THE DEFENCE OF THE REALM: The Authorised History of MI5
By CHRISTOPHER ANDREW
Allen Lane, 2009, 1032 pages, $59.95 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
Have Britain’s spies been injected with truth serum? The huge palaver accompanying the release of a thousand page, authorised centenary history of MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency, by an ‘independent’ historian, Professor Christopher Andrew, would seem to suggest so. Official history has its limits, however, and Andrew’s book, The Defence of the Realm, keeps bumping up against them.
MI5 was created in 1909, as the first world war loomed, to deal with a ‘national security’ panic over the ‘Hun’. Andrews notes that whilst evidence for German military espionage in England was “flimsy and absurd”, the patriotic frenzy over invasion fears saw MI5 set up a secret register of ‘enemy aliens’. “Ethnocentric prejudice”, says Andrew, meant that all persons of German origin were deemed security risks and 32,000 men were interned and 20,000 deported. MI5’s blacklist continued after the war, this time including British citizens with one foreign parent – ‘we had enough trouble in the late war with half-hearted hybrids who asked not to be sent to the front to kill their relatives’, moaned MI5’s Deputy Director.
Also the target of raids and prosecutions under the ‘Defence of the Realm Act’ were thousands of anti-conscription activists and anti-militarists. Anyone opposed to the war was seen as‘pro-German’. Marxists were high on the list of subversives. Surveillance of Russian Bolshevik exiles had begun in 1915, and, after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and Soviet Russia’s withdrawal from the war, accelerated into a 70 year fetish about ‘reds under beds’, particularly in the labour movement.
This paranoia extended to the Labour Party when MI5 was alarmed by Britain’s first Labour Government in 1924. The concern was groundless (Ramsey McDonald’s government used MI5 to spy on trade unions) but a number of MI5 officers, “part of a deeply conservative, strongly patriotic, establishment network”, were not content and publicised the fake ‘Zinoviev letter’, which claimed there was a Moscow-led campaign to undermine, via the Labour Party, Britain’s armed forces in preparation for revolution. These MI5 gentlemen must have celebrated with another glass of port when their efforts were rewarded with a landslide Labour electoral loss.
Whilst MI5 proved adept at unfounded suspicions of possible Soviet agents, the handful of actual ones escaped notice. The Cambridge graduates working in Britain’s intelligence agencies and sensitive government posts (Philby, Mclean, Burgess, Blunt and Cairncross), with their “visionary faith in a future freed from the exploitation and alienation of the capitalist system”, went undetected for nearly two decades.
World War 11 saw MI5 again excel itself in mass internment - over 26,000 ‘enemy aliens’ were corralled. Anti-Nazi Germans and anti-Fascist Italians were interned with supporters of Hitler and Mussolini as ethnic prejudice trumped politics. After the war, MI5 was quick to get back to the real enemy, bugging and burgling Communist Party of Great Britain premises, tapping telephones, intercepting mail and infiltrating the party. ‘Defending the realm’ also meant helping the Chifley Labour Government in Australia to set up ASIO which the head of Australia’s Defence Department referred to as an ‘MI5 section’.
Back in the imperial heartland, the vetting of public servants occupied much MI5 time. The Attlee Labour Government (“The Labour Party has had nearly 40 years of fighting Communism in Britain”,boasted Attlee) presided over a purge which saw over 120 dismissals in 1948-1954. Gays in the public service were particularly suspect. MI5 declared gays to be ‘maladjusted to the social environment and therefore of an unstable character and open to blackmail by a hostile intelligence agency because their activities are felonious’.
As the Cold War deepened, internment lists were reprised once more, with thousands of ‘aliens’and communists slated for imprisonment on the Isle of Man in the event of war with the Soviet Union. Class war, however, occupied MI5’s day-to-day mind, with trade unions their target. The Wilson Labour Government used MI5 to spy on the National Union of Seamen during a strike in 1966 and MI5 drafted the Prime Minister’s Commons’ speeches which denounced the strike leaders as a‘tightly knit group of politically motivated men’. The offense of the dastardly commies was to support a strike against Wilson’s restrictive wages policy.
Other hosts checked for the Marxist virus included University students and the media – in the mid-1970s, MI5 spied on a ‘Trotskyist element’ in Granada TV and ‘ultra-left’production staff in Thames Television (the BBC they reassuringly found to be uninfected,‘free of subversive bias’ because of ‘the careful selection of key personnel by management’).
Colonial radicals in India, Ghana, Malaya, Kenya and other outposts of the realm were fair game for MI5 whose files sometimes assisted bloodily repressive outcomes. In 1949, MI5’s Deputy Director-General warned that independence activists “found the Communists sympathetic because [the communists] had no racial discrimination and were all in favour of the niggers running their own show”.
The anti-communist mind-set of MI5 was persistent, illustrated in 1976 by the four-week induction course for new recruits which included a film entitled ‘Sweetie Pie’, depicting a “lonely secretary being cultivated by a scheming Soviet agent”. The fixation of seeing Reds lurking everywhere was resisted by a handful of MI5 officers whose conscience balked at the monitoring of ordinary citizens in the peace movement, the trade unions and the National Council for Civil Liberties, although spying on communists remained “within the Service’s remit”, as is only fair, says an MI5-friendly Andrew. In any case, ‘communist sympathisers’ (which encompassed anyone whose views intersected in any way with the organised left) always remained in scope of ‘legitimate’ spying.
The demise of the Eastern Bloc, and of Irish terrorism, threatened MI5’s future until Osama bin Laden came to the rescue. Since then, MI5 has foiled countless plots, so they would have us believe, but the glory in MI5’s counter-terrorism crown has been the conviction of the Libyan, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, for the bombing of a PanAm Boeing 747 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988. MI5 intelligence, says Andrew, was crucial. And wrong, as it turns out.
Andrew’s book is permeated by just such a lack of scepticism towards MI5 claims. Harold Wilson’s suspicions of a plot to destabilise his Labour Government are dismissed by Andrew as paranoia, he absolves MI5 from assisting in British shoot-to-kill policies aimed at Irish Republicans, and he finds MI5 not guilty of dirty tricks against the National Union of Miners in the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike. Hand-on-heart, nothing to do with us, swear the MI5 files, which is good enough for Professor Andrew.
MI5 is, indeed, shown to be the voice of reason and moderation in many things, far less alarmist than their political masters who suspected a Moscow masterplan behind every challenge to government policy. For Andrew, the modern MI5 is an exemplary, reformed, professional, open, politically neutral public service agency. Can we believe this?
There was, as Andrew himself notes, a lack of public confidence in MI5 by the late 1980s arising from its Cold War-fixated, anti-democratic, illegal activities in snooping (and worse) on all sorts of dissidents. This generated a need for a reforming show of public accountability, including a much-trumpeted history book. If the book had been mere PR fluff written by an MI5 hack it would have had zero credibility, hence the need, from MI5’s point of view, for an ‘independent’ historian, but one, like Andrew, who shares the security world’s basic value system and assumptions – the‘realm’ must be defended; there werereds under beds; Lenin was the “author of an authoritarian one-party state”;the ‘atom spies’ [including the framed Rosenbergs] were guilty of treachery and got their just desserts; MI5 by-and-large kept out of politics and has contented itself with chasing the ‘Boche’, the KGB and Islamist terrorists.
MI5 saw its job as defending the ‘safety and well-being of the State’. This is quite distinct from a defence of the interests of the ordinary people of Britain. It was the working class and the left which was overwhelming the target of a state apparatus whose class blood-line (of the 16 MI5 heads, there were 12 Sirs, one Brigadier, one Dame and one Baroness) neatly illustrates whose interests the capitalist state, and its secret police, are defending – capitalism’s privileged and wealthy class. MI5’s true history remains to be written.