On the last day before the Xmas break of the UCPI, the abusive UCO, Andy Coles mentioned the FBI enough times in his evidence to raise some eyebrows amongst those watching the live-streaming.

The mentions arose, not in retrospect but contemporaneously as a result of a “Tradecraft Manual” for the SDS that he had put together in 1994.  It was a task given to him during his time out of “cover” while “exfiltrating” his undercover role. It was being done with a view to training new UCOs and with a view to it being a textbook for a training course for plainclothes detectives in the MPSB. Evidence from Coles and and the MPS suggested that it was never used for this purpose, but the inquiry counsel exposed this as a lie because it was used in the NPOIU established as a successor to the SDS in 1999.

The Bureau of Investigation was founded in the US in 1908. In 1924 it appointed as its fifth director 29-year-old J Edgar Hoover. Under his leadership, in 1935, it became an independent service within the Department of Justice in 1935. Forty-eight years at his death aged 77 in 1972, aged 77 he was still director of the FBI.

He was a massive figure in American and International law enforcement and intelligence circles. During and after those 48 years no books, radio show, films and television shows dealing with organised crime and domestic espionage in USA could ignore his presence. Many of the UCO’s and their managers, will, like myself, have grown up watching a highly sanitized and partial account of the FBI in the thirties in the form of a TV series called “The Untouchables” which ran on American television from 1959 to 1963 and then on British TV from 1966 with numerous reruns.

But by 1994, when Coles was cobbling together the SDS Tradecraft manual, Hoover’s reputation was in tatters. Chat GPT is a useful tool for gauging the consensus views of informed observers on Clapham omnibuses at various points of history:

“British media coverage of Hoover in the 1990s reflected broader criticisms of American institutions in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era. He was sometimes portrayed as a caricature of authoritarianism in films and documentaries that reached British audiences.

The revelations about COINTELPRO and the FBI’s actions against civil rights leaders were known in Britain, contributing to a negative view of Hoover among progressive audiences.

…. In summary, Hoover’s reputation in 1994 was in decline, particularly in the United States, where critical reassessments of his tenure were well advanced. In Britain, while he was less of a focal point, his legacy was similarly scrutinized, often within the context of Cold War history and civil liberties.”

Extract from Chat GPT response to the prompt “In 1994 what was the state of J Edgar Hoover's Reputation and legacy? In the US and in Britain.”

“Tradecraft” is an expression that seems to have been adopted in the 1950s to describe standard procedures within the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA was the first centralised US foreign intelligence. It formed in 1947 as the US foreign Intelligence service, as a successor to the temporary wartime Office of Strategic Service that was formed in June 1942 and disbanded in 1945. Their first tradecraft manual was not called that, and was produced for them anonymously in 1953 by a stage magician called John Mulholland. But by the end of the decade, it was in common use, and they were providing tradecraft guides front front-line soldiers.

1945 and all that

Clement Attlee secured a momentous Labour Party majority in the 1945 election. It made him the first of Labour leaders in the twentieth making to secure a parliamentary majority. It also made him the third and last British leader during the Second World War leader and gave him the shocking distinction of being the only British PM ever to authorise the use of nuclear weapons against civilian populations.

There were as many as three times the number of new Labour MPs as sitting ones. A large number of the older and more politically experienced new MPs, that Attlee drew his government from, had been trade union leaders who had a lifetime of battling the CPGB in their unions. This included his Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour George Isaacs, Minister of Defence A.V. Alexander, and Home Secretary James Chuter Ede.

Despite being avowedly socialist and committed to public ownership, the new prime minister and his inner kitchen cabinet were also fervent and vitriolic anti-communists. Initially, only his Chancellor  Sir Stafford Cripps and Health Secretary Aneurin Bevan were identified with the left of the Party.

While pursuing a radical and apparently socialist, though in reality state capitalist, industrial economic policy, internationally they were equal partners with the US government in the joint enterprise of creating the Cold War; and deploying their absolute power to prosecute it in the British Empire with a disempowered population of half a billion.

The Parliamentary Labour Party PLP had created the Labour Party we know today as a national membership party in 1918. The new national Party’s constitution committed constituency and parliamentary members of the new party to support models of public ownership. These models nationalisation where appropriate; but also cooperatives, mutuals, common ownership and what we would call social enterprises with workers control.

Attlee became Party Leader in 1935, four years after an almost fatal split which destroyed all the parliamentary gains made since 1906. His core support within the party came from trade union leaders whose preferred model, and eventually the only model, of public ownership advocated by the party was nationalisation.

In 1945 this top-down. authoritarian state-capitalist model ( always vulnerable to a change in governing party) was even applied to the welfare state and the National Health Service. In Scandinavian states like Denmark, where this welfare nationalisation did not happen, benefits and services remained run by unions and they were protected from both the sympathetic incompetence and unsympathetic mischief of elected politicians.

Of course, Attlee’s frankly Stalinist model of public ownership pleased Labour’s trade union leaders who welcomed the seats they got at top tables. But with perhaps almost 40% of the rank-and-file trade unionised workforce working for the state it was not amusing waking up to find themselves and their working lives nationalised, being expected to be on the same side as their owners and having their demands for better terms and condition represented as anti-social or unpatriotic acts.

Given the repressive, imperialist, conservative position of Labour in international politics it would have been extraordinary if things had been different on the domestic front during the cold war, and it wasn’t. 

Labour Mobilises and Equips the secret state.by the man

 At the outbreak of war in 1939 MI5 was tiny, and still run by its first director Vernon Kell who had reached retirement age. Kell stayed until Churchill became Prime minster in 1941 and had him replaced in an acting capacity by the Deputy Director General Brigadier Oswald Allen Harker, but the permanent position was given in nine months to Sir Devid Petrie,

Petrie was also ready to retire and in 1946 this allowed Attlee the opportunity to make his own appointment assisted by a high-level appointment panel. The unanimous choice of the panel was a high-profile police chief constable Sir Percy Sillitoe. It was not a popular appointment with the Security Service but it was a clear signal that post-war Labour Party did not have the same compunction as the inter-war party about spying on and frustrating the political ambitions of ordinary citizens.

The reverse was in fact the case, He laid down the foundations for a Cabinet Office counter-subversion bureaucratic superstructure of committees and sub-committees headed up by the most senior and experienced civil servants and cabinet ministers with MI5 at its centre. That bureaucracy and its procedures not only survived the six years of  Attlee’s governments, and it remained continuously in place for fifty years and may, in effect, still be operating.

Throughout that time the names changed of the committees. but minimally, reflecting a subtle change in the sensibilities of the ministers. rather than any significant change in approach. The frank Official “Official Anti-Communist Committee (Home)” became the “Official Committee on Communism (Home)” in the early 1950s; and in 1968 it became “Official Committee on Subversion (Home)". This last change is recorded in Mitting’s published evidence in the form of A briefing note on the history of the committee written by the Foreign Secretary for the Cabinet Secretary (UCPI0000035238).  

https://www.ucpi.org.uk/publications/cab-301-487-letter-to-the-prime-minister-regarding-the-information-research-departments-ird-responsibilities-on-the-home-front/ 

Between 1946 and 1951 this counter-subversive cabinet office committee superstructure was responsible for the design and implementation of three workforce purges and a nationalised blacklisting operation using MI5 Registry, that has never been dismantled.

The first of Attlee’s purges/blacklists – the Civil Service Purge -was a matter of public record at the time. However, its conveniently forgotten for different reasons by Labour historians, right and left. It was forgotten by Conservative historians because it was a can of worms which once opened could have no possible Conservative benefits.

The second Attlee purge/blacklist - the Industrial Purge – would, I suggest, be most significant, repressive and subversive. But was deliberately carried out covertly following a conspiracy of senior Civil Servants, senior Labour Party Politicians, trade union leaders, Employers representatives and MI5.

In so far as the third of Attlee’s purges/blacklists has made it to the historical record, it is not particularly credited to Attlee and his cabinet (It was only made public by Churchill in 1952) and not associated with its target group as the Research and Development Purge. Historians recall it by the title “positive vetting”, an anodyne and deliberately misleading expression coined at the time to disguise an unnecessarily intrusive purging and blacklisting process introduced with the sole object of persuading J Edgar Hoover to withdraw his opposition to the US sharing nuclear and weapons secrets with the UK.

Attlee’s Purges and Blacklists

What follows is  thumbnail sketch of the purges. Earlier this year to get to the bottom of the Industrial Purge I spent a day in the national archives identifying and copying the relevant Cabinet Office papers for the `Industrial Purge”. I have since written up the story in a draft form which provides details of all three purges and the anti-communist history of the Labour Party. It is not yet complete and proofed, but it is available to download as an e-book for those who cannot wait for the final version (£2.10: https://www.lulu.com/account/projects/57e85mz )

 

The Civil Service Purge

The most senior committee in Attlee’s counter-subversive machine included the prime minister himself and took an overview of the country’s and the government’s opposition to Soviet expansionism, the progress of the Communist International particularly but not exclusively in Britain and its Empire and commonwealth, and the preparedness of UK and imperial services to top counter it.

That committee which also included the Home Secretary (with the National Archive reference 164) may only have met only once. It received a briefing from intelligence services, and as a result two regular committees were established to take the countersubversion strategy forwards both reporting to the Prime Minister.

In the prehistory of the SDS and spycops story the most significant of the two committees was “Official Anti-Communism Committee (Home)”, Its companion committee was, unsurprisingly, the  “Official Anti-Communism Committee (Overseas)”.

“Overseas” was dominated by Bevin to whom MI6 reported, and the foreign intelligence agency would soon be joined by another well-funded pro-active and interventionist  anti-communist agency in the Foreign Office - the Information Research Department (IRD). Before the Attlee cabinet were returned to the back benches in 1951 IRD was given a home desk, organising black propaganda against radical political ideas in the UK for another quarter of a century.

The first task set by Attlee for the Official Anti-Communist Committee (Home) was however not to introduce blacklisting to the Home Civil Service, but to organise a purge of CPGB members from sensitive posts in it.

Most of the public and private discussion of the Civil Service purge focussed on how the posts were selected as unsuitable posts for members of CPGB; what would be done for those purged; and the very limited grounds for the “independent” appeal mechanism, which denied the purgee information about the source and evidence of the CPGB membership, the right to representation or to call a witness other than a character witness and they excluded for hearing their evidence or cross examination.

The reason for these restrictions was the source of the information, MI5 which had no legal status, was never publicly acknowledged and was very anxious to avoid giving the CPGB any strong hint about how comprehensive their knowledge about their membership list.

The purge and appeals mechanism was agreed by the Cabinet and on March15 1948 Attlee announced it to the House of Commons, where it came as an unpleasant surprise to the left in the Labour Party. In the Commons and in the Constituencies and to the two CPGB members of Parliament.

The Industrial Purge

As Attlee was announcing the  Civil Service Purge in the House of Commons the “Official committee on Communism (Home)” was already setting out to develop the second purge which the civil servants involved informally called “The Industrial Purge”.

The government and Civil Service anticipated that once the mechanism for the the purge was in place in the civil service it would also serve as a model for the introduction for a purge into the private industrial manufacturing defence products to secret specifications.

Throughout 1948, the committee discussed the adaptation of the methods of the civil service purge t for use in for the purge, Including the same independent but limited appeal panel the private sector. That discussion was straightforward, the proposal was to use the same administrative mechanism and there was no discussion at Communism (Home) of the appropriateness of the purge, even though this Parliament was the only one where the electorate had legitimately elected two CPGB candidates to represent them in the Commons.

As with the Civil Service Purge there was no risk assessment, which this time might just have asked the obvious question whether a soviet agent intent on stealing state secrets would really at the same time be an overt and active member of the CPGB.

The difficulties that Communism (Home) did identify was the likelihood of opposition to the purge from Labour’s backbenchers, constituency parties and rank and file trades unionists. The Civil Service purge did not require primary legislation or the compliance of powerful employers, and the trade unions were conservatively inclined and docile, and the left in the party was more suspicious of than sympathetic to civil servants. Nevertheless there still was internal discontent with the policy, within the Labour Party as a whole, and in the Commons. Antagonism towards the purge remained strong and party managers were unsure that thy could prevent a revolt against extending the purge.

Chuter Ede the Home Secretary was warning the committee of this, but under pressure from the PM the senior ministers pressed on. A date was selected for the commons announcement just before the Parliamentary recess in July to minimise the opportunities for a public row about the proposals.

The proposals went to Cabinet on May 19 1949 where they were agreed in principle, but with one straightforward proviso. Before the announcement was made by Attlee he needed to be able to assure the Commons that that he had secured the support of Trades Unions and Employers.

The Ministry of Labour had a Joint National Advisory Committee (JNAC), with 17 representatives of from the  General Council of the TUC and 17 employer representatives from the British Confederation of Employers.  The next meeting of this was just before the announcement was due to be made. The proposal was included on the agenda, as a secret Item, but papers were not circulated in advance, they were handed out at the meeting and collected in after the discussion and it was subject to the official secret act.

Anyone with serious experience of industrial negotiations should have been able to predict what would happen, but not the unanimity between staff-side and employer representatives.

Neither side had raised concerns about the principle of purging CPGB members from defence and strategically important contracts, and both sides saw risks of unofficial secondary action and harm being done to national agreements and industrial relations and neither side thought that the existing mechanism for awarding managing defence were problematic and were not prepared to be bounced into any rash agreement with proposals without consulting with members most affected.

The announcement in the commons was hastily called off, Parliament broke for the recess the two sides took the temperature of their membership over the summer. It returned to the agenda of their Autumn Meeting. This time there was no equivocation. George Isaacs and the senior civil servant were left in no doubt that unions and employers spoke with one voice. The Prime Minister must absolutely not make a public statement about the purge, there should be no discussion or explanation given to purged employees, there should be no appeal mechanism of any kind. To achieve the impact required, all the government had to do was to ensure that its commissioning departments implemented and effectively policed the contractual requirement to provide the names of employees (and presumably) subcontractors with access to confidential information, providing additional support on security matters by informal contact with the secret state. Isaccs reported the position to Attlee. His written response on a compliments slip was simple if not so bluntly unequivocal as the TUC and Employers Confederation: “I am inclined to agree”.  With those five words the Industrial Purge slipped into history unnoticed until the last few years.

Sir Harold Parker the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence was the most senior civil servant engaged in it. Early on in the discussions he had told Communism (Home) that he believed MI5 were concerned about less than 50 CPGB members working on defence contracts. If so they would have been purged fairly quickly and surreptitiously in the new contract compliance regime without raising concerns in the CPGB about the security of its membership lists, especially if those individuals were openly active on behalf of the CPGB.

The Nationalised Industrial Blacklist

Implementing the post-purge blacklist through new contract compliance regime had a number of distinct advantages for services wishing to frustrate the CPGB’s ability to organise,  without alerting them to the comprehensive nature of the surveillance. Every time a contract or sub contract was awarded the blacklisting was renewed from the  MI5 registry.

This was also a leaky, but scarcely dangerous, approach for the registry. Because once a worker was removed from a contract – or more likely employment altogether – because of government concerns this would routinely sit on his or her personnel record and references.

However, industry and especially defence companies had been subscribing to the private blacklisting organisation called The Economic League since the mid-1920’s. There was published evidence of collusion between them and Special Branch in Manchester in 1938 with the League being given access to their files. More recently, though still 40 years ago, information was leaked from the League that at the time Attlee was developing his purges and post-purge blacklists the League in London had recruited a former Special Branch detective to specifically gain access to special Branch Files.

With all CPGB members being people of interest, it is safe to assume that MI5 would have shared CPGB membership details with all local Special Branches and Scotland Yard. The were however circumspect about how much was passed on, wanting to avoid a security shutdown by the Party.  I have indexes of Economic League’s own Central Registry for the 1980s and the Manchester region’s one from the 1970s.

I estimate that together  they contain personal details of over 30,000 alleged activists of whom around 6,000 are identified as CPGB members. That is between 10-20% of the CPGB’s whole membership, but in this would be a considerably larger proportion of its industrial membership.

At Communism (Home) we know that while MI5 representatives, including Sillitoe himself, advocated strongly about the domestic CPGB threat but were were anxious to avoid devoting their limited resources to the bureaucratic tedium of employment blacklisting. The decision to implement the industrial purge and post-purge blacklist entirely covertly with no political oversight or accountability would give the Security Service considerable freedom in how far it could go in facilitating industry’s own blacklisting through the Economic League whether directly or through Police Special Branches.

The FBI and the R&D Boffin Purge

While developing the Manhattan Project, Britain and Canada and US (two powers and three nations) the two powers had signed an agreement in secret, in Quebec to continue share nuclear secrets between the three countries involved, after the conflict was over. Unfortunately, if a definitive copy was ever signed nobody every sved it or filed it in a retrievable place before one signatory was dead (FDR) and the other (Churchill) booted out of office. In other circumstances this may not have mattered. But in the Summer of 1946 the House of Representatives and Senate passed the McMahon Act which gave responsibility for the development of nuclear power and weapons to the private sector which was prevented from sharing details with other powers. This would have revoked the Quebec Treaty, if it could have been found the bill might have been amended. It wasn’t and it wasn’t and overnight Britain had to abandon its nuclear ambitions or develop its own nuclear programme for power and weapons. The decision was a no-brainer for Attlee and Bevin, and entusiastically supported by the otherwise normally sound Bevan.

In August 1949 Russia tested its first nuclear bomb, which made progress more urgent for the British Labour government

and the ending of the communication ban with the USA . By now it was not just the failure to prove the Quebec Agreement that kept the research firewall in place. J Edgar Hoover believed that Britain could not be trusted to keep nuclear secrets. In the FBI his G Men undertook extensive background checks and kept nuclear and weapons scientists under surveillance. For ease of reference I’m calling the “boffins”.

As with most things to do with Hoover it was mostly fantasy and deluded self-importance. There was no real evidence that America was any better at preventing soviet espionage, but that did not matter, Attlee needed to get the data sharing agreed. and for that they needed a serious FBI-style revamp of vetting of scientists, academics and engineers.

As the plans for the second “industrial” Purge was being planned in Communism (Home) they established a sub-committee chaired by Sir John Winnifrith to start thinking how they might be able to come up with a compromise between the labour-intensive and offensively intrusive Hoover methodology and the apparently laid-back office-based approach using pre-existing MI5 files.

The solution Winnifrith came up with was based on some fairly straightforward and not particularly convincing wordplay. He defined the Civil Service and Industrial purges as “Negative Vetting”. that is giving a positive reference if they were already known as a communist from existing reports. Hoover’s FBI method he defined as  “Positive Vetting”  actively looking for evidence that supported a positive reference for their loyalty and reliability. Winifrith’s British system would not rely on special branch officers., or worse MI5 officers, on the tail of actual, and prospective boffins. The existing boffins would be purged using MI5 files, and Winnifrith’s sub-committee was informed that less than 50 people would be affected. As with the Civil Service Purge the mechanism for informing them and the limited appeals mechanism was available to them.

The precise number of purgees does not seem to have been released.

The R&D Boffin Blacklist

With the existing workforce purged of CPGB members applicants for new posts would be screen by MI5’s registry, presumably before short listing and csome additional checks on character undertaken before final appointments made. 

The ongoing surveillance of in-post boffins would be given to line managers who would appraise not only the quality of their work, but also of their lifestyles and personal habits and vulnerabilities and risk factors. In the meantime, the security services would feed any new information they received into the appraisal process.

Whatever it was, Winnifrith’s positive vetting did not resemble Hoover’s system and was therefore not going to persuade him that it was serious. It would have been better to explain to Hoover just how reliable MI5’s files were and how much officer time and technology had been expended compiling them.  Neither were they remotely positive vetting since there were no rational criteria for loyalty save for an officer’s assessment of the middle-class “normalcy” of the boffin and his or her family’s lifestyle.

But the difference in the outcomes for the two approaches were instructive.  Vetting failures in Hoover’s were more likely to generate false rejections - keeping good imaginative boffins out of the programme, something that could not be tested or reliably measured. If Winifrith’s system was more lenient then failure would result in dangerous appointments and failed vets could be measured in the number of “traitors” unmasked.

But in the end both approaches generated false positives and false negatives. In the British case the most scandalous and tragic false-negative failure of positive vetting led to the hounding and death of Alan Turing.

The introduction of “positive vetting” did not have the desired immediate impact for Attlee, or for his successor Churchill, or for his successor Anthony Eden. The McMahon Act was finally amended in 1958 paving the way for the 1958  US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement.

PO Box 500

The three purges instigated by the Attlee’s Labour government  and the Backlisting that followed over the next 40 years until the CPGB was dissolved required MI5 to have accurate adult membership lists for the CPGB from 1948 onwards, This was not a task that could be done in an ad hoc way or rely on a network of informers or be outsourced.

It was done in-house in a concerted and not always legal way including breaking and entering, bugging and theft. The overall operation was known as Operation STILL LIFE but within that there were sub-operations like RED KNIGHT (1949) and PARTY PIECE (1955). For decades newly appointed officers would start learning their tradecraft in surveillance tasks associated with Still Life.

From the mid-1950s onwards post-Lenin Russian Bolshevism was no longer the dominant radical subversive ideology that it had been. and the Registry had to rely on a wider range of sources of information.

Those of us following the UCPI are used to seeing the name “Box 500” as an address to which SDS intelligence files are sent. Box 500 is MI5. These intelligence reports are based on the regularly filed written reports of UCOs. Unfortunately the MPS had destroyed , misfiled or secreted away many of these original UCO reports. But MI5 archived all of almost all the reports sent to them from the SDS.

The reports sent to Box 500 were “topped and tailed” and sometimes sub-edited by more senior back-office officers (DSs and DIs) in the SDS. They often included large verbatim sections from the reports, and the Inquiry teams seem to routinely be able to identify the UCO – described as a “.sensitive and secret source” - providing the  intelligence and assessment. Occasionally Box 500 however reports combine reports from several UCOs and even plain clothes sources. While this has given individual UCOs the opportunity to try to disown some more offensive scurrilously passages, it is more Important to have an insight into what more senior officers were expected to circulate to a wider readership.

MI5 tell us a little about the sse of “Box 500” to refer to its service on their Instagram account:

“mi5official

MI5's wartime postal address was PO Box 500, and decades later 'Box' and 'Box 500' remain terms still used to informally refer to MI5 and its officers.

Although MI5 continues to receive high volumes of daily correspondence, our postal address has long since changed!”

As with most MI5 revelations about itself it true but some way off the whole truth.

The war in question was the Second World War since the Post Office Boxes were not introduce until 1919. I search in digital newspaper archives found now public reference to any form of its full address: PO Box 500 London SW1.

This is interesting because the impression is given  that PO BOX 500 was a version of the terrorism hotline or historically of the lion’s mouth post box in Venice with its inscription "Secret denunciations against anyone who will conceal favours and services or will collude to hide the true revenue from them”

This is clearly not what Box 500 was.  In his book “Sabotage and Counter-Sabotage in Britain during the Second World War” Bernard O’Connor provides some interesting information about MI5 at the start of the War:

“It is worth noting that when war broke out, MI5 had a staff of about 50 with two part-time officers devoted to collecting intelligence on German political and national groups. By 1942, its numbers had risen to 1,500. (National Archive reference:TNA KV 4/170)

The MI5 authorised history by Christoper Andrew – “Defence of the Realm” - makes reference to an important part of MI5’s organisation in the early period of the war which were not MI staff but Police officers identified as  Regional Security Liaison Officers (RSLO). He tells us a story about an anonymous RSLO  one in Cambridge which indicates the size of this force of officers. Chat GPT estimates there were 30-50 regional special branches in 1939 and that might be a reasonable guestimate of the number of RSLOs.

It is not unreasonable to assume that as well as increasing its capacity by having regional liaison officers within the police, MI5 had regional liaison officers in other strategical important public services and authorities. The PO Box would have been a valuable way of collecting intelligence from this sort of network, and that would explain why PO Box 500 gained a currency in the civil service.

Although “Defence of the Realm”  does not tell us much about the wartime  Box 500, through the decades that followed references make it clear that Box 500 did not remain a corporate dead letter drop for long, if it ever weas one. There are eleven references to Box 500 in the history all date from the late cold war section and everyone of them refers to them as Box 500 reports. In 1978 it reported on Mick Costello the CPGB’s new industrial organiser:

 

“Security Service Box 500 reports to Whitehall and Special Branches concluded that ‘The Party leadership has had some misgivings about [Mick] Costello’s rather brash manner and an habitual unwillingness to admit to error.”

 

A later Boox 500 report redescribed by Andrew  is perhaps more politically significant

 

“The Service’s regular (often daily) Box 500 situation reports on the miners’ strike were originally sent only to senior Whitehall officials. In late June 1984, however, Mrs Thatcher discovered their existence and it was agreed that henceforth copies of all the reports should be sent to her through the cabinet secretary.46 She seems to have read them attentively, complaining on one occasion that a Box 500 report of 4 September that Scargill was planning a statement blaming the National Coal Board (NCB) for withdrawing from proposed talks had arrived too late for the government to be able to counter it immediately.”

Conclusion

The parapolitical counter-subversion policy making bureaucracy was a dubious and enduring creation of the post-war Attlee’s Labour Party government. It was a flagrant and sectarian attempt to mobilise the secret state to incapacitate its main political opponent in the labour movement. Twenty years later it t provided the ideal environment for the creation by the next Labour government to create the abusive secret policing service that was the SDS. It is no surprise that the SDS remained in awe of the FBI and the same way that Attlee and Bevin had been during the Cold War.

The decision to continue developing Box 500 as a two-way communication channel for fighting the Cold War on the UK domestic front also rested with Attlee and Bevan. Box 500 and IRD were possibly the most subversive creations of Labour’s politicisation of the secret state. The UCPI seems not to have grasped the significance of Box 500 and has certainly not shown any sign of attempting a forensic analysis of the reach of the SDS reports to Box 500.