Fifteen months before Labour’s election victory in 1964, Tony Benn, whom Wilson was to make Postmaster-General, declared himself “terrified that George Wigg may be minister for security and given power over all our lives”.
Benn had good reason to be alarmed. Wigg, a former colonel in the Army Education Corps, was a fantasist whose passion was secrets, the more malodorous the better. He was at his happiest in the twilight world of spies and counter-spies and viewed his fellow MPs with the same ferocious suspicion that he would have lavished on an accredited agent of the KGB.
What Wilson did not know was that, as well as claiming (with little justification) to be an expert in security matters, Wigg combined prurience about the sex lives of others with the use of prostitutes.
On Saturday, October 19, 1964, the day after Harold Wilson was sworn in as Prime Minister, Sir Roger Hollis, the Director-General of MI5, was told that the new Home Secretary was to be Sir Frank Soskice but that Wilson proposed to transfer responsibility for security to Wigg as Paymaster General — in effect, minister without portfolio.
Hollis was appalled. In the course of the weekend Wilson was persuaded that the Home Secretary would continue to be responsible for the Security Service. Nevertheless, Wigg would assist Wilson on questions of security. For some time Wigg saw Wilson more often than any other minister — more frequently even than the chief whip. The frequency of their meetings was chiefly due to Wilson’s obsession with “plots” against him. Wigg kept the Prime Minister up to date on plotting within — and sometimes without — the Labour Party, and with sexual and other irregularities among Labour MPs that might erupt into public scandals.
Some of the material that Wigg supplied to the Prime Minister was bizarre. Early in Wilson’s first administration, Wigg sent him a large envelope marked “Not to be opened by female staff”, which predictably attracted the attention of the “Garden girls”, the secretarial staff in No 10’s Garden Room.
One of the secretaries, Anne Kiggell, now an Anglican priest, recalls opening the bottom of the envelope and removing from it the photograph of a public figure, whom the Garden girls were able to identify, in the act of removing the corset of a female companion. She replaced the photograph, resealed the envelope and sent it to the Prime Minister.
A decade later a disillusioned Wilson went to the extraordinary lengths of hiring private detectives to follow Wigg to the home of Wigg’s mistress and illegitimate child. Soon afterwards Wigg was stopped several times for kerb-crawling; on one occasion, according to police evidence, accosting six women in 20 minutes in the Park Lane area of London.
Wigg was just one of several dubious characters in whom Wilson, at various times, professed total confidence. Among them were business friends he made while involved in East-West trade during the 1950s. The friend who gave the Security Service most cause for concern was the Lithuanian-born Joseph Kagan, later Lord Kagan, whose company Kagan Textiles made the Gannex mackintoshes that became one of Wilson’s trademarks.
In August 1970 Richardas Vaygauskas, a Lithuanian officer in the KGB residency, was reported to have congratulated Kagan on his knighthood, awarded on Wilson’s recommendation. Vaygauskas claimed to be “so proud” that Britain had at last a Lithuanian knight. Kagan returned the compliment by inviting Vaygauskas to his investiture at Buckingham Palace, possibly the first attended by a KGB officer.
Oleg Lyanlin, a KGB defector, confirmed that Kagan was being cultivated by Vaygauskas. When interviewed by an officer of K5 (counter-espionage operations) two months later, Kagan said that Vaygauskas had visited his flat almost every week since being posted to London in 1964 and that he had introduced Vaygauskas to all his friends, including MPs, not realising that he was a KGB officer.
Kagan admitted that if Vaygauskas had been collecting “dirt” on people in public life, he would have provided him with a great deal: “You know what it is in our sort of world, we gossip a lot and tend to make and destroy people’s reputations.” Among the gossip was Wilson’s alleged affair with a female member of staff, whom Kagan did not name. Vaygauskas would sometimes interrupt his evening chats with Kagan to see his “ambassador” (in reality, almost certainly the KGB resident) before returning with “a shopping-list of questions”.
Why Wilson was attracted to such double-dealers remains a mystery. He continued to enjoy their company even when, as with Kagan, he was “under no illusions about [their] business honesty”. When Wilson’s press officer, Joe Haines, surveyed the Prime Minister’s personal guests at the Guildhall ceremony on December 12, 1975, to confer on him the Freedom of the City of London, he “looked around to see if Inspector Knacker of the Yard was keeping the ceremony under observation”.
Even after Kagan was sentenced to ten months in jail for fraud in 1980, Wilson’s friendship with him continued. On at least one occasion after Kagan emerged from jail, the two men jointly entertained a member of the Soviet trade delegation at the House of Lords. As late as 1986 two major British embassies complained of Wilson’s personal involvement with another company which had “a dodgy reputation”, was notorious for “sharp practice” and had a chairman whose disgraceful behaviour had caused diplomatic problems. Another business friend of Wilson who attracted the attention of MI5 was Rudy Sternberg. Like Kagan, he had made a fortune out of trade with the Soviet bloc and had received a knighthood in 1970 on Wilson’s recommendation. In the Service’s view, Sternberg had made his money “by methods which seem frequently to have been on the fringe of respectability”.
In May 1974 Robert Armstrong, then Wilson’s principal private secretary, asked Sir Michael Hanley, the Director-General, whether there was “anything we ought to know” about Sternberg, who was “seeking to bend the Prime Minister’s ear” – apparently “to seek accreditation as an unpaid, unofficial, confidential and irregular liaison between the Prime Minister and the top leadership of the Soviet Government”. The Security Service strongly advised that Sternberg should not be given access to any information classified “Confidential” or above. “Sternberg’s ambitions”, it believed, “render him vulnerable to Soviet bloc pressure”.
Despite opposition from Robert Armstrong, Sternberg received the peerage he appeared to crave in the 1975 New Year Honours list. His elevation as Lord Plurenden “caused particular offence, since it was well known that Sternberg had contributed generously to Wilson’s office expenses during the period in opposition”.
Among Wilson’s other disreputable friends who had made their fortunes from East-West trade was Harry Kissin who, like Kagan and Sternberg, had helped to finance his private office. Kissin was one of Wilson’s confidants during his final term. Soon after Wilson returned to No 10, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir John Hunt, asked Hanley for a report on Kissin. Hanley replied that, though, unlike Kagan, Kissin’s security record “hardly amounts to an adverse one”, he was “obviously not a man to be trusted with confidences”.
The DG doubtless had in mind Kissin’s indiscretions to, and corrupt use of, prostitutes. According to an agent whom the Service considered reliable, “When Kissin comes to [a brothel] on pleasure bent — always two girls at a time — he invariably uses the telephone in his Rolls Royce ... to establish that the talent at his disposal has already arrived.” Kissin employed prostitutes to entertain foreign business contacts.
After Wilson’s return to No 10 in February 1974, Kissin was confident of a peerage in the Birthday Honours list. Unsurprisingly, his nomination ran into opposition. The peerage, however, duly arrived — doubtless at Wilson’s insistence. On receiving congratulations from one of the brothels that he frequented, the newly ennobled Lord Kissin of Camden promised to call round for a champagne celebration.
To his later regret, Wilson rejected security advice about Jeremy Thorpe, who in 1967 became leader of the Liberal Party. Thorpe was a promiscuous, risk-taking gay, aware that his career might be ended by sexual scandal. At a time when gay sex, even between consenting adults, was illegal, it laid Thorpe open to the risk of blackmail. The threat led the Security Service to warn the Foreign Office early in Wilson’s first administration, when it was suggested that Thorpe join a group of experts with access to secret material who would advise the Foreign Secretary on policy to the United Nations.
Despite the warnings, Wilson made Thorpe a privy counsellor, with access to classified information on national security, only two months after he became party leader. He did so partly because he enjoyed Thorpe’s company. His private and political secretary, Marcia Williams [later Lady Falkender] was to recall that “Harold and I used to giggle at his impersonations. He was a colourful addition to any dinner party”.
By December 1975, Wilson was convinced that there was a plot to discredit and destroy him and his Government. He suspected that the South African intelligence service (BOSS) and the CIA were involved. His paranoia was strengthened by the attempted assassination of Thorpe’s former lover, the male model Norman Scott. The inexperienced would-be assassin, Andrew Newton, a former airline pilot, succeeded only in killing Scott’s great dane. Early in 1976, a hysterical Scott, who was being prosecuted for benefit fraud, claimed in open court that he was “being hounded all the time by people just because of my sexual relationship with Jeremy Thorpe”. Thorpe succeeded in persuading Wilson that he was being framed by BOSS.
Wilson’s mental decline during the year before his resignation in April 1976 was obvious to all around him. Once impressively quick on his feet, he found it difficult even to improvise a short constituency speech and suffered from psychosomatic stomach pains before difficult meetings. His medical condition was accompanied by, and may partly explain, his increasing tendency to conspiracy theory. A colleague recalls standing next to him in the lavatory at No 10, and watching in some astonishment as the Prime Minister pointed to the electric light fitting and gestured that it might well be bugged.
There was, in reality, no plot by any Service officer, serving or retired, to conspire against Wilson. Nonetheless, his resignation on March 16, 1976, gave rise to illinformed speculation among some of his colleagues that the knowledge that the Security Service had obtained discreditable material on him had forced him to step down. The longevity of belief in a Wilson plot owes as much to Peter Wright as to Wilson. Wright claimed in his book Spycatcher that 30 MI5 officers “had given their approval to a plot”. During a television interview Wright admitted: “The maximum number was eight or nine. Very often it was only three.” Pressed further, Wright replied: “One, I should say.”
When Stella Rimington became Director-General, she tried to quash the theory by inviting former Labour home secretaries and other senior party figures to her office. The attempt failed. “Though I did my best to convince them that they were wrong,” she recalled, “I knew that further efforts would be fruitless.” A decade later she failed to convince The Guardian, which accompanied the serialisation of her memoirs in 2001 with an article claiming “there is no doubt that some MI5 officers were out to destabilise Labour ministers”. Old conspiracy theories never die. This one has not even begun to fade away.
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