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This chapter describes the prewar and wartime formation of the British intelligence community in the Middle East, tracing its informality to the particular circumstances in which it was formed, and describes its various diplomatic, military, and civilian participants. It explains how this community was inducted into the formal intelligence and military establishments of the war, and how they and the institutions they developed, including the Arab Bureau, continued to defy bureaucratic discipline. Finally, it explains how their task expanded to include spying on their Arab allies, in anticipation of peacetime arrangements. As their brief as intelligence agents widened, they laid the foundation for a postwar covert empire in which intelligence agents would wield executive power.

This chapter traces the ‘making of MI5’, outlining its activities, policies and priorities (particularly those which are of later significance, such as its focus on the ‘Communist threat’) in the period prior to 1931. The chapter outlines the growth and development of MI5 from a fairly small base during the 1930s and introduces some of the leading MI5 officers, such as Sir Vernon Kell, Guy Liddell, Dick White and Roger Hollis, who subsequently play a part in the narrative. The chapter is based on secondary sources, such as the official histories of MI5 by John Curry (1946) and Christopher Andrew (2010) and the unofficial ones like the memoirs of Stella Rimington (2002) as well as Nigel West's Mask (2005)

This chapter details the further changes in H. L. A. Hart's life following the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1940 Herbert began working for MI5. He was assigned to B division, which was the core of MI5. It was concerned with counter-espionage, running surveillance, and investigation operations which aimed to prevent espionage and identify spies within the UK. Most important of all, B Division developed and operated the highly successful ‘Double Cross’ system through which strategically damaging misinformation was fed back to Germany by double agents.

This chapter, drawing on intelligence files declassified in 2006, considers the involvement of Britain’s Security Service, MI5, in monitoring the circulation of Soviet films in Britain in the 1930s, with particular reference to Kino Films. Kino was an organisation first established in Britain in 1933 as the film section of the Workers’ Theatre Movement, and distributed films ranging from the works of major Soviet directors to a variety of propagandistic news films. In 1931 MI5 assumed the lead responsibility for monitoring domestic political subversion. With the increasing circulation of communist agitational material through Britain, cultural institutions overtly sympathetic to the Soviet Union or suspected of covert links to communist organisations were subjected to MI5 surveillance. The chapter details how Kino operated as a key organization disseminating Soviet cinema through Britain in the 1930s, and how MI5 reacted to the use of cinema as a medium of pro-Soviet propaganda.

This chapter examines Spooks (BBC 1, 2002-11), procedural spy series focused on MI5. Widely understood as British television’s primary dramatic response to the ‘war on terror’, this chapter conversely traces the series’ substantial development prior to 9/11. Spooks is characterised as epitomising trends in the deregulated era of British television, commissioned as part of an investment in cutting-edge new drama to assert BBC 1’s competitiveness in the multi-channel landscape, and developed by the independent production company Kudos Film and Television. Responding to ‘openness’ drives by the real MI5, this reworked the spy series according to the tradition of the precinct drama, situating national security activities within the familiarised culture of the workplace family. This chapter argues that, through self-consciously challenging attitudes to headline issues the series demonstrated continuity with earlier radical BBC traditions, but this was tamed by its procedural format and stylised aesthetics.

The introduction outlines the overall subject of the book: the surveillance of anti-Nazi refugees from Hitler's Germany by MI5 during the period 1933–1950. It broaches the major themes pursued in the narrative, such as the distinction between ‘racial’ and ‘political’ refugees and MI5’s preoccupation with the surveillance of Communist refugees throughout the 1930s and 1940s. It also evaluates the scope and content of intelligence in the security files which furnish the subject-matter of the book, including the files relating to the major refugee organisations – the Free German League of Culture, the Austrian Centre and the Czech Refugee Trust Fund. The introduction also poses the question: why has this extensive MI5 operation hitherto remained hidden from history?

This chapter reconstructs MI5's surveillance of the Karl Otten group (nicknamed ‘The Primrose League’) an informal network of anti-Nazi refugees who ran an information service on developments in Nazi Germany which was penetrated by the MI5 agent Claud W. Sykes, an author of aviation fiction. Sykes's initial contact was made on the pretext of his work as the translator of Karl Otten's novels. The case unfolds like a spy thriller, illuminating the attitudes of both MI5 and German émigrés during the Munich crisis of 1938. The chapter also points forward: both Sykes and Otten were eventually recruited to the security services, Sykes becoming an MI5 officer, while Otten was recruited to a clandestine department of the Foreign Office which became the Special Operations Executive.

This chapter references MI5's preoccupation with the Communist threat', tracing its surveillance of leading Communist refugees such as the composer and musicologist Ernst Hermann Meyer, the statistician Jürgen Kuczynski (and other members of his family, including his father, Robert, his wife and his sisters), the journalist Margaret Mynatt and the photographer – and Soviet spy – Edith Tudor-Hart, whose espionage career is little known, although it was she who first talent-spotted Kim Philby. The chapter discusses those who came relatively early, like Meyer, Mynatt and Kuczynski, stressing their English connections, before introducing those who came later, in 1938-39, under the auspices of the Czech Refugee Trust Fund.

This chapter reviews the place of intelligence in post-Second World War Official Histories (and some analogous productions) and the current ‘state of the art’, as represented by the recent Official (or ‘authorised’) Histories of the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). It concludes that Official Histories should only be a starting point, a kind of brush-clearing exercise, upon which others can build and which others can use to apply more sophisticated (and less theoretically impoverished) analyses of the matters concerned.

This short chapter links Part I and Part II, giving a brief overview of political developments in 1938-39 as the background to the growing ‘refugee crisis’, i.e. the growing number of refugees leaving Greater Germany – and the greater number choosing Britain as a place of refuge. A key group, in the eyes of MI5, were the political refugees, mainly Germans and Austrians, who escaped from Czechoslovakia following the German annexation, arriving in Britain under the auspices of the Czech Refugee Trust Fund – such as John Heartfield and Wilhelm Koenen – whom MI5 wished to exclude, suspecting them of being not refugees but ‘Soviet agents’.

This chapter deals with MI5's problems in the years 1939-41. According to its own internal history, written in 1946 by John Curry, MI5 was ‘in a state of confusion amounting almost to chaos’ for most of the two years following the outbreak of war. The chapter introduces the academic William Robson-Scott, who was recruited to MI5 before the outbreak of war as a German specialist. It also draws on the wartime diaries of Guy Liddell which illuminate MI5's attitudes towards government and in particular its differences with the Home Office, as well as its attitude towards the Communist Party of Great Britain following the Nazi-Soviet Pact and finally its interrogation of the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky.

This chapter summarises the continued surveillance by MI5 of influential Communists like Jürgen Kuczynski and the Soviet spy Edith Tudor-Hart, against the background of the emerging Cold War and incipient atomic espionage.

This chapter follows in some detail the case of atom spy Klaus Fuchs (code-named ‘Charles’), based on his twenty-five security files, from his arrival in Britain as a (communist) refugee and his crucial involvement in the British atomic bomb project, then in the Manhattan project (the US atomic bomb programme), and as a leading atomic scientist at Harwell after the war, culminating in his confession to MI5's Jim Skardon, and his subsequent trial and conviction for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. The chapter also outlines the methods Fuchs used to transmit information, including his meetings with the Soviet agent Ursula Beurton (‘Sonya’) – which were of course unknown to MI5.

This chapter deals with the equally important, but little-known case of the Austrian scientist Engelbert Broda (code-named ‘Eric’), who had access to much information on the Manhattan project and – independently of Fuchs – passed atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, often operating under the noses of the Security Service. Despite considerable suspicion of his activities, Broda was never arrested and returned to Vienna in 1947 to pursue a distinguished academic career. The chapter asks why he was so long suspected but never arrested. Was it due to inefficiency, was it the result of Soviet penetration of MI5 or was he just lucky?

This final chapter traces the post-war biographies of MI5's major refugee targets, their most prolific informers, such as ‘Kaspar’ and Kurt Hiller, and their MI5 handlers such as Claud Sykes and William Robson-Scott. MI5's surveillance of political exiles did not cease with the end of the war; it often continued to gather intelligence well into the next decade. Ironically, the Security Service, which had once tried to prevent certain political refugees from entering Britain, now wished to keep them there, attempting to delay their return to their home countries However, most political refugees were finally able to return to occupied Germany or Austria to take part in post-war reconstruction.

Chapter Six focuses on the Government response to Communism at home. Shaped by their wartime experiences of intelligence and security, it argues that the popular perception that Ministers were suspicious of the intelligence services, particularly the Security Service, is unfounded, based largely upon Labour folklore. In fact, rather than viewing MI5 with distain, even alarm, Ministers in the new government were aware of the need for an internal security body; any changes in the security apparatus were the result of the recommendations made by Sir Findlater Stewart, whose report of November 1945 is examined here for the first time. The chapter also looks at the development of Whitehall security procedures using the minutes and memoranda of the Committee on Subversive Activities (GEN 183). It argues that, as in the field of British policy towards Russia, domestic countermeasures measures against Communists in the civil service were hidden until the spring of 1948 after attempts at Anglo-Soviet rapprochement finally broke down. Despite the introduction and later expansion of vetting, Ministers sought to balance anti-Communist measures alongside the need for freedom of speech and liberty. Nowhere is this clearer than in discussions for domestic anti-Communist propaganda. While the Labour Party and other organisations had participated in the distribution of such material, IRD had no specific mandate to conduct its activities at home. However, after the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, Ministers authorised a domestic campaign aimed at influential sections of the British public, with the study looking at the early development of this campaign, revealing IRD’s domestic activities in education, industry and the armed forces.

In 2003 and 2004, the author developed an inflammatory disease and then had a heart attack. He reduced his workload and took some time off to find out about his parents’ life together in England in 1943–44. What he found is truly amazing: his father, Roger, worked for MI5 in the Double-Cross System. In addition, there is a lot of evidence that his mother, Sallie, was asked to surveil Roger by the same service. When Sallie became pregnant with the author, she wanted to have an abortion but was talked out of it by an American songwriter and composer, Jimmy Davis. The author recounts how he found all this out.

This chapter examines the vetting and purging of workers in the private sector. It was the ‘longstanding practice’ even before the Cold War that the purge and other security procedures extended well beyond the civil service into private industry. This ‘longstanding practice’ could operate only because of the surveillance work undertaken by MI5, in both compiling and maintaining the blacklist of Communist Party members. In the case of the private-sector exclusion of Communists, it was left to MI5 to secure the removal of workers to whom the Service objected: MI5 may have had no authority, but it had power. One question for this chapter is thus the legal issues surrounding such intervention and the potential legal liabilities to which it could give rise, while another is the scope of the authority and the manner and circumstances in which intervention might take place. However, the underlying theme is the question of accountability.