Intelligence, security and the Attlee governments, 1945–51

An uneasy relationship?

Daniel W. B. Lomas

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780719099144
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526109460
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Drawing on recently released documents and private papers, this is the first book-length study to examine the intimate relationship between the Attlee government and Britain's intelligence and security services at the start of the Cold War. Often praised for the formation of the modern-day 'welfare state', Attlee's government also played a significant, if little understood, role in combating communism at home and overseas, often in the face of vocal, sustained opposition from its own backbenches. This book tells the story of Attlee's Cold War. From Whitehall vetting to secret operations in Eastern Europe and the fallout of Soviet atomic espionage on both sides of the Atlantic, it provides a fresh interpretation of the Attlee government, making it essential reading for anyone interested in the Labour Party, intelligence, security and Britain's foreign and defence policy at the start of the Cold War.

1

Wartime apprenticeship: Labour and intelligence during the Second World War

What is needed is a new organization to co-ordinate, inspire, control and assist the nationals of the oppressed countries who must themselves be the direct participants. We need absolute secrecy, a certain fanatical enthusiasm, willingness to work with people of different nationalities, complete political reliability.¹

Hugh Dalton, 2 July 1940

This chapter will illustrate how the Labour leadership’s involvement with the wartime Churchill government brought ministers into the world of intelligence and security, an area previously overlooked by academics looking at this period.² From the summer of 1940, Labour ministers were inducted into Britain’s intelligence and security community, enjoying access to some of the most secretive areas of the state. This chapter will show that this experience had two significant effects. Firstly, it continued the process already started during MacDonald’s second government of improving relations between Labour and the intelligence community. Secondly, it constituted useful ‘work experience’ that allowed ministers to handle intelligence and security issues, and become fully acquainted with the complexities of the secret world. Other than receiving the fruits of British wartime intelligence, Labour ministers played an important role in the formation and early development of the Special Operations Executive, the wartime organisation established to inspire resistance in occupied Europe. This chapter shows how Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare, attempted to develop a new brand of unconventional warfare with Labour at its forefront before his replacement in February 1942. It also shows the important role played by Attlee in supporting Dalton during several battles in Whitehall, and his continued role chairing important meetings of the Defence Committee at which SOE’s future was discussed. The chapter argues that Labour ministers were not averse to special operations, as has been previously suggested, but backed the amalgamation of the organisation with SIS to preserve Britain’s newly acquired special operations capability.³ On the wartime domestic front, Herbert Morrison regularly received MI5 material as Home Secretary, dealing with the political fallout from the internment of fascists and Nazi sympathisers, along with enemy nationals, as well as information dealing with the activities of the Communist Party of Great Britain. While MI5’s information ultimately failed to influence Churchill to implement vetting in government, the information reinforced the anti-communist leanings of Labour ministers.

The collapse of the Chamberlain administration following the debacle of the Norway campaign and its replacement by a coalition government in the summer of 1940 has been considered an important watershed in Labour Party history. For the first time since 1931, Labour ministers were at the heart of government, playing an important role in both domestic and diplomatic affairs.⁴ Attlee was the only figure, other than Churchill himself, to serve for the duration of the coalition. His importance was recognised in February 1942 when he was appointed Deputy Prime Minister, though he had already acted as Churchill’s stand-in since the coalition’s formation. Having no departmental responsibility, save for his brief tenure as Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, Attlee made a significant contribution to the running of important Whitehall committees, developing his skills as an experienced chairman. He was a member of the three important wartime committees – the War Cabinet, Defence Committee and Lord President’s Committee, co-chairing the first two and, from September 1943, chair of the third. Field Marshall Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, described Attlee as a proficient chairman who ran meetings of the Cabinet and Defence Committee ‘very efficiently and quickly’.⁵ While the name of Winston Churchill has become synonymous with the world of intelligence before, during and beyond the Second World War, Attlee fades into the background.⁶ To some extent this omission could be considered the result of Attlee’s private character. As his daughter-in-law, Countess Attlee, made clear in conversation, intelligence was the most secret subject for an already reserved individual.⁷ But, now at the heart of government, Attlee became part of an innermost circle of ministers and officials who, in addition to other paperwork, were privy to a stream of intelligence reports.

Inside government: Labour and wartime intelligence

Attlee was quick to criticise the intelligence world that he had recently been inducted into. As a member of the War Cabinet, Attlee, along with Arthur Greenwood, Labour’s Minister without Portfolio, received the reports of the Joint Intelligence Committee. On 17 May 1940 the JIC was instructed to issue reports on ‘any particular’ strategic development to the Prime Minister, the Chiefs of Staff and War Cabinet.⁸ Within months of the decision, Attlee came to appreciate problems with the machinery of intelligence. In November he wrote to Churchill requesting that the Chiefs of Staff should prepare a report on ‘the organisation’ of Britain’s intelligence apparatus. Completed by November, their report suggested that, while intelligence coordination was far from satisfactory, it ‘seems to us very undesirable that a drastic reorganisation … should be attempted at the moment when we are fighting for our lives’.⁹ Despite his relative inexperience, Attlee was not afraid to challenge this. ‘The fact that we were completely unaware of the elaborate and detailed plan of the Germans for the invasion of Norway,’ he wrote to Churchill, ‘seems to me to have demanded a thorough overhaul of the Intelligence Services.’¹⁰ In fact, the Chiefs of Staff had recommended ‘we should continue to use an inefficient system’. Instead, Attlee wrote ‘It is precisely because we are engaged in a critical war that we ought to do … what should have been done years ago’ and suggested the need for one ‘directing mind’ to oversee and improve intelligence. He would need to ‘be a person of analytic mind, detached from all the Services – without parti pris’.¹¹ Attlee’s forceful letter failed to prompt action. While Churchill agreed that better coordination was necessary, the threat of imminent German invasion prevented swift change.¹² The problem was only remedied after the intervention of the Director of Military Intelligence, Major General Francis Davidson, an ‘old friend’ of Attlee who had served with him in the same regiment during the First World War, which led to the formation of a sub-committee of the JIC to coordinate, assess and circulate strategic intelligence.¹³

Using intelligence

Labour ministers were also privy to the fruits of Britain’s prized intelligence asset: codebreaking. Within weeks of the formation of the coalition, cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, GC&CS’s war station, enjoyed their first major success against the German ‘Enigma’ machine. From May 1940 it was possible to read German traffic almost without a break for the duration of the conflict.¹⁴ Within six months, Attlee and three other Labour ministers – Ernest Bevin, Arthur Greenwood and A. V. Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty (despite claims he ‘was denied access to the most secret materials’)¹⁵ – were among a small group of those entrusted with information derived from this most secret source, known initially as BONIFACE or ULTRA.¹⁶ While it is unclear whether they were fully aware of the true nature of the material, the stringent measures used to protect it would most likely have alerted ministers to its great importance.¹⁷ In addition, Attlee also received intercepts from the chief of SIS, Sir Stewart Menzies, who had been ‘C’ since 1939.

Attlee’s access to the ‘golden eggs’ of Britain’s intelligence community was a direct result of Churchill’s passion for raw intelligence, particularly his decision to request ‘all ENIGMA messages’ on a daily basis in September 1940.¹⁸ While he saw only a selection of intercepts after 1941, Menzies continued to send this highly secret source of information to Downing Street in ‘buff-coloured boxes’ that only Churchill could access.¹⁹ In the Prime Minister’s absence, Attlee also received signals intercepts.²⁰ During the Atlantic Conference of August 1941, Attlee saw ‘Most Secret’ summaries on Axis operations on the Eastern and Mediterranean fronts.²¹ Churchill’s increasingly frequent overseas visits meant that Attlee had further access and, in February 1943, with Churchill away at Adana, Turkey, he received intercepts detailing plans by German intelligence to assassinate the Prime Minister. Although the plot would have failed, Attlee immediately warned Churchill that ‘I and my colleagues, supported by the Chiefs of Staff, consider that it would be unwise for you to adhere to your present programme … [it is] essential in the national interest that you … proceed to England’.²² At the end of the year, Attlee also received the intercept of a meeting between Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, and the Japanese Ambassador to Berlin, which lasted ‘more than an hour’ during which the latter:

thanked [Ribbentrop] for his visit on the 8th and for GERMANY’s entry into the war two years ago in pursuance of the spirit of friendship of the Three-Power Treaty, and I made a suitable greeting. The Minister in his turn expressed, in dignified tones, his congratulations on the victories won by the Imperial Japanese armed forces during the past two years, and affirmed his enthusiasm for cooperation with JAPAN in the prosecution of the war.

Despite the dire situation on the Eastern Front, Ribbentrop optimistically said that ‘there was no great change, operations continuing to be limited to local fighting’, while in Italy, where German forces were in retreat, ‘the position fluctuated from day to day and there was nothing special for him to tell me’.²³

A further illustration of Attlee’s use of signals intelligence can be found in May 1943. As Dominions Secretary, Attlee was consulted about the German legation in Dublin and the activities of its resident minister, Eduard Hempel. From early 1943 British officials had been able to read the legation’s diplomatic tra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Wartime apprenticeship: Labour and intelligence during the Second World War
• 2 Lacking intelligence? British intelligence, ministers and the Soviet Union
• 3 The Cold War heats up: propaganda and subversion, 1945–48
• 4 Britain’s secret Cold War offensive: ministers, subversion and special operations, 1948–51
• 5 The special relationship? Ministers, atomic espionage and Anglo-American relations
• 6 Defending the realm: Labour ministers, vetting and subversion
• 7 Empire, Commonwealth and security
• Conclusion: intelligence and the Labour governments, 1945–51
• Select bibliography
• Index