daily Telegraph on June 23, 1969.
It gave a story from a British diplomat in the Congolese republic, that Spain was doing a deal with President Mobutu; and in return Spain would get a vote against Britain in the United Nations, to aid Spain in its long-running dispute over Gibraltar. That info could only have come from the Foreign Office, or Britain’s security service overseas MI6 (which had reported the deal in January). An ambassador told the FO that the Daily Telegraph told him that the story came from Britain’s embassy in Kinshasa. The FO agreed with the Attorney-General that this was a leak for the FO to investigate; not the police.
As a further sign of how seriously Wilson took any leak, the PM told Armstrong on June 25 that it was unsatisfactory that from time to time a lot of honest civil servants had to feel in a questionnaire about their contacts, ‘when it was fairly clear that the responsibility for a leak of classified information lay with a minister’. Greenhill told Armstrong in September 1969 the outcome: “…. It seems reasonably certain that the leak was the result of careless talk by David Russell who …. was a temporary grade five officer employed as a first secretary at our embassy in Kinshasa. He returned to this country in April on terminal leave and his contract expired on June 21. He is no longer in government employ.’
Russell admitted at interview (not under caution) to lunching on May 13 with Ian Colvin, who wrote the Telegraph story. Greenhill described it as ‘a useful piece of gossip’ – that is, not a state secret – and ‘no damage done, nor is it likely to have jeopardised the source of the information’, that is, someone working for MI6 based in the embassy. The British ambassador in Kinshasa and Greenhill were against prosecution as things were ‘far better left as they are’.
A ’leak’ more at home also in the file was by the Guardian journalist Ian Aitken in November 1969, about an increase in the price of school meals; a decision taken some time before and known to a ‘fair number of people’ at the department for education, the file admitted. Inquiries by the department brought nothing to light – was the leaker an official, or a junior minister? Leaks and what to do about them were discussed across Wilson’s government. In 1967, inquiring into several leaks, the Ministry of Defence found the procedure ‘wasteful of effort and likely to have an adverse effect on the general attitude to security’, as leakers were getting away with it.
A procedure for inquiries into ‘leakages’ dated from 1950, and the cabinet secretary Norman Brook. In June 1959, Brook sent out a reminder that the leaked department should inform Brook, who would initiate the necessary inquiry; and consult with the security services. In the first place, the investigator would be the department’s security officer (whose 21st century title would be more likely head or chief of security). A standard questionnaire for suspected staff to fill in came in 1966. According to a manual on security in government, an investigation would establish the distribution of documents; if any were missing, and who got a copy. It was hardest to trace or prevent ‘careless talk’.
In February 1970, Armstrong, Furnival-Jones and permanent secretaries such as Greenhill, Clarke and Sir Philip Allen met, about the leak procedure. Armstrong admitted in a letter beforehand that the procedure was ‘pretty ineffective …. a cumbersome process which seldom shows a positive result. Moreover I suspect that a person determined to leak information to the press would not find it difficult to complete a standard questionnaire in a way that avoided suspicion.’ And newspaper reporters protected their sources. On the other hand, Armstrong went on, to abandon investigations ‘would give the impression that we were not concerned about the unauthorised disclosure of official information’. Note that how damaging the info was, did not matter; the act of leaking did. Armstrong mentioned the Ministry of Defence had complained likewise, in 1964 (and also in the file was a Febriary 1970 article by the Sunday Telegraph’s naval correspondent Desmond Wettern, about the sale of Seaking helicopters to India; was that a leak, one of several by the same journalist?). Armstrong passed on Harold Wilson’s suggestion of a list in each department of staff known to have contacts with the press, ‘either official or by personal friendship with individual reporters. And question them as a first step.’
‘Box 500’, the long-time address of the security services, wrote to Armstrong in March 1970 that it looked at some 71 leaks brought to its notice since 1966. In 23 cases, MI5 used questionnaires. In five of those, the questionnaires appeared to narrow the ‘field of investigation’. But no questionnaire led directly to a source of leakage (as arguably the most famed journalist of the time, Chapman Pincher of the Daily Express, stated in his 1978 book Inside Story). And no wonder, because (as Pincher reported accurately) the questionnaire asked if someone had knowledge of the leaked information, and if they had mentioned the subject to anyone; if they knew the journalist or anyone on the newspaper that published the leak; and finally fished for whether the suspect could suggest how the leak might have occurred.
To return to the Kew file; without a lead, and where the dissemination of information was wide, the problem, MI5 commented, was ‘bound to be intractable’. Questionnaires, it spelled out, should be unlikely to provide solutions, ‘but they have some value in reminding staff of the need for discretion and I cannot see any alternative. They should be used sparingly but it would be wrong to abandon them altogether’.
Ned Dunnett, the Ministry of Defence’s permanent secretary, wrote to Armstrong in April 1970 that he didn’t at all like the idea of completing a list of people with press contacts; he found it ‘very difficult and indeed obnoxious to try and build up a list of people who have social or personal contacts with individual Press men’.
Otto Clarke, at Mintech, likewise wrote to Armstrong that since February 1967 his ministry had made 17 investigations into suspected leaks. Only one written set of questionnaires was used. In seven cases, questioning by skilled security officers established there was no leak. Clarke was suggesting that questioning (in person) was a way of keeping questionnaires as a sparingly-used deterrent. Clarke was against investigating a leak just because it was of official information (in other words, Clarke only wanted to go after leaks of ‘classified’ information).
The cabinet secretary, Burke Trend, also wrote to Armstrong in April 1970 that he was against a ‘press list’ as ‘a rather invidious business and if it became known to the press (as it surely would) it might be misrepresented’.
A meeting of the senior civil servants in May 1970 thus agreed on questioning by a department’s security staff; and still wanted unclassified – ‘commercial in confidence’ and private matters – to be investigated ‘just as rigorously’ if leaked as actual secrets. As a sign of how much further the state ranged in that era than since, the meeting wondered if the nationalised industries should be questioned, if they had access to leaked information.
Chapman Pincher in his book charged that ‘self-deception’ frequently entered into the authorities’ reaction to a leak (or a suspected one), ‘and there have been several occasions when the wrong people have been accused of giving me information and have been subjected to unpleasant interrogation as a result’ (page 188). Pincher wrote he was convinced ‘that senior civil servants are afflicted with a pathological preoccupation with secrecy which might be called ‘suppresomania’ and seems to be incurable’ (page 207). He explained it in terms of psychology:
Part of the joy of being at the top is being in the charmed circle of the few ‘in the know’ and civil servants say that this is what they miss most when they retire. Releasing any information reduces the extent to which they are exclusively in the know.
Ironically, Pincher revealed that Wigg rang him in advance of the official announcement in 1964 of Wigg becoming Paymaster-General as Labour took power, ‘to give me the news’ (page 246).
Photo of Harold Wilson courtesy of the Magic Attic, Derbyshire.
