Cuckney described various situations, such as entering premises without a warrant, or invading an individual's privacy, where the dilemma might arise. He made it clear that MI5 operated on the basis of the 11th Commandment - "Thou shall not get caught" - and that in the event of apprehension there was very little that the office could do to protect its staff. He described the way liaison with the police was handled. They were prepared to help MI5 if something went wrong, particularly if the right person was approached. But there were very definite tensions between the two organizations.
"Special Branch would like to be us, and we don't want to be them."
Cuckney handed us the current MI5 internal directory and explained how the Service was organized. There were six Directorates: A Branch handled resources; B Branch was the Personnel Department; C Branch controlled protective security and vetting throughout all government installations; D Branch was Counterespionage; E Branch ran British Intelligence, in the still lengthy list of colonies and was responsible for the counterinsurgency campaigns in Malaya and Kenya; and finally F Branch was the domestic surveillance empire, which principally meant keeping tabs on the Communist Party of Great Britain, and especially its links in the trade union movement.
Cuckney talked a little about the sister Service, MI6, or SIS (Secret Intelligence Service), as it was more popularly known in Whitehall. He gave us the standard MI6 directory and discussed the very few departments there with which MI5 maintained regular liaison. In practice this amounted to MI6's Counterintelligence Section, and a small Research Section dealing with Communist Affairs, although this latter was wound up not long after I joined MI5. Cuckney was studiously noncommittal in his comments, and it was only later, when I began to cultivate my own liaison with MI6's technical people, that I realized the depth of antipathy between the two Services.
At the end of two days we were photographed and issued with our MI5 passes. Then Cuckney introduced a retired Special Branch policeman from C Branch, who gave us a lecture on document security. We were told on no account to remove files from the office, to always ensure our desk was cleared of all papers and our doors locked before going out, even if only for ten minutes. I was also issued with my combination safe number and told that a duplicate number was kept in the Director-General's safe, so that the management could obtain any file at any time of the day or night from an officer's safe. It was all sensible stuff, but I could not help contrasting it with the inadequacy of the vetting.
After the first week Cuckney showed me into an office which was empty apart from a tape recorder on the desk. He took a series of large tape reels from a cupboard.
"Here," he said, "you might as well get it from the horse's mouth!"
The subject of the tape was printed on the spool. "A Short History of the British Security Service," by Guy Liddell, Deputy Director-General 1946-1951. Liddell was a towering figure in the story of MI5. He joined in 1927, from the Special Branch, where he almost single-handedly ran a Soviet counterespionage program. He controlled MI5 counterespionage throughout the war with determination and elan, and was the outstanding candidate for the Director-General's chair in 1946. But Attlee appointed a policeman, Sir Percy Sillitoe, instead, almost certainly as a snub to MI5, which he suspected of engineering the Zinoviev letter in 1924. Liddell soldiered on under Sillitoe, barely able to contain his bitterness, only to fall foul of the Burgess/Maclean scandal in 1951. He had been friendly with Burgess for many years, and when Burgess went, so too did whatever chances Liddell still had for the top job. He retired soon after, heartbroken, to the Atomic Energy Commission.
I carefully threaded the tape and placed the headphones on. A soft, cultivated voice began to describe part of the secret history of Britain. MI5 was formed under Captain Vernon Kell in 1909, the War Office finally realizing that the impending European conflict required at least a modicum of counterintelligence. MI5 soon proved its usefulness by rounding up almost all German spies operating in Britain soon after the outbreak of war. Liddell spoke warmly of Kell, who he felt had built a prestigious organization from inauspicious beginnings through the force of his personality. MI5 budgets were strictly limited in the years after World War I, and MI6 furiously lobbied to swallow up its competitor. But Kell fought cannily to retain control of MI5 and gradually extended its influence.
The zenith of its post-World War I prestige came with the successful ARCOS raid in 1927. The Soviet Trade Delegation, based at their offices at 49 Moorgate along with the All Russia Cooperative Society Limited (ARCOS), was raided by police acting under the instructions of MI5, and a vast quantity of espionage activity was uncovered. The ARCOS raid justified the widespread belief inside MI5 that the newly established Soviet State was the principal enemy, and that all possible resources should be deployed to fight her. This view was further confirmed by a succession of other spy cases in the 1930s, culminating in a major Soviet attempt, in 1938, to penetrate the Woolwich Arsenal using a veteran Communist engineer employed there, named Percy Glading. MI5's brilliant agent runner Maxwell Knight succeeded in planting a female agent who betrayed the plot.
By 1939 Kell had lost his touch. He was old. Liddell offered generous excuses for MI5's failure to prepare for World War II. When Churchill became Prime Minister, determined to shake Whitehall until it submitted, it was only a matter of time before Kell went. But although Liddell lamented the loss of Kell, he heartily welcomed the incoming Director-General, Sir David Petrie. Petrie oversaw the recruitment of a vast influx of gifted intellectuals, and under his supervision (and Liddell's, though this went unstated) the famed Double Cross System emerged. Every German spy landing in Britain was either captured or turned to feed disinformation back to the German High Command. The operation was an outstanding success and was a major factor in deceiving the Germans over the location of the D-Day landings. Liddell had a simple verdict on MI5 during the war. He called it "the finest liaison of unlike minds in the history of intelligence."
But Liddell's account ended soon after the war. And in truth his lecture made poor history. Case after case, incident after incident was accurately recorded, but the theme of continuous MI5 success was misleading. He knew full well the inadequacies of the postwar period, the roots of which, in fact, lay in the 1930s. There was no mention of Burgess and Maclean, or what they meant, and no mention either of the vast program of modernization which both he and Dick White knew in the late 1940s was long overdue.
In many ways Liddell was a tragic figure. Gifted, universally popular in the Service, he could justly claim to have been a principal architect of our wartime intelligence mastery. Yet he had been undone by his unwise friendships. As I listened to the tape it was as if he were talking to himself in a darkened room, searching history for the justification of a thwarted career.
I also played a lecture by Dick White on the Russian Intelligence Service. It had obviously been recorded at one of the seminars held for incoming junior officers, because I could hear the audience laughing at his jokes. Dick White's delivery was much more in the style of the Oxbridge don. He had a wonderful light touch, peppering his talk with puns, epigrams, and allusions to Russian literature. Dick White was well qualified in Soviet affairs, having been Director of the old counterespionage B Division before becoming Director-General.