Quote:Revealed: How MI5 bugged 10 Downing Street, the Cabinet and at least five Prime Ministers for 15 YEARS

By Jason Lewis and Tom Harper
Last updated at 1:13 AM on 18th April 2010

MI5 used hidden electronic surveillance equipment to secretly monitor 10 Downing Street, the Cabinet and at least five Prime Ministers, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

The extraordinary disclosure comes despite a succession of parliamentary statements that no such bugging ever took place.

And it follows a behind-the-scenes row in which senior Whitehall civil servants – backed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown – attempted to suppress the revelation.

Under surveillance: Harold Macmillan in the Cabinet Room

The Mail on Sunday has learned that top-secret files held by the Security Service show it installed electronic listening devices in three highly sensitive areas of No10 – the Cabinet Room, the Waiting Room and the Prime Minister’s study.

It means that for nearly 15 years, all Cabinet meetings, the offices of senior officials and all visitors to the Prime Minister – including foreign leaders – were being bugged.

The disclosure is highly shocking in its own right but it will also bring genuine concerns as to why the Cabinet Office still wants to suppress it.

Comments from MI5 chief Jonathan Evans suggest that the attempted block was not done on grounds of national security but for wider public interest reasons.

This must raise the possibility that the bugging was carried out for political purposes and officials do not want to admit it went on in the past because similar operations are continuing today.


Scandal: Harold Macmillan had the bugs installed after the Profumo Affair involving Christine Keeler

It is understood that the top-secret MI5 file on the operation is short and does not reveal why the bugs were installed.

Crucially, the documents also fail to answer whether all the Prime Ministers in office during the period of the operation, from 1963 to 1977, were told that their conversations were monitored.

The files also contain no ‘product’ – transcripts of conversations overheard by the devices – suggesting that the bugs, while working, were not being actively used by MI5.

It is unknown, however, if the devices were being monitored by any other agency, including GCHQ, the Government’s eavesdropping centre, or MI6.

Details of the surveillance operation were due to be revealed in The Defence Of The Realm, the official history of MI5 written by highly respected Cambridge University historian Professor Christopher Andrew.

It is understood MI5 believed there were no national security concerns over the disclosures.

But weeks before the book’s publication late last year, the Cabinet Office – which oversees MI5 for the Prime Minister – ruled that the references had to be removed on unspecified public interest grounds.

Its insistence led to a behind-the-scenes row with Prof Andrew, who wrote of ‘one significant excision’ which was ‘I believe, hard to justify’. The comments by the historian have prompted significant speculation over what he was forced to remove.

Now this newspaper can reveal the deletions relate to the eavesdropping devices that were first installed in Downing Street in July 1963 at the request of the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan.

It is unclear why Macmillan made the extraordinary request, although it came a month after his War Minister John Profumo had resigned after admitting a relationship with prostitute Christine Keeler.

Keeler was also involved with Yevgeny ‘Eugene’ Ivanov, a senior naval attaché at the Soviet embassy in London and the Profumo Affair raised fears that military secrets were at risk.

The scandal undermined Macmillan’s Government and led eventually to his resignation, on grounds of ill health, in October 1963.

Following his departure, the bugs were briefly removed. But according to the secret files they were reinstated months later on the orders of new Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home.

Douglas-Home’s reasoning is also unknown. The MI5 files do not disclose why he too wanted his Cabinet and officials put under surveillance, nor why he wanted his own study bugged.

However, he was still dealing with the fall-out of the Profumo Affair while also facing a number of serious behind-the-scenes scandals involving senior politicians’ links with organised crime and the secret confession of Anthony Blunt, the surveyor of the Queen’s pictures, that he was a Soviet spy.


Spy chief: MI5 director-general Jonathan Evans said that secrecy over the bugging devices in Downing Street was for reasons of 'public interest'

Blunt was only publicly exposed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979. But in 1964, he had confessed and named a series of highly placed British officials he had recruited to work as agents for the KGB.

In return for Blunt’s admission, the Government agreed to keep his betrayal secret and grant him immunity from prosecution.

The bugs remained in Downing Street throughout Douglas-Home’s term and also the premierships of his successors Harold Wilson and Edward Heath.

In all, the equipment monitored the most sensitive areas of Downing Street for around 15 years. It was finally removed on the orders of James Callaghan in about 1977, the year after he took office. The files do not make it clear whether Prime Ministers Heath and Wilson knew there were surveillance devices in No10.

The revelation that there were bugs in Downing Street will add to conspiracy theories surrounding the alleged plot to overthrow Wilson.

Indeed Wilson’s actions while in office suggest he was never told his office had been bugged. Seemingly obsessed by the idea that he and other MPs were under surveillance, he introduced the Wilson Doctrine – still in place today – which bans the bugging of MPs’ telephone calls.

Prof Andrew believes Wilson’s apparent obsession was evidence of his ‘mental and physical decline’. The Prime Minister was later diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

Wilson hired private security firms to sweep his office for listening devices and was said to have pointed out electric light fittings to Downing Street visitors, indicating that they might be bugged.

According to Prof Andrew: ‘Wilson appears rarely to have said anything in the lavatory without first turning on all the taps and gesturing at imaginary bugs in the ceiling.’ He also says Wilson suspected a hole in the wall of the Cabinet Room, behind a portrait of William Gladstone contained a listening device.

After Wilson stepped down, he co-operated with a book suggesting there had been a plot by Right-wing intelligence officers to undermine him. The claim was later supported by former senior MI5 officer Peter Wright in his banned Spycatcher memoir.

It also prompted Callaghan, Wilson’s successor, to launch an investigation into the allegations.

The MI5 files indicate that it was Callaghan who finally ordered the surveillance devices to be removed from Downing Street.

Despite this, Callaghan made a statement to the House of Commons denying that No10 had ever been bugged.

He said: ‘The Prime Minister is satisfied that at no time has the Security Service or any other British intelligence or security agency, either of its own accord or at someone else’s request, undertaken electronic surveillance in No 10 Downing Street.’

The first indication of the Whitehall cover-up over the bugging operation was revealed by Prof Andrew in the preface of his book.

After praising the Security Service for ‘breaking new ground’ over what he was allowed to reveal, he added: ‘The most difficult part of the clearance process has concerned the requirements of other Government departments.

‘One significant excision as a result of these requirements (in the chapter on The Wilson Plot) is, I believe, hard to justify. This and other issues relating to the level of secrecy about past intelligence operations required by the current needs of national security would, in my view, merit consideration by the Intelligence and Security Committee.’

The committee, which provides parliamentary oversight on security and intelligence matters, has so far not looked into the case.

A foreword to the book by MI5 director-general Jonathan Evans also reveals it was ‘wider public interest reasons’ rather than national security that led to details being removed.

He wrote: ‘Striking the balance in the text between openness and the protection of national security has been a complex and demanding exercise...[involving] the Service, and an extensive clearance process involving other departments and agencies.

‘The history as published includes some information that is embarrassing or uncomfortable to the Service.

‘Information has only been omitted if its disclosure would damage national security or, in a small number of cases, if its publication would be inappropriate for wider public interest reasons.’

The Cabinet Office said last night: ‘The book is the authorised history of the Security Service. We are not prepared to discuss any issues beyond the contents of the book.

‘No Ministers were involved in the process around publication issues. Officials determined this process.

‘The Prime Minister was only advised of the outcome at the end of the process.’

So was Wilson right to be ‘paranoid’ about being spied on?

Quote:Stephen Dorril is author of MI6 – Fifty Years of Special Operations; Smear: Wilson And The Secret State; and Honeytrap, on the Profumo Affair.

Quote:Boothby was a regular at London sex parties and began an affair with gangster Ronnie Kray.

Quote:He was PPS to Winston Churchill circa 1926-9, the Vice-Chairman of the Committee on Economic Affairs, 1952–56; Honorary President of the Scottish Chamber of Agriculture, 1934, Rector of the University of St Andrews, 1958–61; Chairman of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, 1961–63, and President, Anglo-Israel Association, 1962–75. He was awarded an Honorary LLD by St Andrews, 1959 and was made an Honorary Burgess of the Burghs of Peterhead, Fraserburgh, Turriff and Rosehearty. He was appointed an Officer of the Legion of Honour in 1950, a KBE in 1953.

Quote:East London gang chief, armed robber, arsonist, protection racketeer, torturer and murderer, certified paranoid schizophrenic, photographed by David Bailey during the height of his career (sic!) convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment and died after a further certification of insanity in Broadmoor high security psychiatric hospital

Quote:the book .... will be of major interest to academic students of British intelligence and political history for years to
come.

Quote:Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd get a sentence each. Wallace is described as a former information officer; his psy-ops role, admitted by HMG, is omitted. Their claims are not stated and Andrew merely quotes the then Director General of MI5, Sir Anthony Duff, who ‘assured staff in 1987 that Wallace’s and Holroyd’s allegations of dirty tricks were “equally baseless” ’. Andrew tells us that Duff conducted a ‘stringent inquiry’ into the allegations about operations against the Labour governments of Harold Wilson. Said inquiry: ‘examined all relevant files and interviewed all relevant Security Service officers, both serving and retired’, and it ‘concluded unequivocally that no member of the Service had been involved in the surveillance of Wilson, still less in any attempt to destabilise the government.’ (p. 642

Well, at one level – gee, agency examines itself and finds itself innocent. Who would’ve thought it?

... Andrew concludes that there was no plot, that Wilson imagined most of it because he was paranoid

...Andrew has adopted the fall-back position of the British secret state circa 1990: ignore Wallace, Gordon Winter, the private armies episode, the Crozier operations, the forgeries and the psy-ops, and focus on the John Ware interview with Wright in which he implied that the ‘plot’ consisted only of himself.

Thus there was no plot; thus Wilson was just a paranoid old fool, a conspiracy theorist. Andrew portrays MI5 in the post WW2 era as cautious, apolitical bureaucrats, defending democracy while trying to stay within their charter, and resisting the siren calls of ‘conspiracy theorists’.

Quote:An earlier attempt to implicate the Kray twins (by Inspector "Nipper" Read) in their reign of fear was destroyed by an FBI officer named Cooper.

David Guyatt Wrote:

Quote:Boothby was a regular at London sex parties and began an affair with gangster Ronnie Kray.

What a delightful couple they were:

Peter Presland Wrote:The Daily Mail has learned; The Daily Mail can reveal etc etc.

It's formulations like that that turn me right off. Frankly, apart from the bits about Brown trying to keep a lid on it, there's really nothing new in that article at all. And the source of those bits is not without an agenda that we should all look long and hard at; viz that of Professor Christopher Andrew who has a book to promote
.....

When it comes to insightful commentary on our SIS's, give me Ramsey and Dorril over Gordon Thomas, Professor Andrew and all the other academics combined.

And the Daily Mail - or any other MSM outlet for that matter; any and all articles concerning alleged SIS activities are of interest more for their ostensible subject matter and timing than for any claimed revelations in their content. It's who is pulling their strings (feeding material etc) and why that interests me.

As for why GB is still trying to cover things up. Frankly, the more I see of GB, the more I judge him to be a brainless nincompoop tool. Whatever he does, he does at the behest of others so it is their motives (in this case the SIS's) for giving the appearance of trying to keep a lid on it (ie the bugging etc) that we should probably be considering.

Magda Hassan Wrote:

Quote:An earlier attempt to implicate the Kray twins (by Inspector "Nipper" Read) in their reign of fear was destroyed by an FBI officer named Cooper.

Care to tell more David?

Quote:olin Wallace and Fred Holroyd get a sentence each. Wallace is described as a former information officer; his psy-ops role, admitted by HMG, is omitted. Their claims are not stated and Andrew merely quotes the then Director General of MI5, Sir Anthony Duff, who ‘assured staff in 1987 that Wallace’s and Holroyd’s allegations of dirty tricks were “equally baseless” ’.

Quote:Prof Andrew believes Wilson’s apparent obsession was evidence of his ‘mental and physical decline’. The Prime Minister was later diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

Wilson hired private security firms to sweep his office for listening devices and was said to have pointed out electric light fittings to Downing Street visitors, indicating that they might be bugged.

According to Prof Andrew: ‘Wilson appears rarely to have said anything in the lavatory without first turning on all the taps and gesturing at imaginary bugs in the ceiling.’ He also says Wilson suspected a hole in the wall of the Cabinet Room, behind a portrait of William Gladstone contained a listening device.