M.I.5

M.I.5 is focused upon security within the U.K.. At the start of the 20^thC British intelligence was gathered primarily by the Foreign Service and the Admiralty. Major James Edmonds headed the War Office s M.O.5 military counter-intelligence service. The unit consisted of him and his two assistants. In 1908 the officer tried to persuade a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence to increase the resources that were at his disposal. The body declined to do so. Edmonds was of the view that he was in danger of losing the small domain that he did have to Scotland Yard. However, a document arrived at the War Office that purportedly a Frenchman had acquired by mistake, while he had been travelling in Germany. The text set out plans for a German invasion of England. This prompted the sub-committee to reconsider the officer's submissions to it. It recommended to Downing Street that a Secret Service Bureau should be set up and that it should have external (C) and internal (K) sections. Its original office was in Victoria Street, next door to a private detective agency. It had two members of staff, one an intelligence officer from the Army and the other from the Royal Navy's intelligence section. Its first director was Vernon Kell, who held the post for 31 years.

Edmonds s knew the writer William Le Queux socially. The latter's output included the novel The Spies of The Kaiser: Plotting The Downfall of England (1909). This contained a description of an invasion plan that was strangely similar to one that had been set out in the document that the commercial traveller had discovered . The Daily Mail newspaper involved itself in the controversy. In 1916 K Branch was incorporated into the Directorate of Military Intelligence. It became M.I.5.

During the First World War M.I.5 recruited Boy Scots to act as messengers as in its headquarters. However, the boys proved to have a talent for mischief. In 1915 they were replaced by Girl Guides.

During the First World War the agency had a series of successes against German agents.

Following the establishment of peace, M.I.5 switched its focus to tracing Communist subversives. However, it also contracted in size. However, it developed a corporate culture that did not tolerate backstabbing amongst its staff and which tolerated eccentrics such as the former prep school Maxwell Knight, who had a passion for keeping unusual pets. It was also one of the first branches of the state to recruit women.

As a spymaster Maxwell Knight's two principal innovations were the use of women, whom he regarded as being more trustworthy, and his appreciation of the usefulness of patience.

In 1927 the authorities mounted a raid on the cover organisation for the Soviet Union s UK spying operation. This revealed to Moscow that the British had broken its codes. A major effort was put into ensuring that such did not recur. And it did not.

In 1929 M.I.5 had only thirteen officers.

During the 1930s Knight was involved in M.I.5's penetration of the British Union of Fascists.

Soviet intelligence gathering was highly effective. However, the Soviet intelligence had two major flaws. Firstly, its capacity to analyse the information it received was poor, and secondly, it always gave its political masters what it thought would please them rather than what was true.

M.I.5 failed to appreciate that Communism had an appeal that extended beyond the working-classes. Therefore, the possibility that Cambridge undergraduates might be embracing the ideology was never given serious consideration.

Following the outbreak of war, M.I.5 took up residence in Wormwood Scrubs. Subsequently, it transferred to premises in St James s.

Walter Krivitsky had run Soviet spies in Britain. During the Great Terror he defected. In 1940 he met Jane Archer of M.I.5 in The Langham Hotel. He informed her that there were moles inside the Foreign Office but was only able to sketch them in the broadest of outlines. Soon afterwards an account of the discussion was sent to Moscow. A month later Krivitsky was found dead from a gunshot wound in a Washington D.C. hotel room.

As the Third Reich started top collapse the Americans commenced a programme of parachuting anti-Nazi Germans into Germany in order to gather intelligence on the Reich's internal condition. It sourced these people from the migr community. One of the principal conduits was the Agent Sonya, who was a Communist

The principal reason that Agent Sonya was able to operate from Great Rollright in rural Oxfordshire was that the male spies at M.I.5 were unable to conceive that a woman could be a spy. However, the senior spy mistress Millicent Bagot, who was the model for George le Carr s Connie Sachs, suspected her.

The Double Cross operations used double agents and decoys to drip feed false information to the Germans about where the Allied landing in northern Europe would take place.

The betrayal of atomic weapons data hastened the development of a Soviet bomb. Thereafter the principal effect of the Soviet infiltration was to undermine M.I.5's self-confidence.

The file that M.I.5 maintained on Harold Wilson was kept under the name Norman Worthington.

In 1956 Roger Hollis was appointed the Director-General of M.I.5.

In the late 1950s M.I.5 unearthed evidence that Communists were rigging elections within the E.T.U. electricians union. This led to a successful fightback by the union's non-Communist leaders.

In 1965 Hollis stepped down as M.I.5's Director-General.

In 1966 Wilson introduced the Wilson doctrine under which the security services were not supposed to bug M.P.s. If they did so then the Prime Minister was required to making a statement to Parliament that such activity was occurring.

M.I.5 used to have the top two floors of Centre Point.

In 1971 Britain expelled 105 Soviet diplomats.

Wilson voiced theories that M.I.5 was mounting a campaign against him. While, he was kept under surveillance by the service, it does not appear to have been seeking to undermine him. His paranoia seems to have derived principally from his own degenerating mental faculties rather than from an external reality.

In 1974 John Stonehouse disappeared. Subsequently, it was to emerge that he had been an agent for Czechoslovakia's intelligence service. It is believed that he was the only agent to have ministerial rank.

The publication of Peter Wright's book Spycatcher (1987) helped to lead to an environment in which the government became more open about the secret service organisations and their operation.

Both the Conservatives and Labour asked M.I.5 for information about their rivals. The service resisted the entreaties, repeatedly refusing to term radicals as subversives.

In 1985 The Observer journalists Paul Lashmar and David Leigh revealed that M.I.5 had influence over the hiring and firing of B.B.C. employees. They were aided by Steve Hewlett (1958-2017), a former researcher on the television current affairs show Nationwide. The programme's editor, had tried to secure him a permanent position. This wish was blocked by Brigadier Stonham.

In 1989 M.I.5 was placed upon a statutory basis.

In 1992 combating terrorism was transferred from Special Branch to M.I.5.

In 2004 it was reported that M.I.5 was making a particular effort to recruit people who lived in south London. This was because research had found that young people regarded a short commuting time as being an important factor when looking for a job. At the time, 58% of the service's staff were aged under 40.

In 2008 the staff of M.I.5 received trade union representation for the first time.

Location: 156 Caledonian Road, N1 9UU. Close to the bridge over The Regent's Canal.

P.O. Box 3255, 12 Millbank, SW1P 4QE (orange, turquoise)

Website: www.mi5.gov.uk

John Bingham

John Bingham (1908-1988) was a noted spy who was believed to have informed the character of John le Carr's Smiley. While a man who never raised his voice, he would hold a glass in his left-hand so as to be able to more swiftly use the knuckle-duster that he always carried in a righthand pocket. He would wear Saville Row suits when being himself but off-the-peg ones when out on business .

Location: ℅ Coutts & Co., 10 Mount Street, W1K 2TY (blue, yellow)

Crowson & Sons

Crowson & Sons was a cheese wholesaling business. In 1894 the firm introduced Camembert into Britain. On one of the external walls of its premises in Clerkenwell there was a 1950s sign that read Crowson & Son - The Fancy Cheese People . The company relocated. The building appeared to be vacant from the street but was occupied. Its exterior was left as it had been. The information seeped out into public knowledge that the new tenants were part of M.I.5. It came to be believed by some that the Crowson vans that could be seen being driven about London were being used by members of the security service.

In 2002 BFD Group bought the real Crowson & Sons cheese business.

The Crowson's sign disappeared in the mid-to-late 2000s.

Location: 27 Farringdon Road, EC1M 3HA (purple, blue)

See Also: CHEESE

Fluffy Bunny

Michael Bettaney (1950-2018) was born the only child of a working-class family in Stoke-on-Trent. He failed his eleven-plus and went to a secondary modern, where he was misfit. However, he was studious and succeeded in winning a place at the University of Oxford. There he adopted the dress, mannerisms, and accent of former public school pupils. He espoused Hard Right political views and served in the Officer Training Corps, which was a deeply unfashionable thing to do. In 1975 M.I.5 opted to recruit him. In large part this was because the service wished to be able to defend itself from accusations that it was a preserve of the privileged. During his adolescence he had unexpectedly converted to Roman Catholicism. In the late 1970s he served in Northern Ireland. It was noted that he drank heavily and made in appropriate comments. There he found his Catholic identity and Irish antecedents started to draw him away from his previous identification with the Establishment. The process was accelerated first by the death of his parents and then by his increasing dependence upon spirits. By the early 1980s his politics were drifting westwards. He joined the Colusdon Labour Party. At the end of 1982 he was appointed to work in K Section, which countered Soviet espionage in Britain. By then he had become a convinced Marxist. Within the service he had acquired a reputation for being an ineffectual sex pest who was not taken seriously, being nicknamed Fluffy Bunny.

Arkady Gouk was the K.G.B. rezident (head of station) at the Soviet Embassy in London. Bettaney knew his address and was aware of when it was not subject to surveillance. He used this knowledge and pushed through the letterbox an envelope contained a number of M.I.5 secrets and a letter that set out his wish to spy for the Communists. He signed it Kuba . The Russian was wary and opted not to respond. A second envelope was posted through the letterbox. Again, Gouk chose not to reply. He told his deputy, Gordievsky, a double-agent who was spying for M.I.6.. Bettaney was unaware of this fact, the Russian informed his controllers and Bettaney was arrested. The Soviets believed that the Briton's attempt had been discovered by means of a wire tap. Gouk was expelled from the United Kingdom. While Bettaney was on remand in H.M.P. Brixton he used his privilege to attend Mass to pass on information about intelligence operations in Northern Ireland to members of the I.R.A., who were being held in the prison. In 1984 was tried at the Old Bailey. Some of the secrets that were involved were so secret that they were not revealed to the Attorney-General, Sir Michael Havers, who was prosecuting. Lord Chief Justice Lane, the presiding judge, was required to sign the Official Secrets Act before they were revealed to him. Bettaney became the first M.I.5. In delivering his sentence Lane stated that he believed that Bettaney had not been motivated by money, however, this did not stop him delivering an excoriating opinion of the man's person and actions.

In the wake of the revelation Prime Minister Thatcher appointed Sir Anthony Duff, a Foreign Office official, to head M.I.5. He proved able to reshape it through a series of reforms.

Bettaney served fourteen years in prison. For much of the time he was kept in isolation units in order to prevent him from revealing secrets. Following his release in 1998 he went to live in Ware, Hertfordshire. There, he sometimes worked as a pheasant beater.

A Lady Spinster Spy

Julia Pirie was an agent who worked for M.I.5's F4 section. In the 1950s she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, became an official at its King Street headquarters, and was appointed to the post of personal assistant to John Gollan, the Party s General-Secretary. She was a keen cricket fan and would pass over copies of confidential documents to her handler at meetings that they had at the Oval Cricket Ground.

The C.P.G.B. s leadership, in order to lessen the likelihood of its meetings in King Street were the subjects of audio surveillance by the service, had a policy of frequently changing the room that it used within the building. Its members believed they had found the optimum location when they started to use a windowless cellar in the basement. M.I.5 bugged the room by inserting a microphone via a coal chute the top end of which could be accessed from the street.

In Operation Party Piece M.I.5 copied the Party's secret membership list. This was being held by a wealthy Party member in his Mayfair flat. The service had copied the man's front door key from one that he kept under his front door mat.

M.I.5 came to the opinion that the C.P.G.B. was not a dynamic entity in its own right. Instead, it was dependent upon Moscow and those trade unions that were Communist-led.¹ In 1978 the service pulled Pirie out of the party. She was redeployed against the I.R.A., monitoring its activities in Europe. The Party paid her workplace pension until her death.

Location: 16 King Street, WC2E 8JF (blue, yellow)

See Also: SUBTERRANEAN

¹. In many strata of British society, Communists were respected for their utopianism and their practicality. Union members were prepared to have Party members as their shop stewards, if the individuals involved were the most effective negotiators in dealings with the employers, which they often were. However, the totalitarian and dogmatic aspects of Communist ideology meant that the Party was always a peripheral entity within Britain.

Room 105

In 1985 The Observer newspaper published an article that revealed that Brigadier Stonham (1927-2014) of the B.B.C.'s Special Duties Management unit vetted B.B.C. staff's political views for M.I.5. The practice had started in 1937. It is thought to have ceased following the end of the Cold War. He also monitored some departmental directors and editors so that that political views and actions could be known when it came to considering their possible promotion. It was reputed that these individual's personal files were stamped with a Christmas tree symbol. Following the breaking of the media story about him, the brigadier was swiftly dubbed the Christmas tree man .

Stonham was based on the first floor of Broadcasting House in Room 105. It was reputed that this portion of the building had been one of the inspirations for George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was claimed that one of Stonham's predecessors, Hugh fforde Searight, had had a spyhole installed in the room's door. This was so that he could know when the tea trolley was coming around.

Location: Broadcasting House, 2-22 Portland Place, W1A 1AA (red, yellow)

Victor Rothschild

Victor Rothschild Cambridge friends had included Blunt and Burgess

During the Second World War Rothschild was appointed to head M.I.5's Anti-Sabotage section. Initially, this was based in Wormwood Scrubs. His inaugural office was a prison cell.

Among those who were accused included Sefton Gow, Sir Roger Hollis, Guy Liddell, Wilfred Mann, Graham Mitchell, Victor Rothschild, Rudolf Peierls, and Arthur Pigou.

Peierls was alive when he was accused. He sued. Mann published an refutation that was accepted.

Prime Minster Callaghan advised Rothschild to rise above it. The baron ignored the counsel. In 1980, as part of his desire to demonstrate his innocence, Rothschild paid for Peter Wright, a former M.I.5 officer, to travel from Tasmania to Britain. The peer introduced him to the journalist Chapman Pincher. This led to the creation of Spycatcher. The book implied that Hollis had been the Fifth Man. Rothschild became the subject of an investigation that sought to ascertain whether he had broken the Official Secrets Act.

Rothschild prompted Spycatcher in order to try to clear himself of the fifth man accusation.

The Spy Who Came In From The Co-op

Melita Norwood (n e Sirnis) (d.2005) was born the daughter of a Latvian exile who translated literature from Russian into English. In the late 1930s M.I.5 opened a file on her because she was a known associate of Percy Glading, a Communist who ran a spy ring within Woolwich Arsenal munitions works. Despite this background she was given a positive vetting to work on the Tube Alloys project as a secretary. The project developed the British atomic bomb. She lived in the Isokon building in Hampstead, where her neighbours included the Soviet agent Andrew Rothstein, who recruited her, and Ursula Kuczynski, who was to be her controller. Ms Kuczynski was also to run Klaus Fuchs and Alan Nunn May.

Mrs Norwood moved to Bexleyheath. Her neighbours were aware that she was keen on the Co-op.

Location: The Isokon Building, 3 Lawn Road, NW3 2XD

Peter Wright

Peter Wright (1916-1995) started advising M.I.5 on bugging in 1950 and joined the service in 1955. Wright was the first scientist to be recruited into M.I.5 (however, he had no formal qualifications per se). His skill in bugging helped rebuild the standing of British intelligence with the Americans in the late 1950s.

As a late-joining specialist his promotion prospects were limited and he found many of his colleagues snobbish. He was rather gullible when it came to conspiracy theories and he was one of the officers who became convinced that the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a Communist.^{1, 2} Wright retired in 1976. He felt his pension to be unduly modest; he lost fourteen years pension rights through his 1955 transfer into M.I.5. He retired to Tasmania, Australia.

There were a number of individuals who had been associated with the service, who believed that Sir Roger Hollis, its former head, had been a double agent. To give their views a public airing, Wright, who in Australia was beyond the jurisdiction of the British courts, was encouraged to write his memoirs. The result was the book Spycatcher.

The book was smuggled into Britain by tens of thousands of Britons.

In 1986 the British government tried to pursue Wright through litigation in Australia and launched a suit in the Equity Division of the New South Wales Court. During the five-week trial Wright was represented by Malcolm Turnbull. The British Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong (later Lord Armstrong) made a very public ass of himself by allowing himself to be persuaded to testify in the Australian court and there being deliberately "economical with the truth".

In 1988 the British Law Lords unanimously refused to grant the government an injunction forbidding the media reproducing those allegations in the book that were in free circulation outside of Britain.

¹. It was to emerge that the Director-General of M.I.5 had had a Henry Worthington file in his safe. This contained material about Harold Wilson.

². The Government Art Collection includes the painting The Watchers, which Harold Wilson had on his walls when he was paranoid about being spied on by rogue elements within the security services.

David Backhouse 2024