Hanley loved seminars, and the meeting went on for most of the day. The F Branch people wanted a relaxation in the restrictions governing the use of telephone taps and letter intercepts, and a much closer relationship with the Post Office. The enemy was diffuse, and its communications so widespread, that this was the only way they could get to grips with the problem. John Jones was a forceful advocate. F Branch needed all the technical resources currently at the disposal of K Branch, he claimed. Agent running was no longer viable as the principal means of coverage. For a start, he could not infiltrate his officers into these left-wing groups since many of them lived promiscuous lives, and there were some sacrifices even an MI5 officer would not make for his country. If, on the other hand, he recruited agents, there was obviously a much higher risk of publicity and scandal. The only answer was to use massive technical resources. I could see from Hanley's face that he agreed.
I, on the other hand, pushed the value of agents.
"Use agents if you want to keep an eye on these groups," I told Hanley later in private. "You'll be storing up problems for the future if you commit all our technical resources against them. The Post Office can't in the end be trusted as much as our own people. It's bound to go wrong."
It was the same with the Computer Working Party. I soon realized that the main interest F Branch had in the Computer Working Party was to establish widespread computer links, principally with the National Insurance computer in Newcastle. In the past, of course, we had always been able to get material from the National Insurance records if we really wanted it. We had a couple of undercover officers posted up there who could be contacted for our files. But establishing a direct computer link was something completely different.
I was not alone among the old guard, anti-Soviet officers in being disturbed by these new developments. We could see all that we had worked to achieve frittered away chasing these minor left-wing groupings. But more than that, the move into the computer generation signaled the relegation of the role of the individual officer. From now on we were to be data processors, scanning tens of thousands of names at the press of a button.
"The fun has gone" was a sentiment I heard more and more in those last few years.
Hanley himself was unable to grasp the difficulties he was getting himself into. It was easy to believe that we had the public's consent when we broke into a Soviet diplomat's house. But the wholesale surveillance of a large proportion of the population raised more than a question mark. "Big Brother" loomed.
Veterans of D Branch viewed groups like the WRP, SWP, and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) as largely irrelevant pieces of the jigsaw. Certainly an eye should be kept on them, but we were quite satisfied they were not the major objects of KGB attack. These were the Intelligence Services, the Civil Service, and increasingly in the 1960s, the trade unions and the Labor Party.
Since the 1960s a wealth of material about the penetration of the latter two bodies had been flowing into MI5's files, principally from two Czechoslovakian defectors named Frolik and August. They named a series of Labor Party politicians and trade union leaders as Eastern Bloc agents. Some were certainly well founded, like the case of the MP Will Owen, who admitted being paid thousands of pounds over a ten-year period to provide information to Czechoslovakian intelligence officers, and yet, when he was prosecuted in 1970, was acquitted because it was held that he had not had access to classified information, and because the Czech defector could not produce documentary evidence of what he had said at the trial.
Tom Driberg was another MP named by the Czech defectors. I went to see Driberg myself, and he finally admitted that he was providing material to a Czech controller for money. For a while we ran Driberg on, but apart from picking up a mass of salacious detail about Labor Party peccadilloes, he had nothing of interest for us.
His only lasting story concerned the time he lent a Cabinet Minister his flat so that the Minister could try and conduct an affair in strict privacy. Driberg was determined to find the identity of the woman who was the recipient of the Minister's favors, and one evening after the Minister had vacated, he searched the flat and found a letter addressed to a prominent female member of the Labor Party. Driberg claimed to be horrified by his discovery and raised it with the Minister concerned, suggesting that he ought to be more careful in case word of his activities ever became public! Since Driberg was certainly providing the same stories to his Czech friends, his concern for Labor Party confidentiality seemed hollow, to say the least.
John Stonehouse was another MP who the Czech defectors claimed was working for them, but after he was interviewed in the presence of Harold Wilson, and denied all the charges, the MI5 objections against him were withdrawn.
This was the context which shaped the fraught relations between MI5 and the Prime Minister for much of this period. Much has been written about Harold Wilson and MI5, some of it wildly inaccurate. But as far as I am concerned, the story started with the premature death of Hugh Gaitskell in 1963. Gaitskell was Wilson's predecessor as Leader of the Labor Party. I knew him personally and admired him greatly. I had met him and his family at the Blackwater Sailing Club, and I recall about a month before he died he told me that he was going to Russia.
After he died his doctor got in touch with MI5 and asked to see somebody from the Service. Arthur Martin, as the head of Russian Counterespionage, went to see him. The doctor explained that he was disturbed by the manner of Gaitskell's death. He said that Gaitskell had died of a disease called lupus disseminata, which attacks the body's organs. He said that it was rare in temperate climates and that there was no evidence that Gaitskell had been anywhere recently where he could have contracted the disease.
Arthur Martin suggested that I should go to Porton Down, the chemical and microbiological laboratory for the Ministry of Defense. I went to see the chief doctor in the chemical warfare laboratory, Dr. Ladell, and asked his advice. He said that nobody knew how one contracted lupus. There was some suspicion that it might be a form of fungus and he did not have the foggiest idea how one would infect somebody with the disease. I came back and made my report in these terms.
The next development was that Golitsin told us quite independently that during the last few years of his service he had had some contacts with Department 13, which was known as the Department of Wet Affairs in the KGB. This department was responsible for organizing assassinations. He said that just before he left he knew that the KGB were planning a high-level political assassination in Europe in order to get their man into the top place. He did not know which country it was planned in but he pointed out that the chief of Department 13 was a man called General Rodin, who had been in Britain for many years and had just returned on promotion to take up the job, so he would have had good knowledge of the political scene in England. We did not know where to go next because Ladell had said that it wasn't known how the disease was contracted. I consulted Jim Angleton about the problem. He said that he would get a search made of Russian scientific papers to see whether there was any hint of what the Russians knew about this disease. A month or two later he sent us a paper about lupus which he had had translated from a Russian scientific journal. The paper was several years old and Angleton reported that there were no other papers in the Russian literature that they could find. This paper described the use of a special chemical which the Russians had found would induce lupus in experimental rats. However, it was unlikely that this particular chemical could have been used to murder Gaitskell because the quantities required to produce lupus were considerable and had to be given repeatedly. I took the paper to Ladell and, while surprised by this area of Soviet expertise, he confirmed that it was unlikely that Gaitskell could have been poisoned by the coffee and biscuits. But he pointed out that the paper was seven years old and if the Russians had continued to work on it they might have found a much better form of the chemical which would require much smaller doses and perhaps work as a one-shot drug. He told me there was no way of proving it without doing a lot of scientific work and Porton was unable to do the necessary work as it was already overloaded.