The Labour Party in intelligence history
Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and Prime Minister Clement Attlee in Downing Street after the Japanese surrender in 1945 (Imperial War Museum, Public Domain).
The Labour Party, which returned to power in Britain after fourteen years on Thursday, has a long and complicated history with the intelligence services.
Labour replaced the Liberals as a major force in British politics during the same febrile period around the First World War and its aftermath that saw the creation of the Secret Service Bureau, and its later offshoots MI5 and MI6.
The defeat of the first Labour government at the 1924 election was marked by the Zinoviev Affair, the release of a purported letter from the head of the Communist International in Moscow, calling for Labour’s use as a vehicle for the subversion of Britain.
Intelligence figures including Desmond Morton of MI6 and Joseph Ball of MI5 have been accused of involvement in the affair. The forgery itself may have emanated from White Russian circles close to the MI6 station in Riga.1
From such milieux, MI6 was already fighting a Cold War against the Soviet Union in the inter-war period. The Second World War forced a change in priorities. In the UK, as in the US, the fight against fascism brought an influx of socialists and even communists into the intelligence world. Under the wartime coalition government, Labour figures such as Hugh Gaitskell played a notable role in overseeing new covert action organisations, including the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), whose early concerns included combating the America First movement in the still neutral United States.
As in the US, peacetime retrenchment in 1945 quickly gave way to the rebuilding of intelligence to fight the Cold War. SOE and PWE were abolished but the latter soon found a successor in the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD). The IRD’s propaganda role was sold within Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government as an attempt to promote British democratic socialism as an alternative to both Soviet communism and American capitalism.2
However, this vision was quickly eclipsed by a growing reliance on Britain’s alliance with the US. Wartime signals intelligence sharing was extended with the UKUSA Agreement in 1946. three years later, Attlee’s foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, co-signed the treaty founding NATO.
Labour divisions over the alliance erupted during the Korean War. As Chancellor, Gaitskell cut back domestic spending to pay for the conflict. The founder of the National Health Service, Aneurin Bevan resigned from the government, as did the President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson.
Gaitskell led the party in opposition from 1955 until 1963, maintaining a firmly Atlanticist line. ‘Gaitskellism’ was a natural counterpart to the Cold War Liberalism of Truman or Kennedy. Gaitskell’s death and the succession of Harold Wilson to the Labour leadership were an unexpected challenge to this strand of the party.
In truth, Wilson was never the left-winger that his early Bevanite allegiance suggested, but in an era of spy-scandals, some on the British right were quick to see him as a potential subversive.
Visiting Britain in March 1963, the Soviet defector Anatoly Golitsyn absorbed this antipathy into the web of conspiracy theory which he spun for CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, suggesting that the Soviets had assassinated Gaitskell to make way for Wilson.3
Although MI5 denies to this day that members of its service plotted against Wilson, the machinations of a right-wing intelligence demi-monde were a persistent irritant during his two periods in government.4 He would not be the last leader to be accused of foreign intelligence links. Michael Foot and Jeremy Corbyn would each face allegations which probably owed something to the self-aggrandisement of Eastern Bloc intelligence officers.
By the 1980s, revelations from the Wilson period brought suspicion of the intelligence services to a new pitch on the Labour left. While these are often seen as Labour’s wilderness years, intelligence historian Dan Lomas has argued that the debate within the party did promote a shift towards greater accountability.
Labour’s wider fears – going back even beyond the Zinoviev Affair of the 1920s – broke the bipartisan consensus on security matters, for the first-time seeing a British political party come up with policy recommendations to bring Britain’s agencies ‘in from the cold’. Although the proposals, forming part of the now infamous ‘longest suicide note in history’, were prompted by domestic and international concerns that intelligence agencies were undemocratic and lacked effective control, and essentially a product of battles within Labour, they marked an important moment in the drive for agency accountability and reform.5
When Labour returned to power in 1997, the party’s Atlanticist wing was once more in the ascendancy, in the modernised form of New Labour. The greatest intelligence controversy of the Blair years focused on the case for the war on Iraq. The issue was not political subversion by intelligence professionals but almost the reverse - the politicization of intelligence analysis. The Iraq War re-opened Labour’s foreign policy divisions, contributing to the emergence of the party’s most left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, a decade later.
After two defeats, Corbyn was succeeded by Keir Starmer, whose willingness to serve in his predecessor’s shadow cabinet initially made him mistrusted by some on the Labour right. Over the course of his leadership, however, Labour’s Atlanticist wing has steadily returned to the ascendancy.
Starmer entered Parliament with more experience of government than any Labour leader since Wilson, having served as Director of Public Prosecutions for five years between 2008 and 2013. According to the head of his department’s international division, Patrick Stevens, Starmer worked closely with the security and intelligence services, ‘was trusted by those people and he has great insight into the realities.’6
A series of British intelligence and security sources have told the i that Labour ‘will need to use their strong domestic position to reassert the the country’s commitment to NATO, the Australia, UK and US (Aukus) agreement, the US special relationship, and continued support for Ukraine.’7
The consensus between the political leadership and permanent officials around that agenda is likely to be as close as in any previous Labour government. The key challenge to British Atlanticism will to come from the American right rather than the British left.
The exception is the Middle East, where the conflict in Gaza has revived the divisions of the Iraq War era. The sole surprise appointment to Starmer’s cabinet, that of eminent human rights lawyer Richard Hermer as attorney-general, may be an attempt to reconcile critics of Starmer’s position on the conflict, as well as to reassert Britain’s support for the rule of law.
That commitment will sit uneasily alongside the imperative to proof the British-American relationship against the possibility of a second Trump presidency. During Trump’s first term, CIA director Gina Haspel was a crucial interlocutor, respected by the British as a former London station chief, and by Trump because of her past role in the CIA’s interrogation programme. Such unedifying expedients may be more difficult to repeat if Trump seeks to remould the US intelligence community in his own image.
The November presidential election will be a fateful moment for a British Government born on the Fourth of July.
Richard Norton-Taylor, Zinoviev letter was dirty trick by MI6, The Guardian, 4 February 1999.
Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britain's Secret Propaganda War 1948-1977, Sutton Publishing, 1998, p.27.
David Wise, Molehunt: How the Search for a Phantom Traitor Shattered the CIA, Avon Books, 1992, p.106.
Two key works on this subject are David Leigh, The Wilson Plot: The Astounding Truth about the Spycatchers who dabbled in Treason, Mandarin, 1989, and Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, Smear! Wilson and the Secret State, Fourth Estate Limited, 1991. For MI5's position see What is The 'Wilson Plot'?, Security Service, accessed 7 July 2024.
Daniel W. B. Lomas, Party politics and intelligence: the Labour Party, British intelligence and oversight, 1979-1994. Intelligence and National Security, 36(3), 410–430. https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2021.1874102
Tevye Markson, Keir Starmer: The senior civil servant who became prime minister, Civil Service World, 5 July 2024.
Richard Holmes, UK intelligence warns Starmer of five major security threats that ‘cannot wait’, The i, 6 July 2024.