“Russia Accuses Fleet Street”: Journalists and MI6 during the Cold War

Background

On December 18, 1968, the Soviet news agency, TASS, revealed to foreign correspondents in Moscow, including those from the Times, Daily Telegraph, and Reuters, that the official newspaper of the Soviet Union, Izvestiya, and its weekly review, Nedelya, would publish articles and documents detailing the “carefully masked connections” (Lyadov and Rozin 1969) between the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6) and a number of leading British journalists. The Times on December 20, under the headline “Russia accuses Fleet Street,” reported that the aim was to demonstrate “the existence of sinister links between Fleet Street and the British secret service,” and that Britain’s free press was “a myth.”

One journalist accused by Izvestiya of being an MI6 agent was Sunday Times correspondent Henry Brandon, who responded in the Times on December 20 that the claims signified “a deterioration of Anglo-Soviet relations and a fading of the East West détente.” The context was the conflict between the British government and the Soviet Union over the presence of their diplomatic representatives in each other’s country, which eventually led in 1971 to Operation Foot and the expulsion of 105 Soviet officials from Britain (Andrew 2010; Hughes 2006). From the mid-sixties, the Security Service (MI5) had warned Whitehall about the threat posed by the presence of the many KGB officers operating under “light” diplomatic cover from their London embassy (Andrew 2010). In contrast, MI6 feared that expelling Soviet officials would create problems for its own officers operating under tighter restrictions out of the Moscow embassy (Hughes 2006).

With the freezing of relations between the two countries following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, on September 27, 1968, British Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart, raised the issue of Soviet diplomatic presence in the United Kingdom with Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who agreed to keep numbers to current levels (PREM 1968). The Soviet government countered that this “unfriendly gesture” reflected “a general hostility” to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR; Andrew 2010: 566), a view reinforced by the British announcement on December 11 that visas for Soviet diplomats would be denied until the embassy reduced the number of staff. In response, on December 19, Pravda attacked the “anti-Soviet campaign . . . dictated by the millionaire proprietors of Fleet Street,” who were “a syndicate of ideological gangsters.” This provided the context for the Izvestiya articles on MI6 and journalist agents.

On December 22, Nedelya claimed that British foreign correspondents had been recruited as “agents” and “contacts” by MI6 and published a “Special Operational” list of journalist agents classed as to their “personal qualities,” “professional possibilities,” and “places of work.” Each agent was “designated by a code symbol, alongside which was an identified MI6 officer, who was responsible for maintaining contact with the agent. Each agent is characterised in detail and how they might be used by the Service.” Nedelya noted (Lyadov and Rozin 1969: 13) that MI6 had “its people in newspapers with circulations of the millions, as well as in technical magazines dealing with construction and electronics. British intelligence agents nestle in both the Sunday Times and the shoddy People.” The documents, which included additional material on MI6’s relationship with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), were reproduced in the February 1969 edition of the East German magazine Horizont. ¹

The Telegraph reported on December 18, 1968, that its proprietor, Lord Hartwell (Michael Berry), managing editor, S. R. “Roy” Pawley, and two correspondents were on the list. Pawley, who “felt flattered,” issued a denial two days later to the Times and claimed that his intelligence contacts had ended in 1945. The Observer’s editor, David Astor, wrote on the 22nd: “It is hard to believe that Russians themselves take their own stories seriously. They should know that the only spy we have had working on the Observer—and that without our knowledge—was one of theirs—Kim Philby.” Former MI6 officer Philby had been employed by the newspaper as a “stringer” from the mid-fifties until his defection to Moscow in 1963. One Observer journalist named in the Russian article, Edward Crankshaw, dismissed it all as a “big joke” whereas former Economist journalist Brian Crozier said that it was “completely untrue.” The Guardian reported on December 21 that the “absurd story” had “caused a great deal of amusement in Fleet Street and the Foreign Office,” particularly “the reference to Lord Arran” of the Daily Mail. Listed as agent “BIN-946,” he was said to be in contact with MI6 officer Count Frederick Vanden Heuvel codenamed “Z-1.” Arran, according to Izvestiya, had helped “BIN” in “the solution of operative problems that arise and furnishes general information on questions connected with newspapers” (Lyadov and Rozin 1969: 13).

Dismissed by the British press as Soviet propaganda, the Izvestiya story soon disappeared from the news. BBC’s Chief External Services Publicity Officer, anxious that the story might develop into a wider investigation, was able to report on January 17, 1969, to senior officials in the BBC that newspapers had responded to the Arran claim with “cartoons and humorous comment” (BBC File 1969b). Deputy Head of the East European Services, Alexander Lieven, was informed on February 13 that the Chief Editor at the Daily Mirror, Edward Pickering, considered the Soviet documents to be “profoundly uninteresting” and was “determined not to spend good money on stuff containing no possible story.” When the Soviet press made further revelations in the New Year, the BBC External Services noted that “only one newspaper reported it” (BBC File 1969a).

Lieven accepted that those documents dealing with the BBC were “probably genuine” but wondered whether the lists of MI6 journalist agents were “fake.” The BBC made efforts to obtain a set of the Izvestiya documents as they thought they “might be useful one day,” and on April 24, 1969, approached Mrs. Josephine O’Connor Howe, the External Services’ contact with the Foreign Office’s propaganda unit, the Information Research Department (IRD). She, however, thought that the attempt to obtain the documents was “wrong and inadvisable,” as “any documents likely to implicate the corporation were already available to it,” thus confirming that the BBC-related documents were genuine. She added that she felt “some sympathy with IRD’s friends”—that is, MI6—for the way its activities were being exposed (BBC File 1969a).

This had been a KGB propaganda exercise but, if we ignore the ideological rhetoric, was there substance to the allegations or was the Izvestiya list a fake? This paper analyzes the list and its provenance. It scrutinizes the relationship during the cold war between MI6 and certain newspapers, and traces the intelligence ties of individual journalists and their reporting of key historical events and involvement in propaganda activities. It also identifies a number of journalists who were active players in helping to shape and frame perceptions of some of the major debates of the cold war. Robert Dover and Michael S. Goodman (2009: 58) in ‘Spooks and Hacks’ believe that

this menage a trois of spooks, hacks and the public is worthy of serious attention, because it is a relationship of great dependencies, synergies and feedback loops. Intelligence and the media—blood brothers separated at birth—operate within the realities established by the societies from which they spring. They can shape the nature and form of these societies.

Method

What has become more apparent with the opening up of archives in Russia, Britain, and the United States is that many “factual” claims in Soviet cold war propaganda publications often turn out to be accurate. Paul Maddrell (2005: 238-40), in a study of the East German publisher, Julius Mader, points out that many of the propagandist’s exposes of Western espionage in the 1950s and 1960s were “indeed true, and his works, though obviously products of an ideology, represent a valuable resource for the historians of today.” This is borne out by a study of propaganda books on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) put together in the 1950s and early 1960s by the KGB’s Department D (Deception), which handled intelligence contacts with Western newspapers. They were a mixture of diligent research of open source articles in the press and the addition of material derived from defectors (Aldrich 2013). The material took the U.S. and U.K. intelligence agencies by surprise. As Maddrell suggests, they were “telling us much that our own governments did not want us to hear” and we “surely have a right to know what secret activities the Western governments undertook during” during the cold war.

From the late 1940s to the 1960s, the KGB published Facts Accuse–type propaganda booklets throughout the Eastern Bloc detailing alleged covert activities by Western intelligence agencies against the Soviet regime. Much of our knowledge of the postwar Polish anticommunist underground known as the Freedom and Independence Movement (Wolnosc I Niepodleglosc, WIN), which was backed by the CIA and MI6, was derived from Soviet documents published in 1952 that disclosed that WIN had been from its beginning a controlled KGB operation (Grose 2000; Rositzke 1977). Similarly, accounts of CIA and MI6 exile operations in the Baltics in the late 1940s have largely been based on publications from Soviet propaganda outlets released in the 1950s and 1960s. ² In both instances, the confirmation of the Soviet versions came from CIA and MI6 officers, and from participants in these operations (Bower 1989; Dorril 2000). In referring to the Soviet publication of details of the guerrilla operation in Lithuania with which he was involved as an MI6 agent, Thomas Remeikis (1962: 32) wrote that “it is reasonable to believe that the Soviet versions are correct as far as facts, dates, names and places are concerned.”

The KGB had a history of propaganda publishing exercises but also emphasized the deployment of “dezinformatsiya” as a useful “active measure” (covert action). It employed news agencies, sympathetic newspapers abroad, courted journalists as sources, and used journalism as “cover” for intelligence officers (Andrew and Mitrokhin 2000, 2005; Bittman 1985; Rommerstein 2001; Shultz 1984). Much publicity was given in the Western press in the 1980s to these activities—though less to CIA similar operations (see Chanan 2009)—but KGB efforts in the disinformation sphere were often unsophisticated and crude. ³ L. John Martin (1982) in “Disinformation: An Instrumentality in the Propaganda Arsenal” defines disinformation as “a persuasive technique that is based on forgeries and staged events.” It is these two aspects that “distinguishes disinformation from run-of-the-mill propaganda.” In this case, the Izvestiya articles and press conference could be seen as a disinformation exercise but, I would argue, was more run-of-the-mill propaganda.

Following the escape and defection to Russia of former British MI6 officers, Kim Philby and George Blake, the KGB engaged in the late 1960s in a propaganda campaign centered on these two agents’ knowledge of MI6 operations against the Soviet Union. Revelations were clearly slanted and skewed in an effort to undermine relations between the United Kingdom and the United States (Kerr 1996), but the majority of published material—Philby’s (1967) autobiographical account, for instance—turned out to be largely accurate. There was little need for Izvestiya to create disinformation because the KGB held a treasure trove of intelligence from these agents. George Blake, who photographed all documents crossing his desk during his time with MI6, had been responsible in the late 1950s for recruiting journalist agents (Blake 1990; Hermiston 2014). The MI6 documents cited by Izvestiya were stamped “September 1959,” a date which fits with Blake’s role within the Service and, along with evidence cited below, indicates that they came from him. The identities of some of the MI6 officers named were not known in 1968 and were only confirmed many years later. Although a number of the journalists were well-known at the time, others are obscure and there was little propaganda worth in naming those involved with technical journals. Similarly, it was not until the 1980s that the BIN code system shown in the documents was acknowledged by MI6 officers, such as Anthony Cavendish (1987), as being genuine. It is possible that the documents are forgeries but other Blake-generated material has been shown to be accurate. In February 1970, Izvestiya published documents, to which Blake provided commentary, on MI6’s Y-Section bugging of foreign embassies in the fifties. An MI6 officer who served with Y-Section acknowledged that the article was correct “in virtually all details” (Davies 2004: 245).

Because of the lack of intelligence records, this is not an easy area to investigate, particularly because the archives have been, in Richard Aldrich’s phrase (Aldrich 2001), “dry-cleaned.” MI6 has never officially released any postwar documents to the National Archives, and a trawl of the records by the author and BBC’s Radio Four “Document” program, for information on the Soviet claims, drew a blank. ⁴ BBC’s file “Communist attacks on the BBC 1968-1984,” which contains most of the Soviet-generated articles on MI6 journalist agents, has been weeded and contains redactions on names of government personnel. However, the deficiency in official information should not invalidate research in this area. M. L. R. Smith (1999: 40) suggests that often “the barrier to scholarly interpretation is purely a mental hurdle that has grown up in the minds of academics, fortified by three decades of established methods of thinking.” The absence of official files becomes an excuse used to rationalize the failure to study problematic subjects. Other sources of information can be used in a way compatible with academic research and as evidence is never complete, there is a requirement for academics to assess the available material.

By using a range of sources, including research on the history of MI6, interviews with former officers, newspaper archives, and journalist memoirs, it is possible to test the validity of the Izvestiya allegations. Increasingly, newspaper archives, including the Current Digest of the Soviet (Russian) Press, are being digitalized through websites such as ProQuest’s Historical Newspapers Digital Archive, News Vault, Eastview Press, and others, which makes it easier to trace particular articles and relevant stories, and, importantly for this research, follow chronologically the work of journalists. There remain problems because the digitalization process is far from complete and often goes back only a few decades, and excludes different editions of a newspaper. However, other websites such as Newspapers.com have digitalized many local American newspapers that are a valuable research tool because they often relied on British newspapers for their foreign coverage. Journalist memoirs can be dismissed as poor sources, lacking any kind of reflection, but those by foreign correspondents, which are mostly neglected by researchers, are often rich sources of material about contacts and the background to stories. The research has been helped by the fact that in recent years, a number of correspondents have admitted to having a covert relationship with MI6 and have described it in detail (Crozier 1993; Horne 2012).

There has been interest in this subject by British investigative journalists (Knightley 2006; Leigh 2000) but little in-depth research (Keeble 2010). An exception has been the coverage by the British press of Northern Ireland during the mid-1970s. The revelations of the British Army’s senior information officer, Colin Wallace, concerning his involvement with the propaganda unit, Information Policy, and his relationship with journalists covering the “Troubles” have provided the most detailed account to date of how journalists can be used by intelligence agencies in psychological warfare campaigns (Curtis 1984; Foot 1990).

The relationship between state intelligence agencies and the media has become a subject of increasing interest to researchers (see Hess 2009, on Germany, and Magen on Israel, 2014) and there have been studies of recent operations (Iraq and Afghanistan, for example) where agencies have used journalists to promote specific information (Barker 2008; Hastedt 2005). There has been, however, little on the direct use and recruitment of foreign correspondents as agents and contacts. In contrast, the relationship between American journalists and the CIA has been scrutinized (Bernstein 1977; Johnson 1986; Loory 1974). Oliver Boyd-Barrett (2004: 436) accepts that there is “irrefutable evidence” of wide-scale, covert CIA penetration of the media in which journalistic collaboration ranged from “intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies.” A series of articles in the New York Times in December 1977 revealed that the CIA had helped to shape American foreign policy through its ownership of newspapers, news agencies, and magazines abroad as “cover” organizations. The Agency’s “Propaganda Assets Inventory” included scores of journalists working as salaried operatives while employed by newspapers, with many more who received no financial reward having close intelligence ties; twelve CIA officers operated under journalist cover (Aronson 1990). James Aronson (1990: 317) in his study of the press during the cold war suggested that American journalists who cooperated with the CIA did so out of “a myopic sense of team loyalty . . . which permitted them to discard a natural sense of scepticism about official pronouncements.” By this “guided or misguided patriotism” they had discarded their obligation to “expose all false and misleading information.”

This whole subject, however, remains a sensitive subject for the British media. Eric Downton (1987: 339), who admitted cooperating with MI6 while a Telegraph correspondent, claimed that there was little “honesty in any of the histories of the two British newspapers having the closest links with the intelligence community, the Daily Telegraph and The Times.” When the Washington Post’s London correspondent Bernard Nossiter (1978: 188) wrote that he had “observed that some British foreign correspondents are interchangeable with agents—like Philby,” he was “savaged” in the Times (December 22, 1974) by its foreign editor, Louis Heren, for “putting a gun at the head of British reporters working abroad.”

Although British journalists and intelligence officers have been remarkably tight-lipped in their willingness to discuss their co-relationship during the cold war, their American counter-parts have been generally more forthcoming. Part of this is down to cultural differences, notions of professionalism, and attitudes to secrecy. Richard J. Aldrich and John Kasuku (2012:1026; Robarge 2009) note that the United States has shown a remarkably open attitude to secrecy:

We have also witnessed a unique American public debate about the place of intelligence in American foreign policy, stretching over more than half a century. All this reflected the first amendment to the US constitution which, despite significant caveats, has facilitated a uniquely open approach to the discussion of intelligence in the American broadsheet press . . . It remains unusual for US journalists to face legal action for writing about intelligence, and it remains easier for most foreign journalists to cover US intelligence than to discuss the secret agencies of their own countries.

When it comes to dealing with the intelligence services, U.K. newspaper proprietors, editors, and journalists have been all too ready to cooperate with the prepublication, semi-official “censorship” of the D-Notice system (Wilkinson 2009). When this author asked a Guardian foreign correspondent why he did not reveal to readers that his “businessman” source on events in Iran in 1979 was a former MI6 officer once based in Tehran (Desmond Harney), he was told that the British did not do that sort of thing (Dorril 2000: 744–45).

Fortunately, attitudes are changing and Paul Lashmar (2013) has detailed some of the institutional links and the ways British journalists collaborate—or collude—with contacts in the intelligence services. He cites the example of David Rose, former home affairs editor of the Observer and the paper’s “accredited” intermediary with MI6. When he met his contact, Rose was instructed to pretend that the meetings had “never happened.” His attribution to a source was to be so vague that no one would realize he had talked to the Service. The penalty for breaching these conditions was to “expect instant darkness: the refusal of all future access.” ⁵ In a competitive U.K. newspaper market, failing to get the story has major consequences for the reporter concerned. The delivering and the withholding of information puts power in the hands of MI6, particularly as it is acknowledged that the Service has been the most difficult one for media to engage with. MI6 says that it only deals with journalists who have a reputation for “discretion and professionalism” (Intelligence and Security Committee 2005: 31–32, 81). Senior American journalists are much more used to citing CIA sources and retired officers by name.

In 1985, in Media, Culture & Society, Morrison and Tumber wrote that academic studies of foreign correspondents were “rare.” Twenty-five years later, John Maxwell Hamilton and Regina G. Lawrence (2010: 632–33) make the point in Journalism Studies that “journalism historians as well as historians in general do very little work on foreign reporting.” There is even less on the intelligence–journalism relationship even though there are, as Dover and Goodman (2009b) argue, similarities between the working methods of the two groups:

The cultivation of sources and of trust, small payments to smooth passing of information, or betrayal of an asset’s employers, and surveillance and interception—these are common to both professions. The difference between the two is clearly wrapped up in questions of structure and scale.

And also regarding time, journalists are generally looking at the present; intelligence is often concerned with the long term.

There have been studies of the Foreign Office’s cold war propaganda unit, the Information Research Department (IRD), and its structural relationship with magazines and other cultural outlets (Lashmar and Oliver 1999), but a limited number dealing with its relationship with journalists and newspapers, though it is of major importance as IRD relied on the news media to push its anti-Communist agenda with anti-Soviet articles distributed overseas. Evidence of IRD political warfare operations using journalist assets and news agency “fronts” during the “Confrontation” with Indonesia in the 1960s has been published (Easter 2012). In addition, there are two pioneering works: Richard Fletcher’s (1982) study of the manipulation of the press through IRD and the intelligence-sponsored news agencies, and John Jenks’ (2006) British Propaganda and News Media in the Cold War, which deals with the immediate postwar period (1945-1950). There remains, however, limited research on the press and journalist relationship with MI6.

MI6 and Journalists

At the end of the Second World War, there took place a debate inside MI6 on how to gather intelligence inside the Soviet Union with officers viewing journalists as ideal agents as they had “natural cover” (West 2009b: 120–30). MI6 hoped the Soviets would become less suspicious of journalists as possible agents. The Izvestiya documents identified the MI6 sections that coordinated journalist recruitment. The Controller Production Research (C/PR), sources confirm, was set up in 1948 to arrange “cover for an agent” with “a British firm or organization,” and to seek assistance from U.K. citizens traveling to the Soviet Union (Bower 1995: 159, 184). C/PR was responsible for the Z-network of journalist agents, sympathetic newspaper proprietors, and subsidized news agencies run by Count Vanden Heuvel (Jeffrey 2010; West 1998). When Anthony Cavendish (1987: 20) entered the Service in 1948, he discovered from Vanden Heuvel that “a number of MI6 agents were sent abroad as journalists. The Kemsley Press [owner of the Sunday Times] allowed many of its foreign correspondents to co-operate with MI6 and even took on MI6 operatives as foreign correspondents.” One Kemsley employee on the Soviet list was Andrew MacKenzie (“BIN01/B”), the London correspondent of the Sheffield Telegraph and author of spy and crime novels. ⁶

The Sunday Times Foreign News Service was managed by former Naval Intelligence Department (NID) officer, Ian Fleming, who controlled a network of 80 foreign correspondents. Fleming had enjoyed a relationship with MI6 since the 1930s when a Reuters correspondent in Moscow covering the Metropolitan-Vickers trial. In 1951, he wrote to a former NID colleague that he was “engaged throughout the year in running a worldwide intelligence organisation and . . . [and] carry out a number of tasks on behalf of a department of the Foreign Office” (i.e., MI6; West 2009: xxiv, xxv).

Former MI6 officers have confirmed that C/PR controlled the London Station (codenamed BIN) that organized anti-Soviet operations run from the United Kingdom (Davies 2004). Izvestiya claimed (Lyadov and Rozin 1969) that a sub-unit, “BIN/CO-ORD”—headed by a veteran officer, Edward Boxshall—was involved in “the use of the British press.” Its remit was confirmed by Nicholas Elliott (Bower 1995: 184)—MI6’s contact with Fleming (West 2009a: 72)—who, in 1956, persuaded the Observer and the Economist to employ Philby as a journalist “stringer” in the Middle East.

An alleged MI6 document cited by Izvestiya, “Contacts with British Governmental and Other Non-Intelligence Institutions and Organizations” (Lyadov and Rozin 1969: 12), claimed that another desk, “SPA/PROP,” was responsible for “exercising political guidance over long-term planning of all propaganda operations . . . for whose conduct Her Majesty’s Government must not be accused.” The Special Political Action and Propaganda section, was created in 1953 in the aftermath of Operation BOOT and the joint CIA/MI6 overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh, and carried out “political measures,” which included “the publication of newspapers and books,” and the “operational” use of journalists (Davies 2004: 227–28).

MI6 and Journalist Agents

George Blake (1990) revealed in his memoirs that in the late fifties, MI6, lacking sources inside the Soviet Union, transformed the Controller of Production into an “agent-running organization,” headed by Arthur Franks (“BIN-51”). As the C/PR deputy, Blake (“BIN01/A”) recruited journalists as “agents” or “contacts,” provided his own officers with “cover,” set information-gathering targets, and paid agents via secret bank accounts. Former CIA Chief William Colby made a distinction between a “controlled agent”—whose loyalty was more to the agency than the newspaper—and a “contact”—who remained loyal to the newspaper (Johnson 1986). An alleged journalist used by MI6 as a “potential source of information and operative data about the USSR” (Lyadov and Rozin 1969) was “Henry Brandon” of the Sunday Times. His former editor, Harold Evans, ⁷ dismissed such claims, though the paper’s intelligence specialist, Phillip Knightley, ⁸ accepted that Brandon was an MI6 “asset.”

An agent may have a long-term relationship with the Service that will involve a handler or case officer who sets requirements that may involve regular payments, whereas an asset or contact is likely to be used on specific projects without any payment or, if there is, only on an occasional basis. Journalist and author, Norman Lewis, who served with the wartime Field Security Sections, was employed by the Sunday Times. According to his biographer, Lewis’ reporting from Cuba at the time of the revolution in the late 1950s was undertaken at the instigation of MI6’s Tim Frenken, a one-time member of the wartime Z-Organization (Evans 2009). A “stringer” used the journalist tag as cover to gather information for the Service while carrying out journalist duties. Lee Tracey was an MI6 operative during the 1950s, who was employed at the Service’s behest by the Daily Mirror as a photographer and journalist but filed few stories. ⁹

Oscar Brandeis (Henry Brandon) moved to Britain in 1938 with the exiled Czechoslovak government and served as a war correspondent on the Sunday Times and as its Chief American Correspondent until 1983. Colleague Godfrey Hodgson acknowledged that Brandon was “well-equipped for social success in the Georgetown dinners where diplomats, journalists and intelligence officials mingled . . . [He] knew how to smelt the scrap of dinner-table gossip.” ¹⁰ He was close to Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who trusted the newspaperman to report fairly (Hersh 1982). However, on May 9, 1969, with Richard Nixon in a rage over damaging leaks to the press about the secret bombing of Cambodia, the President’s National Security advisor urged the FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, to tap the telephones of four journalists, including Brandon, who “had been tapped in previous administrations” (FBI Files 1971–73; Reeves 2002: 86). Hoover briefed Nixon (State Department File 2005, June 1974) that Kissinger regularly visited the home of Brandon, who “had connections with an allied foreign intelligence service.”

Izvestiya claimed that Michael Berry (“BIN-943”), Daily Telegraph’s proprietor from 1954 and created a peer [Lord Hartwell] in 1968, was useful for “not only transmitting necessary information” but also for “winning support and sanction at a high level.” Another alleged MI6 document, “The Utilization of Employees of British Firms and Newspapers Abroad by British Intelligence” warned that “when actions are taken without the knowledge of the directors of newspaper in question, it is probable that valuable possibilities and intelligence information will be overlooked.” Permission had to be sought from newspaper proprietors if MI6 wanted to make use of a journalist. Other agents on the Telegraph included Roy Pawley, whose “services and zeal” were highly valued by MI6, and who was “entrusted with . . . the transmission of money to agents and arrangements of cover for other British intelligence agents such as former Reuter’s correspondent, Tom Harris, in Sweden, Michael Field in Bangkok” (Lyadov and Rozin 1969: 13). Pawley had worked in press censorship and postwar managed Telegraph’s foreign news with direct access to the paper’s proprietor (Faulks 1997; Lycett 1995). One Telegraph correspondent, the Canadian, Eric Downton, employed in the wartime Naval Intelligence Division with Fleming, acknowledged his own recruitment by MI6 and witnessed in Vienna colleagues, such as Gordon Shepherd, being used as information gatherers by MI6’s George Kennedy Young (Downton 1987).

Senior Telegraph journalist and wartime MI6 officer, Malcolm Muggeridge, admitted to journalist Alan Watkins (1982) that he worked part-time for MI6 and helped his contact, Dick Brooman-White, provide journalist cover (Bright-Holmes 1981). In 1949, Intelligence Corps captain Dennis Bloodworth was vetted by MI6 for a journalist post in Paris with the Observer, after Muggeridge spoke to the paper’s editor, David Astor (Jenks 2001; Muggeridge 1949). Muggeridge was also “a valuable ally” to future historian Alistair Horne (2011: 108), who had no qualms about his role as an MI6 agent while a Telegraph journalist. In 1946, he had served under Maurice Oldfield in the Security Intelligence Middle East organization and when, in the fifties, he joined the Telegraph, Oldfield—now a senior MI6 officer—provided him with briefings on the Soviet Union. Horne was posted to Berlin in 1953, after Pawley had been approached by Oldfield, who thought that, because “as a journalist, you have perfect cover,” he could handle MI6’s German assets who were spying on their own government. Horne regarded the information he helped smuggle out as “helpfully complementary to what I was able to garner as a journalist” (Horne 2011: 139–42).

Michael Field had been recruited by Philby to the wartime Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley to analyze radio intercepts and was employed postwar as a stringer for the Times, covering South American “coups.” The Times obituarist (June 17, 2003: 30) noted that “Whether Field retained his Intelligence links during the rest of his career has not been revealed, but he certainly was present in many key areas of international tension.” The Press Gazette (June 6, 2003) pointed out that “much of what he knew went unpublished.” In 1956, Field was posted by the Telegraph to Hanoi, whose MI6 station officer, Derek Davies, later became editor of the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review, which he turned into “the window on Asia.” ¹¹ Posted in 1962 to Bangkok, Field developed a close friendship with the Cambodian ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, and published a government-backed magazine. That same year, MI6’s specialist on South-East Asian affairs, Donald Lancaster, was appointed secretary to Sihanouk. ¹² The year before, Lancaster had published The Emancipation of French Indo-China, praised by the Saigon government for “dealing with the contemporary history of Vietnam as a whole” (Truong-Buu-Lamm 1963). Field’s (1965) memoir, The Prevailing Wind, argued against American policy in the region and was praised by the Journal of Southeast Asian History (Leifer 1966: 46) for understanding the context of “the resurgence of a united China determined to remove the Western presence from what is regarded as her legitimate sphere of influence.” Field later covered Latin America and reported on the Falklands War from Buenos Aires.

Izvestiya claimed (Lyadov and Rozin 1969: 13) that MI6 established a “good alliance” at the Observer with the Editor, David Astor (“BIN 183”), and journalist Mark Arnold-Forster (“BIN 110”) and Soviet specialist Edward Crankshaw (“BIN 120”), who had been “used during his journey to the Soviet Union [and had] a very long record of such work.” Crankshaw thought that either Philby or Blake was behind the article that was “a big joke.” In the Times (December 20, 1968), Astor called the report “nonsense” and Arnold-Forster described it as “rubbish.”

Astor had been turned down by MI6 for a wartime post, though he helped it establish contact with members of the German opposition with whom he had links. In 1944, he worked with a unit liaising between the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the resistance in France (Dorril 2000). In 1947, Astor was appointed editor of the Observer, where he employed Terence Kilmartin, who had worked for the MI6-sponsored Arab radio station, Sharq Al-Adna (Boyd 2003), to run the Observer’s Foreign News Service (which later received subventions from the “secret vote”).^13,14

Mark Arnold-Forster’s uncle, Christopher, had been Assistant Director of Naval Intelligence during the war and served as MI6’s Chief Staff Officer on its postwar Reorganisation Committee (West 1998). Mark commanded a flotilla of Motor Torpedo Boats (MTB) and, in 1946, joined the Guardian as its correspondent in Germany, where his “mentor” [Sir] Charles Wheeler had commanded the Naval Intelligence Forward Intelligence Unit, which recruited naval officers as agents in the Soviet zone (Dorril 2000: 112). Replaced by MI6’s George Blake, Wheeler became BBC’s European External Service liaison officer in Berlin, where Arnold-Forster stuck out, Wheeler recalled in the Independent (October 23, 2006: 10), “because one had the feeling . . . that the stories he was writing were not those others were chasing. He would go off to pursue a subject on his own.” Wheeler admitted that he himself had received intelligence on “cyclostyled sheets of information” about East Germany, which he forwarded to BBC’s German Service. Colleagues accused him of being “a propagandist” but he denied the charge and claimed that he only gave the intelligence service information on one occasion (Nelson 1997).

In 1954, Arnold-Forster returned to MI6 to command a MTB operation infiltrating Latvian agents into the Caucasus but the operation was a disaster, as the exiles had been infiltrated by the KGB and had informed the Soviet authorities in advance of the mission. ¹⁵ He joined the Observer in 1957, specializing in German affairs, and then the Guardian in 1963. A close friend of Tony Benn, the British Labour Cabinet Minister’s growing suspicion of Arnold-Forster’s continuing intelligence ties is strikingly revealed in successive editions of his diaries (Benn 1987–89).

Edward Crankshaw was of particular interest to the Soviets because “he is used to obtain intelligence information, and also to carry out other intelligence assignments.” An alleged MI6 document, “The Moscow Correspondent of the Observer,” detailed preparations to send a new correspondent to the Soviet Union (Lyadov and Rozin 1969: 13). One Observer correspondent posted to Moscow was Mark Frankland (1999), an MI6 officer who had rejected the world of “boyish tricks and thuggery, stealth and deceit.” His acknowledged “mentor” at the Observer was Crankshaw. Frankland denied being a journalist agent, though he was, in 1985, singled out for expulsion by the Soviets.

Crankshaw had wartime contacts with MI6 having served with the Y-Service as a signals intelligence officer and on assignment in 1943 to Bletchley Park as a Russian specialist (HW 50/11; HW 61/37, 1942). In 1947, he became the Observer’s correspondent in Moscow, where he lived with the artist T. S. Andriyevskaya, who, a year later, was accused of being a British spy, forced to confess, and sent to a labor camp, with her ultimate fate unknown (Andrew and Mitrokhin 2000). For twenty years, Crankshaw kept watch on the Soviet Union but he was not a simplistic cold war warrior; he had a genuine love of Russia—believing it had been corrupted by Stalinism—and disliked those “Kremlinologists” who viewed Soviet actions only in conspiratorial terms.

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, the Foreign Office tasked MI6 with helping interpret events in the Soviet Union. This required gathering more intelligence from Russia, but MI6 had few agents in place and so asked the Telegraph to cooperate. The newspaper posted Eric Downton to Moscow and arranged a briefing by an MI6 officer. Downton (1987: 326–29, 342–43) was told by Roy Pawley that Lord Camrose and Michael Berry had approved his employment by MI6:

I had known that many of my colleagues, especially those with wartime intelligence experience, kept in close touch with the British embassies’ intelligence personnel in the areas of their assignments. But I had not realised how extensively and systematically MI6 utilized the British news media with the knowledge and co-operation of its senior executives and proprietors.

Downton’s MI6 contact was Press Attache Hubert O’Bryan Tear, a former SOE officer who had served postwar in Germany, training Ukraine exiles for anti-Soviet operations (West 2010). Through an “indiscretion” on Tear’s part, Downton (1987: 343) learnt that the previous Moscow Sunday Times representative, Cyril Ray, had also been involved in “the journalist-agent thing.”

MI6-Journalist Operations

According to MI6’s George Kennedy Young, in the mid-fifties “after a series of informal supper parties with the brightest SIS officers, a systematic study was started of the top Soviet power structure, its various personalities and cliques, and their associates in the KGB.” ¹⁶ With the support of George Blake, Nigel Clive set up a group of Soviet experts, including Professor Leonard Schapiro, a wartime MI5 officer, whose book, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy (1955), established him as “a penetrating critic of the Soviet regime.” ¹⁷ As head of Russian Studies at the London School of Economics, Schapiro enlisted Soviet studies experts to help MI6 (Reddaway 1984). “The results,” claimed Young, “changed the whole emphasis in tackling Russian targets, produced expert briefings for potential sources and for the interrogation of deserters and defectors.”(p. 16) The first fruit of Schapiro’s work came in 1956 with the visit to Britain of Soviet ex-premier, Georgi Malenkov.

An article appeared in the Daily Mail on February 10, 1956, prior to the 20th Communist Party Congress, written by another journalist on the Izvestiya list (Lyadov and Rozin 1969), foreign editor Walter Farr (“BIN 943”). Based on “carefully checked information reaching London,” Farr wrote that “the struggle between Khrushchev [the new Soviet leader] and Malenkov is flaring again” with Congress delegates “split” over the way forward for Russia. In March, the Observer’s Moscow correspondent, John Rettie, was approached by a Russian contact, Kostya Orlov, whom he suspected worked for the KGB. Orlov told him about Khrushchev’s denunciation of the horrors of Stalin’s rule at a secret February 25 Congress session, details of which, Rettie smuggled out to Reuters. ¹⁸ Supplied with evidence of a split within the Soviet leadership, MI6, according to Robert Service, “cooked up a scheme for the Daily Mail to publish a false report of an internal Kremlin coup against the post-Stalin reformers.” ¹⁹ Schapiro wanted to use Malenkov’s British interpreter, the academic, Harold Shukman, “to tempt Malenkov to seek asylum in London rather than return to Moscow, where he could risk arrest .” (p. 19)

On March 19, Farr wrote in the Daily Mail (p.1) that “a sudden change of plan yesterday by Mr Malenkov is believed to be directly connected with political upheavals in the Kremlin.” Malenkov had hurried back for talks with the Deputy Foreign Minister, Mr. Gromyko, about the leakage of Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin speech: “Western experts regard the speech and the timing of its leakage as striking evidence of growing ferment in the Kremlin. They believe, too, that Mr Khrushchev may have gone too far in attacking Stalin.” According to Shukman’s son, an MI6 officer gave his father a copy of a Mail front page, titled “Four of Malenkov’s men disappear in Moscow,” which they wanted him to read out to Malenkov but he declined to be part of the skullduggery and the planted story never appeared. ²⁰ However, a Mail article was published on July 10, 1957, by Farr, who wrote that an offer of asylum had been made to Malenkov—now purged from the Politburo—in March of the previous year. When questioned as to the source of this claim, Farr declined to comment. ²¹

The text of Khrushchev’s speech leaked out through Poland, whose communist party had received copies (Rettie 2006). Polish journalist Victor Grayevsky handed one to the Israeli Embassy, which in April forwarded it to Israeli intelligence, which then transmitted the document to the CIA’s James Angleton, the Agency’s chief liaison with Israel. ²² He, in turn, provided a version to the New York Times. On June 7, at an Observer editorial meeting, Edward Crankshaw “modestly mentioned that he had obtained complete transcripts of Khrushchev’s speech.” As Rettie (2006) notes, “Exactly how he obtained it is not recorded.” Three days later, the full twenty-six thousand words were published in the paper.

It is often stated that the contemporary activities of intelligence agencies, and British intelligence in particular, cannot be studied because by their nature, they are very secretive and there is no material to study. However, this author has argued (Dorril 2000) that there is—as this paper illustrates—much more in the public domain than is realized and that intelligence agencies are heavily engaged with the press. There is, as Derek E. Miller (2010: 719) suggests, a “conversation” going on, even if it is not directly visible and is hidden behind anonymous sources.

Although MI6 was officially tasked with political intelligence gathering, it also had a propaganda role much in line with Herman and Chomsky’s (1988) five-filter model. Their model claims that the press relies heavily on official sources from government/state agencies that are aggressive in promoting a favorable version of their activities. Such sources are journalistically “routine” but intelligence sources are, as Boyd-Barrett (2004: 445) acknowledges, a “departure” from the routine in that they are privileged because of the aura of secrecy that surrounds such material. Due to its uniqueness, journalists, editors, and newspapers often depart from the standard practice of balancing one source against another or the attempt to secure additional verification. Often there develops a cozy relationship between individual journalists and intelligence sources with a controlled trade-off between support and access to information. Some journalists go well beyond, or rather against the call of duty, in their collaboration. This is, suggests Boyd-Barrett, the additional sixth filter to the propaganda model—the “buying out” of journalists or their employers by intelligence agencies.

MI6 had significant involvement in “agenda setting” (Herman and Chomsky 1988) during the early stages of the Vietnam War. Through its journalist assets and the use of secret briefings which included privileged access to intelligence specialists it set about “framing” (Goffman 1986) the debate on the war, its origins, direction, and significance for the region and cold war policy generally. Drawing on the work of Richard C. Stanton (2007: 193–94), it can be seen that the use of disguised intelligence sources, which were seen as “credible” by journalists, allowed MI6 to shape, define, and “force all interpretation of issues and events into a narrow frame.” The audience was not only the British public but also American officials and politicians who took a strident line on the influence of the Soviet and Chinese communist governments in directing the war.

Crankshaw was responsible for groundbreaking articles in the Observer on the Moscow meeting in November 1960 of world communist parties, which witnessed a serious deterioration in Chinese/Soviet relations, and led to an intense debate within Western intelligence about the reality of the split: “There has come into our hands,” Crankshaw wrote in the Observer (February 12 and 19, Charles, 1961: 1), “a fully-documented report of the charges and counter charges between Peking and Moscow . . . this report, which contains detailed summaries of hitherto secret correspondence, came from a satellite source.” ²³ These articles were highly regarded by Kremlin watchers (Ford 1998-99; Griffiths 1962) and were quoted in 1961 in the CIA-sponsored China Quarterly (Macfarquhar 1995) in an article “The Dismissal of Marshal P’eng Teh-huai,” by “David A. Charles.” The author argued that the rift developed following P’eng’s dismissal in 1959 for “intriguing” with the Soviet leader. “Charles” was, in fact, MI6 officer Frank Rendle, the central figure in a factional clash within MI6 and the CIA over the Sino-Soviet split (Dorril 2000: 713–14). Was the split real, which Rendle believed, or was it a deception to confuse Western governments, as stated by the CIA’s James Angleton?

This doctrinal dispute was played out in the press in secret briefings to select journalists. In 1963, Crankshaw produced The New Cold War: Moscow v. Peking. The following year, Mao against Khrushchev: A Short History of the Sino-Soviet Conflict by Telegraph’s communist specialist and one-time MI6 employee, David Floyd, and published by the CIA-backed Praeger press, argued that the “monolith solidarity” of the past had ended and that “each Communist Party, each Communist-controlled country must be studied individually and treated individually .” (back page) The MI6 officer dealing with Rendle’s analysis, Nigel Clive, officially pronounced the split genuine and passed details on to the foreign editor of the Economist, Brian Crozier (1993: 55–59), identified by Izvestiya (Lyadov and Rozin 1969) as a journalist who “provides cover for the agents on brief assignments abroad, and furnishes intelligence information from time to time.”

Crozier’s obituary in the Guardian (August 11, 2012) portrayed him as “a political vigilante who unashamedly cultivated a close, mutually beneficial, relationship with MI6.” As a Reuters correspondent in Saigon, he exchanged information with MI6’s Donald Lancaster, who helped him in 1954 to obtain his position at the Economist (Crozier 1993). Crozier’s source for “occasional scoops,” Frank Rendle, gave him access to the Service’s analytic staff that led in 1965 to his book, South-East Asia in Turmoil, a pro-MI6 view of Vietnam that claimed that there was “little evidence of direct Chinese Communist involvement in the so-called ‘liberation’ movements in the area.” A year later, he wrote an MI6-sponsored “Background Book,” The Struggle for the Third World (Crozier 1993: 55–59).

Crankshaw was identified in KGB files brought to the West by Vasili Mitrokhin (Andrew and Mitrokhin 2000) as a particular target of the Soviets. In 1968, he had let fly with a series of anti-Soviet articles in his “Russia Today” column: “KGB Turns the Clock Back to Stalin” (February 11), “Another Nail in the Coffin of World Revolution” (May 10), “The Cold Soviet Aggression Was the Expression of a Crisis in the Soviet Union” (August 25), “The Soviet Dinosaur Is Stuck in the Swamp—and Dying” (September 1). These articles infuriated Soviet leaders and the KGB tried various methods to intimidate him, including blackmail over his sexual liaisons in Moscow, where he had been photographed engaged in “sexual frolics.” KGB head Yuri Andropov sanctioned an operation to make the photographs public but, according to Mitrokhin (Andrew and Mitrokhin 2000: 529-31), this was abandoned when it became clear that Crankshaw would not succumb to threats. In December 1968, the Soviets released the Izvestiya list, where Crankshaw featured prominently but, by then, he had retired from the Observer.

Conclusion

Oliver Boyd-Barrett (2004: 448) suggests that we need to peer into the “black box” if we are to seek confirmation of the secret operational transactions that occur for the implementation of Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model. This paper has shown that it is possible to shed light on the darkness. It has confirmed that there is in the manipulation of the public opinion and the use of propaganda, a degree of fusion between state and news media practices that goes beyond everyday dynamics, and that Boyd-Barrett’s sixth filter, the “buying out” of journalists or employers by intelligence agencies, is a necessary addition to the propaganda model.

There is sufficient evidence in the public domain from journalists’ own memoirs, archives, diaries, and intelligence-derived material to suggest that the Izvestiya list is reliable and is based on MI6 files that Blake handed over to the KGB. The published names from the list (see the appendix) were a fraction of a larger list of journalist agents that was displayed at the Izvestiya press conference but not released. It possibly still resides in the KGB archives.

There is the question about the precise nature of the journalist ties to MI6. Were the files based on casual contacts and exaggerated in the recording (a not unknown practice)? Was there a legitimate relationship as might occur when a journalist seeks information from an intelligence service, or did they record accurately the running of a journalist as an agent? Clearly, there were journalists who would dispute the term agent and would class their role as that of news-gatherer, their contact being purely professional. There were, however, journalists who had an MI6 handler, and were provided with tasks and received payment. Newspaper proprietors cooperated with MI6 and allowed the use of their journalists for assignments, intelligence gathering, and for publishing very specific intelligence-related articles. As Philip Knightley wrote in the Guardian (May 24, 2008: 17), “All this could have been considered just a bit of James Bondish fun, but for the fact that it entitles every foreign security service to believe that all British journalists working abroad must be spies.”

The above study has touched on only a small area but, hopefully, it opens up possibilities for more wide-ranging studies of the press–intelligence relationship, including researched histories of individual journalists and newspapers, and their relationship with intelligence. It is known that the main target of MI6 recruitment was journalists covering the Middle East. In the late 1940s, Hector McNeil, a Foreign Office minister liaising with MI6, assured Cyrus Sulzberger (1969: 412, 654) of the New York Times that British intelligence “only hires journalists in the Middle East.” To date, there have been no studies of the journalist–intelligence relationship in Africa during the period of decolonization and little on the Far East during the cold war. Similarly, there is limited research on the precise role MI6-subsidized news agencies (see Fletcher 1982; Jenks 2001) played in key events such as the Iran coup of 1953 and Suez—an internal CIA study (Calhoun 2007) refers to “the secret British disinformation effort” against Nasser and American policy—partly because files relating to more than a dozen agencies have been held back from the National Archive (Lancaster 1961).

It is unlikely that MI6 will make available such files but if researchers venture outside of the traditional archives and dig deep into material in the public domain, particularly given the increasing availability of digital newspaper archives, then we might be able to sketch out a more precise picture of what role the press did play during the cold war, and its significance in terms of state-related propaganda activities in shaping and framing debate and policies, and also during the “War on Terror” and current conflicts in the Middle East.