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12
Harold Wilson - Security Scandals and
Spy Revelations
The result is the worst press any P.M. has had in my day . ..
Cecil King, newspaper proprietor, 25 June 1967 1
For British intelligence, the 1960s was a decade of cultural transformation.
Journalists who had been brought up to respect
wartime secrecy were discovering that Cold War espionage was
a hot subject. It had already burst onto the front pages with
the shooting down of Gary Powers' U-2 over Russia in May
1960 and the CIA's ill-fated Bay of Pigs adventure in February
1961, which attempted to unseat Fidel Castro in Cuba. The
Profumo affair gripped the British public imagination in the
second half of 1963, while the journalist Chapman Pincher broke
the news of Britain's secret access to overseas cables in what
became known as the 'D-Notice affair' in 1967. The following
year was marked by the appearance of Kim Phil by's dishonest,
but delicious, autobiography, written after his defection to
Moscow.
Harold Wilson's first government was beset by security scandals.
This was something he had fervently hoped to avoid. In
1963, while still leader of the opposition, Wilson had enjoyed
taunting Harold Macmillan over the Profumo scandal, the Vassall
spy case which involved a British civil servant passing naval
secrets to the Soviets, and Philby's defection. Macmillan resigned
a month after Lord Denning released his report on the Profumo
affair, proof, if any were needed, that espionage and security
were areas of serious political liability. Having seen Macmillan