MI5 bosses saw red after failing to nail Communist Clydesiders
THEY were a group of firebrand Scottish communists suspected by security services as being Soviet agents on what became known as Red Clydeside.
But despite devoting huge resources to spying on them, MI5 failed to find a single piece of evidence strong enough to have them convicted.
Now, new evidence suggests that the trio: Jimmy Shields, Willie Gallagher and John Kerrigan, may have been tipped-off about security operations against them.
Previously secret documents reveal that information about at least one of the men was handled by Kim Philby – an intelligence officer who was later unmasked as a Soviet agent.
MI5 employed a double agent to feed Shields dud information to pass onto his Soviet handlers.
However, British intelligence feared Shields had known about the ruse from the start and was duping them.
The hugely expensive operation, in which agents followed Shields’s every movement, intercepted his mail and bugged his telephone lines, was finally called off by Roger Hollis, then a senior intelligence officer who would later become director general of MI5.
In a memo from March 1946, Hollis said: ‘I had a talk with “M”, telling him that we had devoted a great deal of time and energy to Jimmy Shields, without result and that though I realised results were hard to come by, I could not avoid the suspicion that Shields might be leading us up the garden path.’
The three Scots were founding members of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
In the early 1930s, they came to the attention of the security services who suspected them of being Soviet agents and they began surveillance operations focused on the men until the mid-1950s.
Documents reveal that reports into the activities of Kerrigan were handled by Philby who, in September 1945, narrowly avoided being outed as a Russian spy when the intelligence services received information from a Soviet defector in Canada.
Months later, news spread that a network of Canadian spies had been passing classified information to the Soviet government.
A report on Shields’s meeting with MI5’s double agent, who was codenamed M/7, at the Communist Party headquarters in London, described the Scot as being in a state of extreme anxiety about the ‘Canadian affair’.
It said that Shields informed M/7 he had been instructed to ‘exercise the utmost caution at the moment’.
MI5 became increasingly frustrated, with one report stating it had ‘acquired little information about the extent of Shields’s espionage activities’.
Around the same time, Kerrigan, who stood unsuccessfully as an MP for seats in Shettleston and Gorbals in Glasgow, was suspected of seeking to pass on nuclear secrets after he was apparently spotted scoping a former atomic energy research station in Kent, but intensive surveillance of his activities produced nothing concrete.
Gallagher’s file, meanwhile, reveals MI5 considered the possibility that the Communist Party MP for West Fife was furnishing the Russians with intelligence about the geography of Scotland to facilitate a possible invasion of Britain, via the Highlands.
‘Leading us up the garden path’