Wilson, the KGB and the ‘Watergate’ break-in that was the REAL reason he quit
WHEN the offices of a serving Prime Minister are burgled, you might expect a clamour of concern, an official inquiry or even a crisis. Yet the public knew nothing when, in 1974, thieves broke in to Harold Wilson’s offices on Buckingham Palace Road in Victoria – a stone’s throw from the Palace itself. Nor when a cache of stolen documents from the burglary went on sale to the foreign press.
Even the police were kept in the dark, initially at least.
Yet this mysterious break-in, which took place in the months leading up to the 1974 General Election, would change the course of political history. Among the stolen documents was an explosive letter from one of Wilson’s many powerful friends and it hinted at criminal actions which touched the Prime Minister himself.
With echoes of America’s recent Watergate scandal, dark insinuations followed, as did a potentially incriminating court case – events that helped force Wilson’s shock resignation just a year after his Election victory.
This was already a time of fear, paranoia and poisonous suspicion, of course. Wilson faced claims not just of cronyism but of high-level links between the Labour Party and the KGB.
And standing, invisible, at the heart of events was the man trusted to clean up the mess, a short, tubby character with the face of an owl and an unrivalled devotion to duty. This was Maurice Oldfield, the legendary Chief or ‘C’ of the Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6. IN 1974, Labour had been returned to power with the narrowest of margins – Wilson winning a majority of only three seats. Just weeks into the job, new Foreign Secretary James Callaghan summoned Maurice Oldfield to his office.
‘Tell me, Maurice,’ said Callaghan, who, despite serving as Home Secretary and Chancellor in the previous Wilson government, had little experience of foreign affairs. ‘What, exactly, is it that you do?’
‘My job, Foreign Secretary,’ the mild-mannered spymaster replied, ‘is to bring you unwelcome news.’
What Callaghan didn’t know was that Oldfield had been digging into Wilson and his staff for some time – and with good reason.
The high-profile Soviet KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn had claimed Wilson was a Soviet agent. MI5 was already looking into his connections, whether friends, political contacts or employees.
Dark practices were rife. In Northern Ireland, for example, the Army psychological warfare expert and information officer Colin Wallace was involved in a black propaganda campaign called Clockwork Orange during 1973 and 1974.
It started out spreading misinformation about the terrorist groups but Wallace became concerned when it began to smear senior politicians. Wilson was one of the prime targets. The scope of Oldfield’s knowledge on Wilson’s staff surprised many. One new face in No10 was the Head of the Policy Unit, Bernard Donoughue.
One Monday morning, Donoughue had been surprised when the MI6 chief passed him, smiled, and asked: ‘Did you enjoy your football game yesterday?’
Donoughue used to play football every Sunday morning on Hampstead Heath.
He first assumed that Oldfield perhaps lived nearby. When told that Maurice lived a stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament, Donoughue realised that ‘the man knew everything. Nothing was left to chance’.
Suspicions surrounding Wilson, along with a fear of the trade unions and their alleged links to the Soviet Bloc, served to stoke a feeling of paranoia.
And it seems the circle around the Prime Minister didn’t do an awful lot to calm the situation. Donoughue says that Wilson’s long-term private and political secretary, Marcia Williams, was a significant figure in fuelling the problem.
She told Wilson that the security services were not to be trusted and was said to have had a disproportionate influence on the honours system, which saw Wilson accused of handing out peerages to friends and associates of dubious character. Certainly Wilson’s choice of friends, however innocent he may have thought them, left him wide open to accusations of harbouring Soviet sympathies.
The Conservative MP Winston Churchill, grandson of the wartime leader, wrote to Wilson late in 1974 to warn him that one of his closest associates, Lithuanian-born businessman Joe Kagan (formerly Juozapas Kaganas), was having KGB officials as house guests.
Wilson asked the security services not to speak to Kagan directly but agreed to warn him personally about his contacts.
In a pointed note, lest anyone thought him naive, Wilson added: ‘For the record, I always assume that Russians I speak to may be connected to the KGB.’
An investigation found that the KGB had been trying to use Kagan as an ‘agent of influence’, but cleared him of being a conscious agent.
Given the prevailing sensitivities, Wilson might have tried to distance himself from the likes of Kagan. In fact, the reverse was true: Wilson continued almost defiantly to associate with controversial business leaders with Eastern Bloc connections such as Kagan and the industrialist Rudy Sternberg.
He proudly wore his trademark Gannex raincoats from Kagan’s
KGB defector claimed PM was a Soviet agent Harold was defiant over controversial associates