Our Secret Police
By R. H. CECIL
I- F there were no such institutions as M.I.5 and the Special Branch oto f pretendt h e M e ttrhoap ot there tae rne wPolice Ti t h we yo ualcl are ps oaor tn obecomee inn eocneostsao gr yy of our democracy, enabling free men to feel that they are watched, and thus supplying freedom with the fleas that keep it active. What have we guessed—for guessing in this field has become a national pastime—about these two pleasantly sinister departments ? There is no. need to guess, at all events, about the composition or origin of the Special Branch, which grew out of the Irish-American dynamite campaign of the eighteen-eighties and acquired an added importance with the passing of the Aliens Act, 1905. (An early tendency to call it the " Political Branch " was speedily discouraged.) Its members are all Metropolitan policemen, they have all plodded the beat regulated traffic, noted car-numbers, impounded stray dogs ; and they have all,, while so engaged in their early years, been hand- picked for the Special Branch because of a special knowledge of languages, of foreign countries, of commerce or industry or the arts and sciences.
. Any outstanding young man who joins the Metropolitan Police is watched as a possible recruit to the Special Branch, though none of the qualifications I have mentioned is of much value to it unless combined with a general savoir faire and complete dependability. Its members must know, as constables, their powers of arrest and search, but they can get along with considerably less knowledge of the criminal law (and, correspondingly, rather more bluff) than is required of their less specialised colleagues in the Force. Apart from State security matters their work includes the protection of Royalty, Ministers of the. Crown, eX-Ministers and distinguished foreign visitors (though " distingiiished," in this context, has in recent days a controversial meaning) ; and they play a large part in the control of firearms, explosives and aliens. They are alSo, you might say, Britain's special contribution to the work of the Inter- national Criminal Police Commission.
M.I.5 is younger, perhaps rather more secret, takes itself even more seriously, and comes out of a higher drawer. (Even its. lady clerks, one sometimes reads,. are " members of old and , 'trusted families who have served the country well in the past.") Because even less is known of it, even more nonsense is talked about it. No official information concerning it has ever been published, but the following details are about as well-authenticated as, say, the 'origin of the Pyramids or the authorship of Titus Andronicus. ' ' The nucleus of M.I.5 originally consisted of Army officers of field rank, carefully selected from the Intelligence Corps formed 'during the First World War.: It is now controlled by the Joint Intelligence Committee, which itself comprises, a Foreign' Office Counsellor, the heads of the three Service intelligence branches, and the head of the Joint Intelligence Bureau at the Ministry of Defence. (The TIC. is a sub-committee of the Chiefs of Staffs Committee.)
M.I.5, the fifth section of "Military Intelligence," is itself divided
into six sections—factories, political, sabotage, aliens, communica- tions and Forces liaison. It works mainly from London (though not from the War Office), and in those six contexts its job is the ascertainment of facts—about people. It presents its facts to the Ministries whom they concern ; and when a Ministry, nevertheless, employs a person like Dr. Klaus Fuchs, that Ministry may or may not have been justified in the risk, but it is useless and unfair to blame M.L5, whose job is purely advisory—unless, of course, it has clearly erred, as in its failure to discover that Dr. Pontecorvo had a near relative in the Communist Party. This failure has been publicly admitted by the Minister of Supply, who had previously said that Pontecorvo had been " screened several times in the past few years with particularly satisfactory results." But let us remember that M.I.5's "successes," if they get known, sometimes cause greater uproar than its failures, as in the case of the Sheffield Peace Congress.
Its counter-espionage work is confined to Great Britain, though it works closely with the Secret Service section of the Foreign Office. No one, except perhaps the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury and the Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign .Affairs, knows its numerical strength or the names of its members. But we all know that its head is Sir Percy Sillitoe, successively Chief Constable of Chesterfield, East Riding, Sheffield,-Glasgow, and Kent ; and anyone who studies the Service Estimates may learn that in 1950-51 it is to cost the taxpayer £3,000,000.
This figure in the Estimates is not open to challenge or discussion: it is passed automatically. Parliamentary questions about M.I.5 are seldom permitted by the Speaker. ' When they are, it is the Prime Minister himself (and not, for example, the Secretary for Wail who gets up to say " No, sir." The Speaker has repeatedly ruled that " a Minister is always entitled to refuse to answer a question on our Secret Service,, which he thinks may affect security." Some members of the House never tire of trying. Typically, " Is there any way for members to get information about this very sinister police force ? ", asked Mr. Gallagher on March 17th, 1948. "No, sir," said the Prime Minister.
Its sinister attributes are, for the most part, the projections of coat-trailing journalism. Could anything be more sinister than a military organisation which, whatever you say about it and however loudly, not only ignores what you say but probably types your name on a little card and puts it away for reference ? . Yet one likes to think that M.I.5 is sometimes amused. Not long ago I read in an article that service in M.I.5 was not only an irksome and unwelcome break in many a military career, but a frequent form of " light duty " prescribed for officers convalescent after sickness. I remem- ber hoping that M.I.5 permitted itself a short laugh when it read this. But I cannot guess what it may have felt about another article which disclosed that neither its salaries nor its expenses are ever paid by cheque and that " accordingly " it pays no income tax.
Most responsible citizens now accept the necessity for a highly- secret counter-espionage service. The T.U.C. itself, in 1948, rejected (narrowly, and on a card vote) a Civil Service resolution expressing "profound concern" that purged -Whitehall staff were not being allowed to be represented when they appeared before the. Prime Minister's advisory ." Committee of Three." Any such representa- tive, it was decided by the trade-union delegates, would need to know the evidence compiled by M.I.5 and how it worked against Communists—and he would necessarily have the right to cross- examine Secret Service men.- The security of the State was involved. There is some negative comfort in the contemplation of other countries' fapped telephone lines, concealed microphones and per- manent disappearances of unsatisfactory citizens for " political re-education." And perhaps the silence of our method has its own dignity. The Americans, who invented the phrase "top secret. call their M.I.5 the Federal Bureab of Investigation and accord it Publicity on the Hollywood scale. The F.B.I. likes the limelight. Its leader, Mr. Edgar Hoover, writes copiously in magazines and broadcasts regularly. Squads of newsmen follow it around, exer- cisMg their unique krms of raillery at its frequent Press conferences. But its job is simplified by the McCarran Act, which outlaws Com- .munists anyway. Lacking any comparable -statute, lacking, in particular, the plenary powers of F.B.I. agents, M.I.5 can only " smell out" and report. True, Parliament has trom time to time heard stories of the dis- missal, under " pressure " from M.I.5, of wrongly-suspected employees from nationally-important factories ; in 1948 Mr. D. N. Pritt urged in the House of Commons that writs for slander should be issued against two M.I.5 men alleged lo have caused this. No answer was forthcoming, no writs were issued, and many M.P.s were uneasy. One would wish to see these stories officially denied, • but they are not ; believe them or not—take your choice.
"Secret Police" is now so hateful a term that we use it only in speaking of foreign systems, but M.1.5 is a police organisation operating in secrecy. Its name combines the attractions of euphemism and mysterious initials. If any of us, as Englishmen for example, find grounds for uneasiness in the banning of the Sheffield Peace Congress (and are bewildered by the variety of comment expressed in our newspapers), let us pot blame M.I.5, which is mainly a research organisation compiling and keeping up to date a kind of Dictionary of Political Biography for the use of Government Departments. M.I.5 and the Special Branch may not, to some of us, look their best in strong sunlight, but they do a difficult, necessary, thankless and vaguely-defined duty extremely well—so well, and in such queer places, that if we ever became so illiberal as to ban all our extremist political organisations, thus " forcing them underground," M.I.5 would probably get to know more about them than ever.
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