Inside Intelligence
Anthony Cavendish
Palu Publishing Ltd. 1987
Although many hundreds of books have been written on British Intelligence, very few have tackled post-war intelligence in any kind of depth or with any degree of reliability. By contrast, we tend to believe that we know quite a lot about the workings of the CIA. But even this isn’t true. The major part of the CIA’s work is concerned with the National Intelligence Estimates, collating and assessing information on the perceived Soviet threat, and not covert operations as many would like to believe – and as most writers on intelligence imagine. Even so, we know virtually nothing of any substance about the operations of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.
It may be asked, ‘But what about Nigel West, Christopher Andrew and Chapman Pincher?’. Andrew has written nothing on the post-war intelligence world and is overrated. Pincher’s books are a rehash of the material which he puts before the public every so often to supplement his pension. And West has only one book on the post-WW2 period, ‘A Matter of Trust’, about MI5. Although valuable, because books on MI5 are rare commodities, it gives a totally distorted picture of what MI5 is about. Reading West’s account one has the impression that MI5 is primarily concerned with dealing with defectors and imaginary moles. Wright’s Spycatcher topples that idea very easily. West fails to mention all those areas which made Spycatcher so interesting: the surveillance of political groups, of embassies, liaison with GCHQ, the use of computers, operations abroad, contacts with the CIA etc.
The picture is less distorted when we look at MI6 – there are more sources. Quite rightly, Cavendish suggests that Anthony Verrier’s ‘Through The Looking Glass’ is the best. It is choc full of inside information, and what makes it so good is that Verrier has a point of view. Although we may disagree with the perspective, at least it recognises that the subject we are really dealing with is politics; or, more precisely, parapolitics. Where the West books are little more than the dissection of bureaucratic entrails, like Spycatcher, Inside Intelligence adds flesh to the bones and is therefore a most welcome addition to the subject.
Cavendish’s intelligence career is well known. He served with SIME in the Middle East which was controlled by MI5. There he met Maurice Oldfield who was to become a life-long friend. Cavendish makes great use later of the friends he met in intelligence work. (One of the alleged anti-Wilson MI5 conspirators, Harry Wharton, began his intelligence career in SIME).
In the late 1940s Cavendish followed Oldfield into MI6 where he served in the counter-espionage and sabotage section, R5. His postings abroad included West Germany, and these chapters read very much like Le Carre – David Cornwell served in Bonn 10 years later. There are no major revelations but they do have the atmosphere and detail of working in an intelligence organisation. It is like Spycatcher in this respect, which makes this section of interest in comparing the two organisations. One begins to get the feel of how they work, and the influence of personalities on the operations. Most people will recognise the descriptions: they read very much like a version of typical small office politics.
One of the sub-texts is the poor relationship between the two allied services. Early on Cavendish was privy to the intelligence war: “…those of us who worked with MI6 officers knew that that organisation was the tops and that they – not us (MI5) – were the real professionals.” (p38) A year later, when he joined MI6, “I said apropos dictating a letter, ‘How rude can we be to MI5? “. (p47) Peter Wright, from the other side, has similar views on MI6: “They invariably planned operations which, frankly, stood little chance of success… There was, too, a senseless bravado about the way they behaved which I felt often risked the security of the operations … (MI6) was operating in the modern world with 1930s attitudes and 1930s personnel…” (p72 Spycatcher)
Cavendish goes into some detail about his involvement in anti-Soviet operations in Communist-held Latvia. In discussing the book the newspapers have said that we have read about this before. In a limited sense that in true, but there is still a great deal more to tell. There have been minor mentions in other books, primarily when dealing with the role of Kim Philby. But, as Cavendish makes plain here, Philby’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Just as in the better known Albanian operations, failure in the Baltic was most likely due to other sources.
Comparatively little is known about these MI6 operations. The only books so far on the subject have been E. H. Cookridge’s book on Gehlen, based largely on Soviet publications, and Bethel’s flawed book on the Albanian episode. Neither book takes on board the fact that the emigres used were largely ex-nazi collaborators, or how MI6 came to be involved with such people. The big secret that Philby and the other defectors took with them was the involvement of MI6, through Ellis and Menzies, with these proto-fascists before, during and after the Second World War. Cavendish’s minor account of the anti-Bolshevik campaigns will help those currently digging away in this area.
Cavendish confirms that MI6 was planting agents on newspapers and recruiting journalists – something, although not a secret, which has been officially denied. He mentions Kemsley newspapers who, according to Cavendish, even took on MI6 officers as foreign correspondents. This practice ended, he claims, in 1959 when Kemsley stopped publishing. Cavendish also confirms that Count van den Heuvel was known as ‘Z’ (a title that went back to the days of Claude Dansey’s Z network). The importance of that is the publication in December 1968 of articles, apparently based on MI6 documents, in the Soviet press. In these articles the Count is referred to as Z-1 and they allege that he was responsible for contacts with journalists.
The journalists went by their coding: BIN-1 etc. As Cavendish also confirms, MI6 were using a three letter coding for agents and staff. That Soviet list now makes interesting reading. Included were Lord Arran on the Daily Mail, W. I. Farr, Michael Berry (Lord Hartwell), Roy Pawley, Tom Harris, Michael Field of the Telegraph, Wing Commander Paul Richey at the Daily Express. At the Observer, David Astor, Mark Arnold-Foster, Wayland Young (Lord Kennet) and Edward Crankshaw. Brian Crozier at the Economist, Stuart McLean, vice-chairman of Associated Newspapers; John S. Whitlock, managing editor of Butterworth Publications; P. Morgan, editor British Plastic; G. Paulton of Arbeiter Zeitung (Vienna), and Henry Brandon at the Sunday Times.
In this period Kemsley owned the Sunday Times. In 1945 Ian Fleming, who had spent the war in Naval Intelligence and had had his own ‘secret army’, became Foreign Manager of Kemsley newspapers, and set up a separate department, Mercury News, to provide foreign news for the group’s newspapers, including the Sunday Times. Fleming was responsible for taking on the foreign correspondents and giving them postings. It is hard to believe that Fleming, who had such an exhilarating career in intelligence, and whose character and drive hardly fitted him for a desk job, just sat back as a newspaperman. Was Fleming the MI6 link man to Kemsley?
This long digression leads us nicely into the next part of Cavendish’s life when he became a journalist in 1953. He writes (p53) “Since I had been both a genuine journalist and a merchant banker it is often difficult to persuade people sufficiently knowledgeable about intelligence matters that that is the case.” Indeed it is. I accept that Cavendish was no longer an agent, though those who met him in every obscure town in the Middle East might disagree. But it is really a matter of splitting hairs. Cavendish did keep in touch with MI6, was a source of intelligence, and makes plain that he enjoyed using his old ‘six’ contacts.
In Paris he obtained one of the first copies of Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin speech to the 20th Party Congress in Moscow. In Poland he “was privy to the Intelligence games … I was able to take a surreptitious photograph of anything of interest, I did so and passed it on.” (p106). In Washington, during the Kennedy years, he “knew much of what was going on.” (p117). During the same period, “The unedited versions were filed for Intelligence.” (p119)
The Intelligence world, the ‘twilight world’ never really left his blood. When he became a director of Brandts bank in the early 1970s, he took on three ex-MI6 men for his International department. (He also notes that at the same time there “were half a dozen ex-MI6 men working in the City of London.”(p76))
It is this period, when he made his fortune, that becomes the most interesting. From 1965 onwards, Cavendish was meeting Oldfield on a regular basis for lunch and bridge. His other close friend was George Kennedy Young who supplies the unusual foreword to the book. ‘Unusual’ because Young, who is generally regarded as a racialist and political extremist, appears as a reasonable human being. Like Young, Cavendish was accepted as a Conservative candidate in the early seventies, though their politics were to the right of the party. Cavendish, in Diana Menuhin’s account, was “so British as to belong to a past backed by an Empire that ruled the waves,” a world where “theft, deception, lies, mutilation and even murder are possibilities.” (p13)
Cavendish and Young were to work together from 1973 in Unison, the co-ordinating committee which was to play its part in the anti-Wilson – or, at least, anti-Heath – plots. One has to ask why Oldfield, a man who is generally regarded as being something of a liberal, was close friends with these two. Is everything we know about Oldfield wrong? Was the man a closet reactionary, or a man admired as a true professional, oblivious of politics and only interested in protecting the service?
Part of Oldfield’s Chinese horoscope, a copy of which he carried around with him, includes this passage: “While he can be tender and benevolent to his friends and those he loves, there is a latent ruthless streak in him which sometimes surfaces. Then one needs to beware, if one has anything to fear, because one might find oneself deep in his clutches. He can dig in his claws when he wishes.” (p105, ‘C’ by Richard Deacon) Was Wilson the victim? Cavendish would like to think so.
“It was always clear to me from things he said that Maurice was somehow involved in the sudden departure of Harold Wilson from the premiership. I also linked to this the fact that on Maurice’s retirement from MI6 the new Prime Minister (Callaghan) recommended him for an advancement in the Order of St. Michael and St. George. The Queen awarded him the Grand Cross of that Order, and he was the first and so far the only Chief of MI6 to be so honoured.” (p149)
“Maurice always insisted to me that Harold Wilson, after his retirement, was at great pains to avoid him. Since Wilson lived in Lord North Street and Maurice in Marsham Street, they were neighbours and Maurice said that Wilson would always avoid passing him by. Similarly, if they both appeared at the same gathering, Wilson would make every effort not to be near or even in the same room as Maurice.”
This is not a new story. A version of this appears on p183 of Deacon’s autobiography of Oldfield, ‘C’. There, another MI6 source, who seems to be Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), says
“I can only say that Harold Wilson told me, quite spontaneously, in January 1977, that he had the highest opinion of MI6, whereas of MI5 he would utter no good word. Indeed, he accused MI5 of conspiring against him and trying to bring down his government. MI6 at the time of which he was speaking, was under Oldfield.”
Dacre had told the same story to Chapman Pincher (See Inside Story, p1 and A Web of Deception p106).
The waters are now becoming very murky. Wilson supposedly likes MI6 but distrusts Oldfield. Added to which, although Deacon wrote a very sympathetic biography of Oldfield, he was not a champion of MI6. On the contrary, reading closely his other books, his sympathies clearly lie with MI5. What is going on?
The Deacon biography looks more and more like a deliberate ploy to counter the MI5 smears against Oldfield which were then current. Cavendish is a source for that book. But was he a major one? On p 142 of Deacon there is the Sefton Delmer link to Oldfield; on p146 there is the story about the MI6 agent and the poison pill; on p181 a Russian story favoured by Oldfield; on p186 the story of Oldfield’s kindness to his bodyguard. All of these – and there are many others – appear in Cavendish’s book.
Cavendish, p149: “A lot of suggestions have been made about why Wilson went as he did. I have the good fortune to be a friend of the Baroness Falkender who, as Marcia Williams, worked closely with Wilson.”
Poor old Marcia! Not only does she suffer the shock of discovering that her good friend James Goldsmith has been accused of being one of the conspirators with Peter Wright, but another friend turns out to have been a member of Unison, possibly the co-ordinating committee for the whole damn thing.
“While I believe her when she rubbishes various smears that have been put about as reason for why Wilson retired and insists that Wilson had made it known when he returned to Downing Street for the last time that he intended to retire before the end of the Parliament – I believe there was something which triggered Wilson’s abrupt resignation, and it is related to something about which no outsider knows all the details.”
Here it comes, the one we have all been waiting for.
“Wilson travelled a great deal, both when in and out of office and particularly to Warsaw Pact countries. This may be one of the facts which so worried MI5. One is forced to ask, therefore, what action would the KGB take if they had evidence of some theoretical indiscretion on the part of a British prime minister. There could be no consideration of approaching the PM directly or indirectly. What the KGB would probably do in such a circumstance, therefore, is to pass what they had to the CIA or to MI6, secure in the knowledge that it would cause chaos.”
Inside Intelligence
Chapter 7
At the time that these various aggressive activities were taking place against the Soviet Union and satellite countries I was unaware of them. So there was some initial surprise when I was given my new assignment, which was to be the MI6 liaison officer with the Royal Navy in Hamburg, in an operation which involved the covert transporting and landing of agents on the Latvian coast.
When I use ‘aggressive’ I in no way mean the word in the sense in which the Russians would use it. Merely in the sense that we were actually getting up and doing something, the attendant risks of which could all too easily cause a major diplomatic incident. In later years, it has always amazed me that these various operations were authorised by a Labour government in London and I attributed this to the power of the Foreign Secretary at that time, Ernest Bevin.
Part of my briefing covered the fact that the Germans, during the war, had used their very fast S-boats to carry agents on to the beaches of the Baltic States. We intended to recruit one of the most successful of the S-boat captains, Lieutenant Commander Hans Helmut Klose, to carry out similar operations for SIS using one of the S-boats. The S208, which had been built by Lurgens in Vegasack, was taken to a British yard near Portsmouth, stripped down and then souped up so that she would do almost 50 knots. The cover of the operation was that Klose, his German crew and the S208 were part of the British Control Commission Fishery Protection Service which operated in the Baltic to keep an eye on West German fishermen’s rights. The East Germans had already set up a miniature navy with armed sea-going vessels as part of their border protection service. I was not involved in recruiting the Baltic agents who, in the main, were enlisted from Displaced Persons camps in Germany with the aid of emigre organisations with whom we were in contact.
Youngish men were recruited. Those who were, firstly, ideologically sound, secondly, were prepared to return to their homelands and about whom a fitting cover story could be produced and, thirdly, who could successfully complete our training course which involved instruction in radio, weapons, explosives and subjects essential to secret communications such as codes, cyphers and the use of secret inks.
Another voice
Spectator 19 June 1976
Westminster fringe benefits
Auberon Waugh
Oddly enough, I have been working on the outlines of a political sex extravaganza for some time, without ever having the opportunity to write it. No doubt the plot, when explained, will prove too preposterous for any West End impresario or mogul of Independent Television, most of whose minds are on higher matters. No audience will invest much credibility, in it either, so resigned are we all to the gloomy proposition that our political leaders are sexless as well as incorruptible. But since nothing else has happened this week for me to write about, I suppose I might as well set it down.
The hero is a youngish, fairly idealistic politician – I suppose we had better make him Labour – who falls from grace just once. Although he is already married, he embarks on an affair with a lady from work. The affair only lasts a comparatively short time – about two years – but he makes the mistake during this time of taking his lady friend to Russia with him, where he is visiting on business, not one but three times. During the first or these visits, they are photographed in compromising circumstances by agents of the Soviet security police at a hotel where they are both staying.
The plot, as I say, is a preposterous one – anybody who knows anything about politics will know how absurd it is to suggest that a politician could ever have an affair with anyone who was not his wife – but this is the least preposterous part of it. Those who have made a study of such matters assure me that the KGB take infinite pains, and every single applicant for a tourist visa to the Soviet Union – even half-witted students or journalists on a Thomson package tour – is made the subject of a KGB decision on whether the applicant should be recruited, compromised or merely neutralised (that is, prevented from seeing anything unsuitable). The risk of a politician visiting Russia with a lady friend being made the subject of such attentions is so great as to be a virtual certainty, and where repeated visits are involved, it is more than a certainty.
At any, rate, our hero comes back from the Soviet Union to disclose that the KGB have the screws on him, and the only person in England who knows this is his lady friend. Fortunately, she remains loyal to him, and in fact stays by his side like the proverbial limpet long after their sexual passion has run its course. But the knowledge undoubtedly gives her a certain moral purchase.
His career progresses, as politicians’ careers are wont to do, and in time he finds himself the leader of his party, and eventually (why not?) Prime Minister of Great Britain. As the former lady friend approaches a certain age, her influence becomes unsettling. The demands she places upon his loyalty become more strenuous, and the threats more overt. Eventually he inexplicably resigns, his last actions in obedience to her demands leaving a noticeable question mark over the whole episode.
The truth finally comes out when, in a fit of hysteria, either the politician, or his lady friend – or possibly both – institute libel proceedings against a brave, handsome, much-loved journalist who has guessed their secret. In the final court scene it is recalled that the former Prime Minister has been an agent of the Soviet Union – albeit an unwilling one – throughout his entire period of office.
Are there any takers for this preposterous fiction?
This fantasy/smear had first appeared in Waugh’s diary column in Private Eye in April 1975.
Cavendish continues: “..if something came into Maurice’s hands relating to the Prime Minister of the day, his duty would be clear, he would show it to one of three people: the Prime Minister himself, the Cabinet Secretary or his immediate boss, the Foreign Secretary. I believe from things Maurice said that something may have come into his hands and that he showed it to the Foreign Secretary, James Callaghan.”
Writing about the Prime Minister in June 1975, Waugh added this intriguing touch to the tale:
“Another factor may have been the discussions we had over the matter of some photographs that had come into my possession. They are of an interesting nature, taken in the summer of 1959 when we were all so much younger and less inhibited – and there was still sap rising in these withered old branches”.
Waugh had been a friend of at least one MI5 officer, its boss and also victim of a smear campaign, Sir Roger Hollis.
According to this scenario, Big Jim, the first to know of Wilson’s resignation plans, turns out to be the secret beneficiary of the Wilson plots. No doubt redoubtable Jim will issue a writ for this smear, or at least a statement which will explain his long silence over the plots.
Stephen Dorril
(A message from Mr Cavendish’s sponsors at Century House)
(From Inside Intelligence)
Appendix A
23/4/87
Sir Maurice Oldfield
You will have seen accounts of the statement made by the Prime Minister today about Sir Maurice Oldfield.
An event like this, with all the innuendo and ill-informed press comment which accompanies it, is bound to be a shock to all of us. Those who served with Maurice will feel dismay and concern and sadness, particularly those who knew him well.
It is perhaps important and of some comfort to separate the personal aspects from the wider professional considerations. As the Prime Minister indicated, the facts became known after Maurice left the Service, and his PV certificate was then withdrawn. There is no evidence that the security of our work was in any way prejudiced, of which the best confirmation is that during his period in office the Service’s record of achievement was very high. That record and your own contributions to it still stand, and we can all be proud of them. It is this that we must remember during these difficult days. The fundamental integrity of the Service remains intact, and our determination to continue to perform our tasks remains undiminished. And we of the current generation are determined at least to try and match your own achievements.