The Defence of the Realm by Christopher Andrew

Author:Christopher Andrew
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Canada

Section E

The Later Cold War

Introduction

The Security Service and its Staff in the Later Cold War

The aloof management style of two successive DGs, Sir Martin Furnival Jones, and his predecessor, Sir Roger Hollis, combined with the unprecedented investigations of Hollis and Mitchell on suspicion of being Soviet agents, built up strong support within the Home Office in favour of an outside appointment following FJ’s retirement in 1972. The PUS, Sir Philip Allen, told the Home Secretary, Reggie Maudling, in January 1972, ‘My own view is that the Service would benefit from a breath of fresh air, and that it would particularly benefit from someone who had some political nous.’1 The case for a DG with ‘political nous’ was reinforced by the fact that the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, had taken a personal dislike to FJ at their first meeting after his election victory in June 1970.2 Allen’s candidate for the succession was a senior Home Office official, J. H. Waddell, who was considered unlucky not to have become a PUS.3 The main argument against an outsider, as Allen acknowledged, was the malign precedent set a quarter of a century earlier by Sir Percy Sillitoe, who ‘had a distinguished record as a Chief Constable, but was pretty disastrous as Director General of the Security Service’. 4

At a meeting with Maudling on 5 January 1972 FJ argued against an outside appointment with some passion and ‘at very considerable length’. ‘Members of the Service’, he insisted, ‘were not civil servants . . . They were a professional body who ought to be professionally led – just like the Army or the Police.’ In addition to the effect on Service morale:

To appoint an amateur at this stage would have a bad effect on our allies . . . At the moment, MI5 was regarded in the USA, Western Europe and the old British Commonwealth as being the best Security Service in the Free World, and arguably better than the KGB. This was because it was professionally staffed and had been professionally led for the last 18 years. It was the Service which was the most favoured by the CIA (the Israeli secret service being next). All this would be badly affected if an appointment were now made from outside, and the head of CIA would regard such an appointment as showing that the powers that be in this country thought there was something wrong with MI5.

FJ countered Home Office claims that the Service ‘would benefit from a breath of fresh air’ by linking them to similar statements by the discredited Sillitoe:

Sir Percy Sillitoe had said in his memoirs that the Security Service were ‘a bunch of introverts’, and other people had said that they would benefit from a breath of fresh air. Furnival Jones refuted both statements which he thought were nonsense. Their recruits tended to be fairly mature, with experience of the outside world; a good many of them were extroverts.5

The DG’s arguments failed to make any impression on the Home Secretary, who wrote to the Prime Minister recommending the Home Office candidate as the next DG.

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