In his impeccably researched Intelligence, Security and the Attlee Governments, 1945–51: An Uneasy Relationship?, Daniel Lomas draws on previously inaccessible archival files to answer the rhetorical question in the book's subtitle. The question is rhetorical, because, as Lomas makes abundantly clear, the Attlee government enjoyed a close and cordial working relationship with Great Britain's security and intelligence services; rarely was it uneasy. The literature on the connections between British intelligence, government policy, and covert operations during the Cold War is already very crowded with some impressive studies in the last fifteen years. But what Lomas, a lecturer in international history at Salford University, does is unique: he unpicks the intimate links between the intelligence agencies, the prime minister, his senior ministers, his departmental officials, and the relevant government committees he chaired or oversaw.
Although a great many rank and file Labor parliamentarians were suspicious or hostile towards the “secret state,” the leadership of the Attlee government harbored few misgivings. Indeed, in its desire to thwart inroads that the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) could make into its constituency and its organization, the Labor Party was, as MI5's deputy director Guy Liddell commented, “more interested to make use of our services than the Conservatives” (as quoted by Lomas, 260). Attlee was the first prime minister to visit MI5's Millbank headquarters; he was keenly interested in, and readily devoured, intelligence reports; he had an especially close rapport with its director general from 1946 to 1953, Sir Percy Sillitoe (even writing the forward to Sillitoe's Cloak Without Dagger); and he sanctioned MI6's “whispering campaigns” to foment discontent in Eastern Europe. As Lomas points out, Attlee “was not in awe of the world of spies and special operations” (265). Nor was Attlee's pugnacious foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin. Lomas challenges the misconception that Bevin was opposed to subversive activity and details his endorsement of Operation Valuable, a disastrous MI6 initiative in which twenty-six agents experienced in guerrilla warfare were dropped into Albania to destabilize the Hoxha regime.
Attlee's generally comfortable relationship with the secret state was helped by the stridency of his anti-communism: he was “particularly pleased” (according to Sillitoe) that MI5 had deeply penetrated the Communist Party of Great Britain, and as early as 1947 recommended that “six of our cryptos should be sacked” (in 1949 several left-wing Labor MPs were expelled from the party). Nevertheless, as Lomas shows, Attlee was not uncritical of the intelligence community: in October 1948, for example, he closed down clandestine operations in India conducted by MI6 without the knowledge of the (now-independent) Indian government, and in 1950 ordered a comprehensive review of the security services.
The period covered by the two Attlee governments, 1945 to 1951, coincided with the collapse of the wartime Anglo-Soviet alliance and the increasingly imminent threat of a third world war. As the postwar years advanced, the British position toughened. In 1948, the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia and the blockade in Berlin caused alarm; in 1949, the detonation of an atomic bomb in Kazakhstan caused shock. Until then, an anticommunist offensive was shackled by residual sympathy from Labor MPs for the socialist sixth of the world. After then, resistance to government-sponsored counter-propaganda and counter-subversive measures against the Soviet Union, its satellites, and the Communist Party of Great Britain was negligible. Any minister who remained skeptical was blocked from membership of relevant committees or denied access to confidential memoranda. Attlee himself chaired many of these new Cold War committees, such as the Ministerial Committee on Anti-Communist Propaganda, which focused on covert activities and “black” propaganda, and the Cabinet Committee on Subversive Activities, which drew on MI5's assessment of the communist threat. The author would have encountered countless cryptic annotations in red crayon from “CRA.”
A recurrent theme of this book is how a cash-strapped government embarked on propaganda and other political warfare initiatives within the financial constraints of postwar austerity. The answer, in part, was provided by the innocuously-named but increasingly influential Information Research Department, a clandestine counter-propaganda unit operating within the Foreign Office, which acted as a major hidden influence on public attitudes towards communism, at home and abroad. (An early employee, not mentioned here, was Guy Burgess.) Thus, psychological weapons became essential to Great Britain's status. In the short term, they could mask British weakness: anti-communist propaganda did not entail significant increases in British military and economic commitments. In the long term, with its “third force” emphasis on the virtues of British social democracy, such propaganda would encourage other countries to look to London for moral authority.
Another constraint was civil liberties. The Attlee government tried to juggle the fight against ideological subversion with the defense of democratic rights, especially freedom of expression. This balancing act became more difficult as cases of atomic espionage (Allan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs, Bruno Pontecorvo) highlighted flaws in the vetting processes, a point not lost on the American intelligence services. Attlee found the American system of loyalty boards hearings distasteful if not undemocratic, and rejected calls for an “Un-British Activities Committee.” Although Attlee defended the security services from American criticism, espionage severely strained the special relationship. To appease US pressure and to restore access to atomic secrets, more stringent screening procedures (“positive” vetting), especially in atomic energy facilities, were introduced in the dying days of the Attlee government. These supplemented the “negative” vetting introduced in March 1948. Civil liberties were circumscribed, but debates within the parliamentary party were contained because the decision-making circle was so closed and discussions so secret. However, through his close reading of committee minutes, Lomas reveals that differences of opinion, some heated, over counter-subversive measures did exist at higher levels, not just between Whitehall and Washington but also within the cabinet, across departments, and between the chiefs of staff and the Foreign Office.
The publisher's copy editor has served Lomas well: a rare mistake was the Australian prime minister J. B. Chifley being labeled a “Premier” (233). With Lomas's emphasis on archival analysis and with his academic prose, his book will be of much greater interest to the specialist than to the general reader—bureaucratic documents rarely lend themselves to sparkling expression or engrossing narrative. That said, this book fills admirably an important historiographical gap in the so-called missing dimension of intelligence and security studies.
