May 14, 2013

Finest Hour 149, Winter 2010-11

Page 35

Churchill and Intelligence – Intelligence Today: What We Can Learn

The Churchill Centre has always tried to avoid suggesting what Churchill would have to say about contemporary situations, which would be pure conjecture. But much can be learned from considering similar episodes in Churchill’s career, and his responses to them.

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By David Freeman

Professor Freeman ([email protected]) teaches History at California State University Fullerton and is a longtime contributor to Finest Hour. His recent articles include “Churchill and the League of Nations 1934-1939” (FH 147); “A Polemic, Not a History” and “The Friendship Between Churchill and F.E. Smith” (FH 139); “Did Britain Fail?” (FH 135); and “‘Ungrateful Volcano’: Churchill and the Making of Iraq” (FH 132); as well as numerous book reviews and contributions to “Churchill Proceedings” from his papers at Churchill Conferences.

In the summer of 2010 the alleged non-profit website WikiLeaks published 77,000 classified documents snatched from Pentagon computers that related to the war in Afghanistan. Unredacted, the material included the names of Afghan informants who had been cooperating with Coalition Forces. A Taliban spokesman told The New York Times that a commission had been formed “to find out about people who are spying” and report the results to a Taliban court.¹

The founder and proprietor of WikiLeaks, 39-year-old Australian Julian Assange, remained defiant about his decision to publish the documents even as Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders joined the Pentagon (an unusual combination) in criticizing an action that potentially endangers those Afghans whose names were published. Other workers at WikiLeaks have publicly broken with their colleague over his behavior.

Mr. Assange is now in serious trouble. The U.S. government is weighing a possible prosecution under the 1917 Espionage Act, and Australian officials have made it clear to Mr. Assange that they will support any such action.

Welcomed initially in Sweden, Assange had to leave Stockholm after accusations of sexual assault that could lead to another prosecution. When Finest Hour went to press, Assange was in Switzerland, where he was contemplating an application for asylum.

What does all this have to do with Winston Churchill? There are two Churchillian aspects to it, one general and one specific.

The preceding articles by Sir Martin Gilbert and David Stafford (pages 12-27) show in detail that Churchill very properly took great care in safeguarding intelligence sources. Whatever the ultimate fate of Mr. Assange, surely the real concern now must be with determining how it was possible for his organization to acquire classified material in the first place.

As is so often the case, Churchill’s story provides an example of a similar breach of security, and how he reacted to it. In the spring of 1951, intelligence officers Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean vanished from Britain. It was five years before Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev finally admitted that they were in the USSR, but suspicion set in immediately that Burgess and Maclean had been spying for the Soviets while employed by the British government.

As Leader of the Opposition in Parliament, Churchill concentrated on essentials. The real question, he said, was not the motivation or ultimate fate of the traitors. “I don’t think he was much interested,” recalled his private secretary Sir John Colville. “In fact I had to press him to ask the Cabinet Office to provide a Note on the incident.”²

That Burgess and Maclean were homosexuals did not trouble Churchill, except to raise his natural sympathy. His personal private secretary, Sir Anthony Montague Browne, recalled that Churchill felt “homosexuals might indeed be a security risk, not so much because they might be subject to blackmail, but because they often feel themselves alien and apart from the mainstream of the country.”³

Nor was there much question as to how Burgess and Maclean had come to be employed by the British government in the first place. “Our vetting procedures in those days were primitive and sloppy,” recalled Sir Anthony, himself a Foreign Office veteran. During the war, he wrote, “the Soviets had been our involuntary allies, which made it easier for those concerned to condone a background that would later be considered deeply suspect.”⁴

For Churchill, the real question in 1951 was why Burgess and Maclean not only continued to be employed by the British government after 1945, when relations with the Soviet Union dramatically changed, but even received promotion to highly sensitive positions that should have triggered assessments of their job performances up to that time. Burgess in particular was long notorious in Whitehall for his alcohol-induced indiscretions.

Seeking an answer to Churchill’s key point, Peter Thorneycroft put down a question in the House of Commons for the Foreign Secretary, Herbert Morrison, on 9 July 1951. Morrison attempted to evade the issue of when the traitors received postwar promotions by stating the Government had no awareness of the two men having any Communist associations at the time they received their original appointments to the Foreign Office: October 1935 for Maclean and June 1944 for Burgess.

Churchill intervened to say that Morrison had not answered Thorneycroft’s question. On what dates, he repeated, had Burgess and Maclean received their postwar appointments? Morrison continued to prevaricate so Churchill pressed harder. When Morrison merely repeated the dates of the original appointments, Churchill began moving in for the kill: “We must all profit by the advice of the Rt. Hon. Gentleman. He has given two dates: why can he not give the other two?”

The Foreign Secretary foolishly responded with the legalistic defense that Thorneycroft’s original question as submitted in writing asked for no such dates. Churchill, of course, had been Prime Minister, and Morrison Home Secretary, in the wartime coalition when the employment of Maclean had continued and Burgess had first received his own appointment. Churchill waved this aside with the observation that “failures may always occur,” but that did not mean that Morrison could then “shuffle off all responsibility” and “not give the other two dates,” that is, those from the postwar period.

Morrison, however, stuck to his legalistic guns and Churchill closed the trap: “Will the Rt. Hon. Gentleman give the dates of these two specific appointments if a Question is put on the Order Paper?”

Having painted himself into a corner, the Foreign Secretary was forced to capitulate: “If a Question is on the Order Paper I shall be most happy to answer it.”⁵

As Leader of the Opposition, Churchill had the responsibility to force the Government to attend to the point that really mattered: determining when and why there had been a failure in security. Only this could lead to the constructive reforms necessary to prevent future recurrences.

Historians naturally concentrate on Churchill’s time as a Cabinet minister and his opposition to Appeasement during his Wilderness Years. In this episode, though, we see that late in his career and in a very different sort of parliamentary role, Churchill still had the capacity to look past the sensational and focus on what was most important. In so doing he discharged his responsibilities to the nation while maintaining the highest standards of the Mother of Parliaments.

End Notes

1. “WikiLeaks Founder on the Run,” The New York Times, 23 October 2010.

2. David Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service (New York: Overlook Press, 1997), 333.

3. Anthony Montague Browne, Long Sunset London: Cassell, 1995), 219-20.

4. Ibid., 61.

5. Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), House of Commons, 9 July 1951, cols. 33-34.