Spy secrets laid bare in MI5’s first official history
The Defence Of The Realm, by Cambridge historian Professor Christopher Andrew, was released to mark the centenary of the founding of the agency in the early weeks of October 1909.
It ranges from its very first days hunting for German spies in the run-up to the First World War to present-day operations to counter the threat from al-Qaida-inspired terrorism.
Among the book’s disclosures is that the service’s first director-general, Captain Vernon Kell, tried to alert Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to the Nazi threat in the 1930s by telling him that Hitler regularly referred to him as an “a***hole”.
It also reveals that three Labour MPs were working for Eastern Bloc intelligence agencies in the 1960s, among them the notorious John Stonehouse who went on to fake his own death in an attempt to start a new life in Australia.
At the book’s launch in London yesterday, former MI5 director-general Stephen Lander described its publication as a “unique event”. Lander, who took the decision to commission its publication in 2002, said no other major intelligence agency had opened up its files to an independent historian in this way. He said the main reason for doing so was because the advent of al-Qaida-inspired terrorism following the 9/11 attacks in 2001 meant it needed the help of the public more than ever before.
“It is quite clear within the service that our world has changed fundamentally. The suicide bomber is a different order of threat to the IRA,” he said.
“Reaching out, beyond the myths and misunderstandings, to the public was one of the motivations.”
In the book, Prof Andrew – who was given access to the service’s entire archive of 400,000 files – said MI5 had been slow to see the threat to Britain from Islamist terrorism.
