Tag Archives: history

How do you spin a crisis like Kim Philby’s defection to Russia ? What the newly released spy files reveal.

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Government and MI5 files from 1963 released to The National Archives reveal how Whitehall handled the unwelcome news that former MI6 officer Kim Philby had defected to Russia.

The circumstances were unprecedented; an MI6 man who the Government had said wasn’t a KGB agent had now admitted that he was and then set off for Moscow to join two of his spy friends from the Foreign Office. It had happened because MI6 had bungled an attempt to do a deal with him. The news had not yet come out but it was bound to leak soon. The question for the Government of Harold Macmillan was how do we spin our way out of this one? Downing Street and MI5 disagreed on what to do and we can read edited documents in those parts of Philby’s MI5 file which have now been released.

Foreign Office official Peter Westlake was optimistic, ‘it seems highly improbable that the reputation of the Foreign Service proper will suffer’. Philby may have been the First Secretaryat the British Embassy in Washington but press reports had said he worked for MI6 or ‘our friends’ in Whitehall jargon. Westlake recalled that ‘the employment of H.A.R Philby as a member of our friends’ service was terminated in 1951 when the circumstances of the disappearance of Messrs Burgess and Maclean cast serious doubts on his loyalty. Since 1956 he has been a journalist in the Middle East residing in the Lebanon and working for the Observer and the Economist. He disappeared on January 23 and subsequent enquiries have shed no light on his present whereabouts.It is known however that a Soviet ship left Beirut for Odessa on January 23 and it is possible that Philby boarded this clandestinely and may now be in the Soviet Union’. 

What Westlake didn’t mention was that MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott, a friend of Philby, had flown to Beirut to confront him with conclusive evidence of his treachery and had given him time to write a confession in return for this not being used in court against him. In the words of another document Philby ‘agreed to submit himself for detailed examination later.’ Instead he disappeared. 

Mr Westlake believed that when the story of Philby’s disappearance broke it would amount to either a presumption or a confirmation that he was the Third Man. ‘In either case HMG’s public posture is good. These events can only serve to confirm that the Government of the day were right to terminated (sic) Mr Philby’s employment in 1951’.  Mr Westlake chose to ignore was that it would also ‘serve to confirm’ that MacMillan, then the Foreign Secretary, had told the House of Commons something very different back in 1955: “I have no reason to conclude that Mr Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of this country or to identify him with the so-called ‘third man’ if, indeed there was one”. 

At the next level up at the FO the Deputy Under-Secretary,Sir Hugh Stephenson, drafting the note that would go to Downing Street toned down Westlake’s words. HMG’s public picture was no longer ’good’ but ‘reasonable’. Stephenson outlined two options for how to handle the news. The first was to take the initiative and make an announcement. This would ‘produce a success story. demonstrating that the tenacity of the Security Service has finally disposed of a long standing case’ .The alternative was ‘to play it long and to deal with the situation as it develops’.

Over at MI5 the Deputy Director-General Graham Mitchell thought there was a third, to ‘announce the substance of the facts’ without the spin. But in an internal MI5 memo he noted: ‘it is not in any case a matter for us to determine and I think we would be wise to make no comment’. 

The very next day, February 22 1963, came Macmillan’s decision: ‘it would be right to do nothing for the time being and to decide later how to handle the case in the light of developments’. Three days later the Arab News Agency in Beirut sent a telegram to Reuters and the world soon knew the story. Macmillan’s Government was forever on the back foot and under attack in the press and parliament. 

At MI5 Graham Mitchell didn’t have much time to say ‘told you so’ and he certainly got no thanks. Later that year he was suspected of being a Soviet agent himself. Macmillan recalled being told Mitchell had been ‘ spotted wandering around the loos in the park,passing things, probably it was opium or something, he seems to be somewhat unhinged. Fortunately he retired before we could do anything about it’. 

‘She could have become a female Philby’ – our new research on the Communist Party spy recruited at Oxford aged 21.

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An article on the Sunday Times website on October 20 2024 by Nicholas Hellen was headlined ‘The Home Office high-flyer cultivated by Soviet spies’. It is the story of Jenifer Hart an Oxford graduate in 1935 who agreed at the age of 21 to become a Communist Party spy inside the Home Office. She had meetings with recruiters from the KGB. Nicholas Hellen’s article says the source of new material about Jenifer Hart is research I have done with my colleague Jeff Hulbert for our book ‘The Summer Camp Spies’. Here’s our summary of what we have discovered:

Newly unearthed documents reveal the full scale of the KGB’s attempt to repeat at Oxford University their success with the recruitment of the ‘Cambridge Five’ spies in the 1930s . They made contact with five Oxford graduates and three of these became KGB agents. 

All five were involved in a summer camp which Oxford students organised for unemployed workers in 1935. One female student who joined the Communist Party after the camp was targeted by the same recruiters who took Cambridge graduate Kim Philby to the KGB. She could have become a female Philby inside the British establishment but became ‘disillusioned’. 

Her history as a secret Communist inside the Home Office was covered up for two decades by her boyfriend, later her husband, an MI5 officer (he got the job thanks to her). She had met KGB recruiters at his flat and he used his MI5 role to try to keep her name out of their file of suspects. Thanks to him and his senior colleagues it was two decades before MI5 was forced to interrogate her after she let the cat out of the bag at a party.

The full story of the couple who became better known post war as Oxford dons Professor Herbert ‘H.L.A.’ Hart and Jenifer Hart is revealed in MI5 files in the National Archives and family files deposited at Oxford University. I discovered them and my colleague, Jeff Hulbert, made a fresh analysis of other MI5 archive files using digital tools not available to MI5 at the time. 

Our research is summarised in ‘The Summer Camp Spies by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert’ and in follow-up work which we report here. The Oxford students we name have a more diverse background than their posher counterparts in the Cambridge Five. Working with them at the summer camp was a wealthy Indian Marxist student. Apart from the first English woman known to have been targeted by the KGB other women made an impact as spy recruiters and spy catchers.

We name five Oxford graduates at the summer camp who were later involved in espionage either for the British Communist Party or the KGB or both:

  • Peter Rhodes, the camp organiser, was an American student who became a communist while at Oxford. In 1945 he was named by a member of an KGB spy ring in America as a fellow Soviet agent.
  • Jenifer Hart, recruited to the Communist Party at the camp, became an undercover communist inside the Home Office. She had meetings with two KGB recruiters before becoming ‘disillusioned’ with communism.
  • Bernard Floud was a fellow student who asked her to be a secret Communist in the civil service and gather information to ‘prepare for a revolutionary situation’. He later became a Labour MP. After MI5 blocked his promotion to ministerial rank he committed suicide in 1967.
  • Arthur Wynn was the KGB recruiter who Floud arranged for Hart to meet in 1936. He was later revealed in KGB files to be their ‘Agent Scott’. 
  • David Floyd was, variously, an Oxford student on a scholarship from Wiltshire Council, a milkman, a Foreign Office diplomat and a KGB spy. In 1951 he confessed and was found a job on the Daily Telegraph.

Among our other discoveries are that MI5 missed several real spies by concentrating resources on surveillance of known Communist Party activists.

‘The Summer Camp Spies’ is available, price £10, from Daunt Books Hampstead, 51 South End Road,London NW3 2QB. hampstead@dauntbooks.co.uk 020 7794 8206. Copyright © Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert 2024. Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work.

spspurvis@blueyonder.co.uk

40 YEARS ON FROM THE MINERS STRIKE, MEMORIES OF MY STRANGE ENCOUNTER WITH THATCHER’S SECRETIVE ADVISER.

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The battle between Margaret Thatcher’s government and Arthur Scargill’s union is rightly regarded as a turning point in 20th century Britain. So it is no surprise that it has been revisited, reviewed and re-enacted in British TV documentaries and drama.

Having seen most of them and appeared in a few, ’Miners Strike 1984 – the Battle for Britain’ gets my vote as the best yet. This three part series for Channel Four, filmed and mostly directed by Tom Barrow for Swan Films, is being scheduled on Thursdays at 9pm and all the episodes are already available online .

The films focus on ‘three powerful stories’: the divisions in the Derbyshire village of Shirebrook where striking and working miners came to blows, the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ and the subsequent attempt to jail miners for ‘riot’ and the story of the businessman David Hart who once told Margaret Thatcher ‘victory is yours and yours alone’ and set out to make it happen for her. As Thatcher’s adviser on the black arts of propaganda he helped organise and fund the working miners committee which successfully campaigned to get striking miners back to work. 

While I was Editor of Channel Four News (C4N) the Miners Strike from 1984-5 was the story that first proved the value of a primetime hour of TV news every weeknight. We sent reporter Jane Corbin to live in Shirebrook and her work is revisited in the first part of the new series. We also sent camera crews to stand alongside the pickets at Orgeave, other news programmes chose to stand behind the police lines.  As for David Hart, the focus of the third part of the series, I met him once in strange circumstances..

In August 1984, five months into the strike, Channel Four News planned a live TV debate between the leaders of the National Coal Board (NCB) and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Such encounters were extremely rare but at C4N we had built a reputation for serious coverage of the issues and both sides had a degree of trust in us,  Arthur Scargill was quick to agree to represent the NUM and the NCB put forward their Director of Industrial Relations, Ned Smith, a former miner.  Scargill would be live from Leeds and Smith would be on a live link from NCB HQ in London. The C4N presenter, Peter Sissons, a former ITN Industrial Editor, was an obvious and perfect choice to chair the debate .

There was a lot of media interest in who would come out on top in the debate and the Government helped to brief Ned Smith.  As I went into work on 22nd August 1984 all seemed organised for the big event and I was certainly not prepared for a mid-afternoon call from the NCB Press Office: ‘Stewart, I think you’d better come round to the Coal Board. I can’t say any more at the moment’.

As I arrived at the NCB I caught sight of Ned Smith leaving the building, and from his body language it looked as if he was in a huff. I was told he was getting a train home. Not exactly what I was expecting a few hours before the biggest TV event of the strike so far. My assumption was that the live debate was off for some reason but surely the Coal Board wouldn’t just pull out at the last minute handing a PR victory to Scargill.  Wondering around the NCB offices half-hoping that someone might just turn up to appear live, I discovered that the Coal Board would be represented by none other than the Chairman himself, Sir Ian MacGregor. “I will do it myself” he told me.

A Scot by birth, a U.S citizen by adoption, an industrialist toughened by confrontations with American unions he had been recruited to sort out British Steel  and then assigned by Margaret Thatcher to confront coal. 

Half of me was delighted, C4N would pull off a real scoop,  MacGregor and Scargill exclusively together live. The other half of me was worried, a few weeks before I had made a film with MacGregor to present his view on the dispute. At the same time a young producer called Michael Crick produced a film with Scargill. It was no contest, Scargill was a much better performer than MacGregor who seemed to have trouble reading a script. I wondered if he was dyslexic.

As we approached transmission at 7pm I discovered that earlier that day there’d been a mighty row between MacGregor and Smith with multiple changes of mind about who would appear for the Coal Board. Now the hard reality was that we were about to go on the air with an inexperienced and unprepared TV debater on one side. No wonder Scargill seemed pleased when told of the change of opponent. But as MacGregor and I walked into the makeshift studio at the NCB, I realised the Chairman was not going to be without a bit of help.

For there stood a man I had never met before, who was never introduced, a mustachioed, balding figure clutching a set of cue cards. I later discovered he was David Hart, an adviser to both MacGregor and Thatcher. In the short time he had to prepare the Chairman Hart had hand-written phrases on his cue cards for MacGregor to read out  Hart himself said nothing, he just stood off camera shuffling his home made cue cards.

Once Sissons began the questioning MacGregor, sweaty top lip glistening under the TV lights , would sometimes look to the side of the camera to read what Hart wanted him to say but at other times was confident enough to fly solo. It was never in doubt that Scargill would navigate himself and be more fluent and so it turned out. Both men began each answer strongly but then got lost in the details, it was MacGregor who got most lost. The exchanges made it clear just how much they disliked each other.

To wrap up the debate Peter Sissons observed that the general public would conclude that these two men had no common ground whatsoever and would ask ‘what are we to make of it?’. Neither respondent had a convincing answer. 

The encounter made news for the fact that it had happened at all rather than what anybody said. It proved there was no way to bridge the gap other than for one side to eventually knock out the other. Seven months later as more and more of the striking miners became working miners the NUM gave up and went back to work. David Hart’s work was done, Margaret Thatcher had her victory.

Extracts from the debate are available to view on the Getty Images news archive website gettyimages.co.uk. To see the first extract type in 1447914031 and for the second extract type in 1447914076