[A-List] Wilson plot: Leigh review, part 2

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

THE ENEMIES DEEP WITHIN

A review of David Leigh, "The Wilson Plot: The Intelligence Services and the
Discrediting of a Prime Minister 1945-1976", London: Heinemann, 1988

PART TWO

Investors in People

In an apparently sharp contrast to days when government policy was to deny
even the existence of the intelligence services (Thatcher once famously told
Parliament that MI6 did not exist), MI5 now has its own website, whose
homepage proudly boasts the certificate of accreditation proclaiming the
organisation to be recognised as an "investor in people". As its own web
site states, Investors in People is "a national quality standard which sets
a level of good practice for improving an organisation's performance through
its people" [*]. Developed in association with employers' organisations,
trade unions, personnel management academics and other "stakeholders", it is
now a commonly observed marque in the array of promotional material produced
by all sorts of organisations throughout the UK's state and private sectors.
It certainly marks a major change in the culture of MI5 that it should even
boast of such an internal development. The story related by David Leigh
concerning MI5's post-war development reveals an organisation that was
anything but professional in its personnel management. However, it was able
to invest significant resources in people that its agents suspected of
communist or left political activity.

Although the precursor to the modern British intelligence agencies was
established prior to the First World War, and had a notable domestic success
in the publishing of the notorious "Zinoviev letter" in the Daily Mail in
1924, bringing down the first ever Labour government, it was only during the
Second World War that the secret state began to take proper shape. Britain
was reduced to utter dependency upon the United States by the war against
the axis powers, and had effectively mortgaged its future in agreeing to the
ultimately usurious terms of "Lend-Lease". That Britain was able to hold out
and conduct often surprisingly successful missions against a superior foe
was largely due to the development of a sophisticated intelligence
apparatus. Its relative importance in the British armoury was recognised by
the US, which was able to learn from its evermore-junior partner [**]. This
dependency culture (to use the Thatcherite term) was to have disastrous
consequences for many of those whom it concerned.

As Leigh notes, the British secret state was constructed by a Labour
government, under the direction of Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign
Secretary Ernest Bevin. Just as in the US, it was the ostensible party of
the Left in the dual system that was responsible for establishing the
national security state. (Of course, in the US, that apparatus did not turn
against its original sponsors: far from it - see William W. Keller, "The
Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover", Princeton UP, 1989). Bevin, especially, is
important here. While Attlee, as in other matters, was measured, Bevin was
ferociously anti-Communist and anti-Semitic. This is relevant in the context
of the concurrent British failure to maintain its grip upon Palestine, where
Jewish guerrillas were conducting an ultimately successful war of
independence. The British attempted to break the insurrection via the use of
trusty subversion techniques honed during the war with Germany, and it is
there that many of the relationships and what subsequently became
"traditions" within the intelligence services were formed. The British
establishment's innate anti-Semitism was given a big boost by the failure in
Palestine, and, ironically, led to an eerie echo of the sort of anti-Jewish
propaganda pumped out by Hitler and his cronies concerning the synonymity of
communism and Zionism - except this time its most eloquent spokesman was
Bevin himself, supported by intelligence agents who came to be involved in
the Wilson plot such as George Kennedy Young (p.10).

The portrait painted of the culture of the secret state in post-war Britain
reads like a pastiche of a Boy's Own adventure. MI5 and MI6 grew out of the
Special Operations Executive (SOE), which had engaged in much derring-do
during the war.  While many were unhappy that Churchill lost the 1945
election, Attlee was largely content to grant the agencies "an outrageously
free hand", giving "the swashbucklers of SOE ... a new lease of life inside
MI6" in order to "set Europe ablaze" by bringing down the Soviet regime
within the space of five years (p.11).

In "The Power Elite" C. Wright Mills applied his network analysis of the
interlocking sectors of US political power as they traversed business,
government and the military. His work in this area has been continued by,
among others, G. William Domhoff (see, for example, "The Bohemian Grove",
New York: Harper and Row, 1974). This sort of work earns less academic
plaudits, even, perhaps especially, among more consciously orthodox
Marxists, because it lacks theoretical rigour. It does not conform to the
primacy of the economic over the political; it does not lend itself to
elegant abstraction; it is too journalistic. [***] Yet such methods lend
themselves to the study of the British elite, linked as it was across the
state, business and military sectors by the "old school tie" and Oxbridge.
Those relationships were further strengthened by the experience of SOE and
Palestine, and continued to be so as Britain, very reluctantly, withdrew
from its imperial outposts.

As Leigh promises at the beginning, his book reveals "the existence of a
surprising network of contacts between MI5 officers, journalists,
businessmen and Conservative MPs, which belies the claim that MI5 is a
passive 'secret' organisation. The City Golf Club in Fleet Street, the
Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge, and the Carlton Club in St James were
the venues for this secret side of British life. This history also reveals
the true calibre of some of the men from MI5 and the CIA - people whose
training, background, and lifelong isolation within organisations which
never had to explain themselves made them very bad judges of character. This
is unfortunate, because it is what their job is supposedly all about" (p.
xvi). The personification of this in-bred dysfunction was the agent
ultimately responsible for its exposure: Peter Wright.

The Wright Stuff

Peter Wright's father had already enjoyed a career in MI6, based in Norway
spying on German naval radio transmissions during the First World War. Peter
himself followed in his father's footsteps as a radio engineer. The advent
of the Second World War led to the employment of both father and son in the
Admiralty applying their special talents to the war effort. Peter "topped
the entrance exams for the Scientific Civil Service at the end of the war"
(p. 31) and began work  immediately. However, he was not a success in that
role. Leigh quotes the testimony of Neville Robinson, a junior working under
Wright at this time:

        "He really knew damn all about what we were doing ... He was frankly
an ignorant shit and quite impossible to work for. He was the real reason
why I left in 1950 for Oxford. I just couldn't stand working for him any
more. Nothing Wright touched ever came to anything." (p. 32)

Leigh qualifies Robinson's characterisation as possibly "unfair", or even
"snobbish". Yet he spends the rest of the book showing that Robinson's
appraisal is inadequate precisely because it does not go far enough in
depicting Wright's venality. This spiteful little man, granted his passport
into MI5 in 1955 as the agency's first career scientific officer, was able
to employ the power of the British secret state in his paranoia-induced
search for moles and traitors that led to the deaths of at least two people,
including a government minister, undermined the integrity of the very agency
for which he worked and ultimately led to the internecine warfare within the
British secret state that claimed a number of victims close to Harold
Wilson, but not actually Wilson himself. As Robinson testified: Nothing
Wright touched ever came to anything. Except that the consequences of
Wright's actions were far-reaching and, on occasion, fatal.

Wright was inducted into MI5 by John Cuckney. Unfortunately Leigh does not
expand on his description of Cuckney beyond saying that after ten years in
MI5 Cuckney got out and made a successful business career, ultimately ending
up as the chairman of Westland Helicopters. Perhaps coming so soon after his
detailed study of the Westland Affair ("Not with Honour", co-authored with
Magnus Linklater in 1986), Leigh felt he had little reason to reiterate
whatever was said in the earlier volume. However, Cuckney's career is of
some interest, because it helps to demonstrate the interlocking nature of
the different sectors that were presided over by the British power elite.

In its early days MI5 could hardly have been described as an "Investor in
People". It was run on a shoestring. Its gentlemen (and lady) employees, in
the best traditions of the British public sector, were paid pitifully poor
wages, in the expectation that they all had independent sources of income
(rather like it was expected of MPs): the effect of a lingering military
tradition "that officers were gentlemen who did not require to live on their
military pay" (p. 34). As a result, someone like Wright who had scraped his
way as far as he had was left to get by on relatively little. The
alternative, of course, was to seek additional sources of remuneration, even
after the civilian head of MI5 imposed by Attlee, Percy Sillitoe, had put
MI5 staff pay on the civil service scale.

        "The bad effects of this tradition were that representatives of MI5,
MI6, IRD and GCHQ, with their unaccountable, secretive ways, continually
infected the rest of British public life. In the boardrooms of large
companies, senior common rooms of ancient universities, the lobbies of the
Commons, regimental messes, and the homes of individual wealthy tycoons,
there were the men from the intelligence services, apologetically asking
favours, swearing those concerned to secrecy, offering favours in return ...
In addition the extensive links with secret work of defence contractors and
defence departments made their own budgets hard to control ... [President
Jimmy] Carter's CIA chief, Stansfield Turner, in his own memoirs, recounts
with surprise how Maurice Oldfield, by then MI6 chief, lectured him on the
virtues of using amateur businessmen for Secret Service work" (p. 34).

One of these "amateur businessmen" employed by MI6 was Robert Maxwell. As
related by Russell Davies in his fascinating "Foreign Body: The Secret Life
of Robert Maxwell" (London: Bloomsbury, 1995) Maxwell was long associated
with intelligence work, although he was rather less discriminate in his
associations than preferred by his British masters. He appears to have
fancied himself as a kind of détente facilitator, bringing peace and
understanding (and lucrative trade) to West and East. His talent for working
both sides of the street was demonstrated nicely in 1990 when he colluded
with MI5, the Conservative Party and Neil Kinnock's proto-New Labour
leadership in his newspapers' smear campaign against the National Union of
Mineworkers (see Seumas Milne, "The Enemy Within: MI5, Maxwell and the
Scargill Affair", London: Verso, 1994). Latterly, of course, Maxwell's ego
displaced his business sense and his business empire collapsed, just after
he mysteriously drowned in the Atlantic. Davies is of the view that the
evidence, inconclusive as it is, points to the work of intelligence
agencies, although it is not clear which ones, given Maxwell's multifarious
links to all and sundry. This would not have endeared him to his "handlers"
at MI6 of course. Indeed, it was Wright's group within MI5 during the 1960s
that smeared Maxwell as a suspected KGB spy, as one of a group of similarly
suspect Labour MPs. In Leigh's account, Maxwell and most others are
exonerated [****]. But Maxwell's ignominious demise in 1991 led to the
collapse of his empire and the discovery that he raided the Mirror Group's
pension fund to prop up his ailing businesses. The person brought in by John
Major to clean up that mess was "Sir" John Cuckney, fresh from "rescuing"
Westland. Once again, the network was looking after its own, making sure
that the reasonably informed speculations of Davies did not become the
indisputable facts of the kind peddled by Leigh in his 1988 book. Cuckney
was subsequently made chairman of the Ministry of Defence's secret arm,
International Military Supplies as the Major government sought to limit the
damage of the Arms to Iraq affair and the associated inquiry by Sir Richard
Scott. The Scott inquiry was conducted during the tenures as Defence
Secretary of both Malcolm Rifkind and Michael Portillo. In that position
they employed in an advisory role one David Hart, who had organised and
financed, with the help of Rupert Murdoch, the breaking of the 1984/5
miners' strike (see Milne, op. cit.).

Thus the British secret service, born and bred in the culture of noble
frugality that still afflicts the British state sector [*****] - and is now
the pretext for the vast expansion of private finance underpinning state
activities - was able to extend its reach well into the City, the military,
the academic cloisters, Westminster, and, importantly, Fleet Street.

News that's fitted to print

It has already been remarked that Britain has, by Western standards,
draconian secrecy laws. Yet, during the post-war period, and particularly
during the years of the Wilson/Callaghan governments, a remarkable amount of
information concerning the intelligence services was published. Taking the
form of "leaks" and gossip, the effect of this, in the then very compacted
world of informed opinion, was intentionally the destabilisation or
discrediting of individuals and ideas associated with the Left. Even those
not associated with the Left but thought to be too lenient, such as
Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath, fell victim to the malice of the
British power elite. But while investigative journalists like Pilger, Foot,
Campbell and Leigh have struggled against the machinery of suppression,
longtime Daily Express journalist Chapman Pincher was able to carve a
lucrative career out of spinning rumours, conjectures and tasty morsels
dropped to him by his contacts (or should that be "handlers"?) in the
intelligence services. Pincher periodically would piece these together into
book length treatises on the wicked lengths to which the KGB and Soviet
satellite intelligence agencies would go to undermine freedom and democracy.
In "Writing by Candlelight" (London: Merlin Press, 1981), E. P. Thompson
devotes an entire chapter to Pincher and his oeuvre, noting his wartime
career as a laboratory assistant (similar to Wright) and connections with
all those other brave souls who sat at desks playing strategic games and
bemoaning the decline of empire. [?]. Along with others, including William
Massie (of the Sunday Express), Patrick Marnham and Auberon Waugh (of
Private Eye), Pincher was the conduit for a stream of poison that undermined
Wilson and the labour movement during the 1960s and 70s. Needless to say,
none of these individuals ever faced prosecution under the Official Secrets
Act. Nor did it ever seem to be questioned why they should escape such
warranted action.

The role of Private Eye is an interesting one here. The magazine was founded
in 1961 by a group of underachieving public schoolboys who ended up
spearheading the emergent satirical movement that lampooned previously
sacred cows like the political elite. Helped along by the election of the
energetic and youthful John F. Kennedy in the US, the outdated façade of
Harold Macmillan and the Tory establishment was even more ripe for mockery.
Revolutionary at its time, it came to be a useful weapon in the
establishment's own undermining of Harold Wilson. While Private Eye
published a relatively harmless, fictitious "Mrs Wilson's Diary" during
Wilson's first premiership, it was with his return to Opposition in 1970
that its political "correspondent", Auberon Waugh, began a series of
defamatory articles openly alleging Wilson's status as a KGB agent. He was
fed by a number of sources, including his uncle Auberon Herbert, an MI6
agent himself. Also, Sir Hartley Shawcross, the chief British prosecutor at
Nuremberg and former Labour Attorney General, believed in Wilson's treachery
and regularly attended Private Eye gatherings to encourage such views. This
was after he had written a letter to William Rees-Mogg's Times in which he
opined about the corruption he had discovered at the Board of Trade in the
1940s, when Harold Wilson was its President (p. 248). Shawcross and
ex-Foreign Secretary George Brown were only the tip of an iceberg
encompassing the right wing of the Labour Party eager to undermine and
discredit the unworthy successor (in their view) to Hugh Gaitskell. Brown
ended up with his own show on London's Capital Radio during the 1970s,
giving apocalyptic warnings of impending communist insurgency and chaos.
Patrick Marnham, meanwhile, began receiving unsolicited dossiers on Wilson,
featuring material that was "too hot to handle" for its original addressee,
a journalist friend of Marnham at the Times. According to Leigh, Marnham has
admitted, "in a rather cavalier manner", that they all came from MI5 (p.
246).

Private Eye's editor at the time was Richard Ingrams. In later years he has
revealed himself to be quite reactionary in his views: anti-gay clergy in
the Church of England, and far too enthralled with Thatcher for the editor
of a supposedly unaligned satirical magazine. He always possessed an
establishmentarian anti-semitism.  This reactionary conservatism, coupled
with the Eye's then-strong links with conservative Fleet Street gossips like
Marnham, Waugh, Peter Mackay and Nigel Dempster, led some of Ingrams' fellow
founders like Willie Rushton and John Wells to distance themselves from the
magazine. They came back later when Ingrams was replaced by the much more
equal opportunities satirist, Ian Hislop, who expelled Mackay and Dempster
and their ilk and beefed up the magazine's investigative journalism, in
accordance with the wishes of its owner, the late Peter Cook. Thus Francis
Wheen arrived and Paul Foot returned, after a long hiatus. [??]

And the rest...

As Leigh details, there is what seems to be an endless list of Conservative
MPs with connections to the intelligence services, many of them having
served in SOE during the war or with MI5 and MI6 in the ultimately
unsuccessful rearguard actions that merely postponed the end of empire.
Leigh describes them as "Buchanesque Tories". [???] Julian Amery, for
example, is perhaps most known for having initiated the vastly expensive
Concorde project (paid for by taxpayers and now benefiting the shareholders
of the Thatcher-privatised British Airways). But he was also an MI6 agent.
His brother, John, was so right-wing that he was executed after the war for
having gone over to the Nazis. James Scott-Hopkins retained his MI6
connections as an MP when he conducted his own investigation into Wilson in
1965/6, in an effort to uncover extra-marital scandal involving both MP and
Wilson's political ally Barbara Castle and Marcia Williams, Wilson's
political assistant (pp. 114-6). Henry Kerby was a backbench MP with MI6
experience and MI5 links. He ingratiated himself with Wilson's intended
"link man" between the Prime Minister's Office and MI5, George Wigg. Kerby
was thus able to "spoil" Wilson's first attempt as Prime Minister to get a
grip of the security services, by feeding Wigg disinformation (p. 90).
Wigg's resultant paranoia led to his departure from that role in 1967. Airey
Neave's role is well-documented, up to a point. After escaping from Colditz
Castle, he ran MI9, the "escape line" service during the war. He continued
to be involved in MI6, as was his wife Diana, and was also involved in the
émigré Polish community. Leigh describes him as the "shadowy backer of the
campaign to oust Heath and put the rightist Margaret Thatcher into power"
(p. 220). Neave was assassinated by the Irish National Liberation Army
outside the House of Commons in 1979. Repeated attempts to uncover Neave's
post-war intelligence activities as they relate to the Wilson Plot and
Northern Ireland have come up against the usual establishment brick wall,
however. Ken Livingstone's efforts within the House of Commons and elsewhere
to raise the topic have earned him the sort of opprobrium and disdain that
only the British elite can affect. [????] No wonder Tony Blair, Gordon Brown
and Neil Kinnock detested him so much as to employ Labour Party funds to
rubbish his efforts to gain the Labour Party's nomination as London mayoral
candidate.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. The third and final part of this
review will examine the methods employed by Wright and his allies within MI5
and the CIA to bring down Wilson. Also discussed will be the wider
international ramifications of the Wright/Angleton axis, as well as the
parallel moves to impose economic order upon its allies by the US during a
time of economic crisis and hardening establishment attitudes towards the
Soviet bloc abroad and labour unrest at home. A brief look at the current
political situation as the living legacy of these events will conclude the
review.


Footnotes

[*] http://www.iipuk.co.uk/

[**] See Mark Jones, http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2001II/msg02171.html

[***] Clyde Barrow observes that disputes between state theorists are as
much methodological as they are theoretical (see "Critical Theories of the
State", op. cit.) Domhoff's long-running dispute with Theda Skocpol over
state autonomy or class dominance is a case in point. Interestingly,
Domhoff's citation of sociologist John Goldthorpe's critique of
"interpretations of interpretations of, perhaps, interpretations" echoes
exactly the sort of problems raised by the flurry of idealistic "post"
theories, including the grandiose "Empire" of Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri. Domhoff writes: "In addition to pointing out the empirical and
theoretical inaccuracies of the state autonomy theorists, I want to
challenge the way they have been able to legitimate a style of work
requiring virtually no empirical research, instead relying almost
exclusively on secondary sources in making new and controversial claims. I
think this approach is the kiss of death for the development of sociology
and political science, a strategy that will turn these disciplines into
debating societies better labeled social studies or textual criticism".
("State Autonomy or Class Dominance: Case Studies on Policy Making in
America", New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1996, p. 4). See also
Doug Henwood, http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2001II/msg03416.html
Louis Proyect, http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2001II/msg03491.html
Louis Proyect, http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2001II/msg04009.html


[****] It ought to be remembered that Maxwell, during the 1980s, employed
the last resort of all scoundrels: not patriotism, but the English libel
laws. For Leigh to have even risked speculating on Maxwell's activities
would have invited legal trouble - even more than he already invited by
getting to the bottom of Peter Wright's convoluted but annoyingly half-true
tales. And Wright, though perhaps instinctively right about Maxwell, still
did not have anything like sufficient evidence even to form a case against
him. And even if he did, what we know now about Maxwell suggests that there
were too many people in both MI5 and MI6 who would have been concerned to
preserve him for future use.

[*****] Leigh relates the amusing tale that former MI5 head, Roger Hollis,
used to boast of consistently underspending his department's budget; "than
which, in a British accounting system, there is no more absurd sin" (p. 34).

[?] Thompson writes of Pincher's book, "Inside Story": "Mr Pincher never
ceases to remind us of his 'wartime background', which brought him
colleagues who 'went to the top in Whitehall'. He is always on about his own
exceeding patriotism and loyalty: 'I have spent a large slice of my life
investigating and trying to expose the machinations of the extreme Left
against the interests of the country I love'. A good part of the biography
on the dust jacket is given over to his war service. He was 'commissioned in
1941 in the 6th Armoured Division', but was transferred in 1943 to the
Military College of Science, and spent the rest of the war researching into
such matters as anti-tank weapons. I think we must take it that he did not
see any active service, since if he had, the biography would have entered
into all the details.
        "As it happens, I was also commissioned, a little later, in the 6th
Armoured Division, and my own researches into anti-tank weapons were
conducted at the receiving end. This argues no particular merit of
patriotism in me. It was how the chips fell. I am not even clear what I am
trying to say, except that it has to do with the betrayal of the past and
the calumny of the dead" ("Writing by Candlelight", p. 130).

[??] Under Hislop's editorship Private Eye became a leading source of
critical material on Thatcher and her backers. It was responsible for
forcing the resignation of Cecil Parkinson as Trade and Industry Secretary
in 1983 after revealing he had fathered a child by his secretary (whose
treatment remains an utter disgrace) as well as bringing to light many of
the facts dealt with by Leigh, including the activities of George Kennedy
Young, General Walter Walker and Airey Neave.

[???] Interestingly, in his appearance on BBC Radio 4's "Desert Island
Discs" programme, Tony Blair chose as his one book Sir Walter Scott's
"Ivanhoe".

[????] Online versions of Hansard make this abundantly clear. See
http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm198889/cmhansrd/
1989-06-22/Debate-2.html

Mr. Ken Livingstone (Brent, East) : Will the Leader of the House find time
to debate the terms of reference of the Calcutt inquiry and in a form that
allows us to move amendments so that we can ensure that the inquiry
investigates why it was that when Colin Wallace drew the attention of child
abuse in Kincora to the attention of his superior in 1974 no action was
taken and six further years of child abuse ensued? That inquiry should also
investigate the links between the late Airey Neave--in writing--with Colin
Wallace, commissioning work from Colin Wallace to continue his
disinformation activities. It should also investigate the information passed
by Airey Neave to Peter Wright, in Peter Wright's capacity as an MI5
officer, about figures in public life. It should investigate the meeting
held between Peter Wright and the late Airey Neave in the period immediately
before the decision of Airey Neave to offer his campaign services to the
right hon. Member for Finchley (Mrs. Thatcher). It should
investigate the meeting that took place in the Cumberland hotel a week
before the murder of Airey Neave, when Airey Neave sought to recruit a
former officer of MI6 to set up a small group to involve itself in the
internal struggles of the Labour party.

Sir Geoffrey Howe : I do not think that the House will have any enthusiasm
for the way in which the hon. Gentleman has sought, through an extended
intervention, to make as many allegations as possible, and many of them
against a late and mrespected Member of this House. The matters upon which
he touched have been largely the subject of fully conducted investigations,
including two full reports on the allegations in respect of the Kincora
boys' home. There is no case to make any special arrangements in relation to
that matter.

Also the disinformation perpetrated by Guardian journalists in this
connection is interesting, underscoring Mark Jones' earlier points about the
realignment of forces within the British state. See
Mark Jones, http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2001II/msg01756.html
An article by Derek Brown in the Guardian of 21 February, 2000, ostensibly
on the institution of Parliamentary Privilege, which protects MPs from libel
laws, slips in the convenient snippet that "Most rows of privilege are more
nakedly political. In 1987 there was an explosive row in the Commons when
the newly elected member for Brent South, one Ken Livingstone, suggested
that Airey Neave, assassinated by the IRA in 1979, had had knowledge of
treasonable activities by security forces in Northern Ireland". See
http://www.guardian.co.uk/parl/Story/0,2763,193597,00.html Livingstone was
MP for Brent East, not Brent South, as the extract from
Hansard above highlights. Secondly, as already stated, Neave was
assassinated by the INLA, not the IRA. Not to worry, however. As long as
it's clear that any effort to uncover what was going on is discredited as
"nakedly political", other inaccuracies really pale by comparison. Derek
Brown is among those credited by Seumas Milne as assisting him in the
preparation of his book on MI5's efforts to destroy the miners' union, cited
above. More on developments at The Guardian will follow in part 3.

Michael Keaney