The History of MI5

Introduction

Some of the Service’s history has been well known for many years, but it is only recently that a policy has been adopted of trying to put as much additional information as possible into the public domain. Some of the material released is referred to in the brief history of the Service that follows.

In October 1909, following a recommendation by the Committee of Imperial Defence which had been considering the danger to British naval ports from German espionage, Captain Vernon Kell of the South Staffordshire Regiment and Captain Mansfield Cumming of the Royal Navy jointly established the Secret Service Bureau.

To meet an additional requirement from the Admiralty for information about Germany’s new navy, Kell and Cumming decided to divide their work. Thereafter, ‘K’ was responsible for counter-espionage within the British Isles (MI5) while ‘C’ was responsible for gathering intelligence overseas (MI6).

World War One

Between 1909 and the outbreak of World War I, more than 30 spies were identified by the Secret Service Bureau and arrested, thereby depriving the German Intelligence Service of its network. At the time, the Bureau had a staff of only ten, including Kell himself. The Bureau was rapidly mobilised as a branch of the War Office. In January 1916 it became part of a new Directorate of Military Intelligence and was then titled MI5.

Wartime legislation increased the responsibilities of MI5 to include the co-ordination of government policy concerning aliens, vetting and other security measures at munitions factories. MI5 also began to oversee counter-espionage measures throughout the Empire. By the end of the war, during which a further 35 spies were identified and arrested, MI5 had approximately 850 staff.

Details of the work of MI5 up to the end of World War I may be found in the Service’s surviving records from this period, which were released for public view at the Public Record Office in November 1997. These records illustrate MI5’s response to the significant espionage attack on the UK launched by Germany before and during World War I, including the arrest of many identified spies just before the outbreak of the war. There are also reports of the discussions which led to the creation of the Secret Service Bureau and official histories of the various branches set up during the war. The records are available from the PRO on a CD-ROM, ‘MI5: The First Ten Years, 1909–19’ (for further details, see Openness and visit www.pro.gov.uk/releases/).

A BBC programme, ‘Timewatch: The Gentlemen Spies’, broadcast in November 1997, was based on these records.

Between the Wars

After the Bolshevik coup d’état of October 1917 in Russia, MI5’s work extended to cover the threats from Communist subversion within the armed services, and sabotage to military installations.

These threats attained additional importance in the mid-1920s, with the publication of the infamous Zinoviev Letter, in which the Comintern (a Soviet-run organisation which aimed to co-ordinate Communist effort worldwide) appeared to instruct the British Communist Party to foment insurrection. The letter caused a considerable furore. An investigation by a Foreign Office historian recently concluded:

“White Russian intelligence services were well developed and highly organised, and included the operation of a forgery ring in Berlin. It seems likely that they asked either those forgers, or their contacts in the Baltic States with similar skills, to produce a document which would derail the [Anglo-Soviet] treaties and damage the Labour government...” The idea of an institutionalised international campaign, directed by SIS, to discredit both the Bolsheviks and the Labour government is not only unsubstantiated by the documentation, but seems inherently unlikely. It was just not how the Intelligence Services operated, and implied a degree of cohesion and control, not to mention political will, which simply did not exist. As has been shown in the case of the Foreign Office, the majority of officials considered it their duty to serve the government of the day faithfully, whatever their private views may be.” (from: ‘A most extraordinary and mysterious business’: The Zinoviev Letter of 1924, by Gill Bennett, Chief Historian, FCO).

On 15 October 1931 formal responsibility for assessing all threats to the national security of the United Kingdom, apart from those posed by Irish terrorists and anarchists, was passed to MI5. This date marked the formation of the Security Service, although the title MI5 remains in popular use.

Following Hitler’s rise to power, the new service had to face the threat of subversion from Fascists. In early 1939 the Service’s strength stood at only 30 officers and the surveillance section comprised just six men. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the Service had moved premises to Wormwood Scrubs Prison, but in late 1940 the majority of staff were evacuated to Blenheim Palace. To make matters worse, in September 1940 many of its records were destroyed by German bombing.

At the time of the outbreak of World War II, the Service was ill-equipped for its increasing tasks. They included counter-espionage; monitoring of enemy aliens and advising on internment; vetting checks for government departments; visiting firms engaged in war work to advise them on security measures against espionage and sabotage; and dealing with reports by members of the public concerning suspicious activity.

In early 1941 David Petrie was appointed the first Director General of the Security Service, and given the resources to rebuild a substantial organisation.

World War Two

Internment at the outbreak of the war effectively deprived the Germans of the opportunity to recruit agents from those in Britain sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Moreover, when captured German intelligence records were studied after 1945, it was found that all of the further 115 or so agents targeted against Britain during the course of the war had been successfully identified and caught, with the exception of one who committed suicide before capture.

Some of these agents were ‘turned’ by the Service and became double agents who fed false information to the Germans concerning military strategy throughout the war. This was the famous ‘Double Cross’ system. This highly effective deception contributed to the success of the Allied Forces landing in Normandy on D-Day in June 1944.

Collections of the surviving records from this period were released into the public domain by the PRO in January and September 1999, April and November 2000, and July and November 2001. Further tranches of historical records continue to be released twice yearly. The material released includes histories of parts of the Service files on policy matters, personal files for German intelligence officers and agents, and files concerning double agent operations and ‘renegades’ (British subjects in enemy or enemy-occupied territory who assisted the enemy in various ways, notably by broadcasting on behalf of Germany. The cases illustrated include the writer P.G. Wodehouse).

Many of the personal files contain details of the interrogations of German agents and officers carried out at Camp 020, the Service’s main interrogation centre at Ham, in Surrey. There is also a range of associated material, including photographs, censored letters and recorded conversations. For further details, see Openness and visit www.pro.gov.uk/releases/mi5

1950's

In 1952 the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, deputed his personal responsibility for the Security Service to the Home Secretary, who issued a directive describing the Service’s tasks and setting out the role of the Director General. This directive provided the basis for the Service’s work until 1989, when the Security Service Act placed it on a statutory footing for the first time.

By the early 1950s, staff numbers had increased to about 850, including some 40 Security Liaison Officers overseas, who provided advice and assistance to governments in the Commonwealth and Colonies.

Following the defeat of Nazi Germany and the advent of the Cold War, attention turned to the threat from the Soviet Union. The Service had for some time been focusing on the activities of the Communist Party of Great Britain which, at its peak in the early 1940s, had 55,000 members.

In March 1948 the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, had announced that Communists as well as Fascists were to be excluded from work “vital to the security of the state”. This was achieved through the setting up of the vetting system (see Vetting), which the Service was charged to support. The cases of Kim Philby of SIS, and Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean of the FCO, in particular, soon showed how effective the Russian intelligence services had been before the war in recruiting ideologically motivated spies in Britain.

The 1960's, 70's and 80's

In the 1960s, a number of spies were identified, including George Blake, an SIS officer; the Portland spy ring; and John Vassall, an employee at the Admiralty recruited by the KGB (the Russian civilian intelligence agency) in Moscow. These cases illustrated the need for a substantial counter-espionage effort.

Lord Denning’s report into the Profumo Affair in 1963 revealed publicly for the first time details of the Service’s role and responsibilities. This period culminated in the mass expulsion from the UK in 1971 of 105 Soviet personnel known or suspected to be involved in intelligence activity, which severely weakened Russian intelligence operations in London.

By the late 1970s, resources were being redirected from counter-subversion work into international and Irish counter-terrorism. The Service’s counter-terrorist effort had begun in the late 1960s in response to the growing problem of Palestinian terrorism. Major incidents, including the terrorist sieges at the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980 and the Libyan People’s Bureau in 1984, tested the Service’s developing procedures and links with other agencies. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Service played a leading role in establishing an effective network for co-operation on terrorism among Western security and intelligence services.

In 1983, Michael Bettaney, a member of the Service who had offered information to the KGB, was detected, charged and subsequently convicted of espionage. Following a Security Commission inquiry, whose findings were critical of aspects of the Service, Sir Antony Duff, formerly of the Foreign Office and Cabinet Office, was appointed as Director General. He began the discussions which laid the foundations for the Service as it exists today, strengthened by the legal status conferred by the Security Service Act 1989.

The 1990's

Major changes in the focus of the Service’s work took place in the early 1990s with the end of the Cold War. The threat from subversion had diminished, and the threat from espionage, though it persisted, required fewer resources.

Terrorism, however, had not abated. In October 1992 responsibility for leading the intelligence effort against Irish republican terrorism on the British mainland was transferred to the Service from the Metropolitan Police. In this new work, we drew on the experience gained from our role in running long-term intelligence operations against Irish related terrorism overseas during the 1970s and 1980s. Between 1992 and 1999, the Service’s work with the police against Irish republican terrorism resulted in 21 convictions for terrorist-related offences. Many intended terrorist attacks, including large city-centre bombings, were prevented.

In 1996, new legislation extended the Service’s statutory remit to include supporting the law enforcement agencies in the work against serious crime. Some of our resources previously deployed against terrorist and espionage targets were redirected to the threat from serious crime.

Subversion

The Security Service Act does not use the term ‘subversion’, but provides a definition of it by reference to actions that are “intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means”. The concept of subversion, therefore, focuses on the hostility to democratic processes.

Historically, Britain faced a real threat from subversive organisations seeking to undermine parliamentary democracy – and having the capability to do so – most notably during the Cold War. Indeed, some of these organisations and groups, which embraced both extreme left wing (Communist, Trotskyist) and extreme right wing (Fascist), made no secret of their intentions and included those whose allegiance lay with countries hostile to the UK. Their activities were of concern to successive governments and were an important subject of our attention. A particular focus of this work was to deny members of such groups access to sensitive government information. This was achieved through the vetting process instituted in 1948 (see Vetting).

Subversive groups sought to infiltrate and manipulate bona fide organisations, such as trade unions or pressure groups, as a way of exercising influence out of proportion to any support they could achieve through the ballot box. We investigated the activities of the subversive groups, not the organisations they sought to penetrate. Individuals were never investigated merely because they were members of trade unions or campaigned on particular issues such as nuclear disarmament.

Since the late 1980s, particularly following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet communism, the threat from subversion diminished and is now negligible. We do not currently investigate subversion (but see Emerging threats).