Government Archives and Official Histories

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Wednesday 10th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

My Lords, I am left breathless, but I will try. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank, for giving us the opportunity to debate this important theme. I declare an interest as president of the Friends of The National Archives and as a teacher of contemporary British history at Queen Mary, University of London.

I will concentrate on a special oeuvre within the genre of official histories: those dealing with the secret services. Two very fine ones have appeared since the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, last enabled your Lordships’ House to discuss official histories: first, The Defence of the Realm: the Authorized History of MI5, spanning the years 1909 to 2009, by Professor Christopher Andrew, which was published in 2009; secondly, the following year saw the publication of Professor Keith Jeffery’s MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909 to 1949.

Both books brim with their own special mixtures of analysis, swash and buckle, operations and organisation. Both studies kindle that fascination to which we Brits are so susceptible when reading about the King’s or the Queen’s most secret servants in either fictional or non-fictional form. It is here in that strange, twilit terrain between the facts of Professor Andrew and Professor Jeffery and the imaginations of the spy novelists that one finds the real utility of intelligence history. Spying and counterspying are activities that uniquely lend themselves to fantasy and conspiracy theory. The meticulous, careful reconstructions and assessments filtered through the minds and pens of Chris Andrew and Keith Jeffery are the best antidote we have to what one astute critic called the “snobbery with violence” practised by Commander Bond on both page and screen.

Part of the special utility of secret service official histories and historians is that they possess another virtue, a Heineken lager quality, for they can reach those parts of the secret state that others cannot reach because of the stratospheric classification levels of many of the documents on which they draw and the care needed to avoid blowing both human and technological techniques, the sources and methods of the craft that remain of enduring value.

The paper product of our secret agencies does not flow that easily into the public domain on the tide of the 30-year—soon to be 20-year—rule. But the appearance of the official histories of the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service has provided a scholarly bonus —a Keynesian multiplier effect—which I had not anticipated. Once the volumes had been published, a proportion of the retained files on which Professors Andrew and Jeffery had drawn could be prepared for declassification at the National Archives, and indeed were.

At Kew last May the Foreign Office, the Cabinet Office and the National Archives mounted what can only be called a cornucopian release, drawing on two of the most secret collections the British state has ever created. The FCO batch covered the Foreign Office’s dealings with the SIS—the province of what the FCO euphemistically calls the Permanent Under-Secretary’s Department—covering the years 1903 to 1951 and shedding much new light on how the secret state coped with successive threats from the Kaiser, Hitler and Stalin. The second tranche flowed from what I call the Cabinet Secretaries’ “too hot to handle” cupboard, formally known as the Cabinet Secretary’s Miscellaneous Papers. This batch covered the years 1936 to 1951 and contained material which, in my judgment, is of continuing value to today’s guardians of national security in the secret agencies and in Whitehall.

I particularly have in mind the report prepared for Mr Attlee and a small group of Ministers in 1951 on The Secret Intelligence and Security Services. Written by that great technician of state, Sir Norman Brook, the Cabinet Secretary to four Prime Ministers, it painted for Ministers a vivid and unsparing portrait of how the secret world had fared and was faring against the toughest target British intelligence had ever faced: Stalin’s Russia.

I hope that the current heads of service and the Cabinet Secretary will read the Brook report. Not only is it an exemplar of concision and penetration and the jargon-free language at which Whitehall excelled before departments sought the assistance of management consultants, it is a model for how such a review might be commissioned today; for example, if the Prime Minister wished to review the workings of the secret world as a whole with now more than three years’ experience available of his National Security Council as the taskmaster and pacemaker of the agencies.

I profoundly hope that the current austerity will not dam the flow of official histories for the foreseeable future, not least those dealing with the secret world. It would be hugely beneficial, for example, if Cheltenham could authorise an official historian to start work on a volume designed for the general reader, embracing as much as can safely be divulged about the Government Communications Headquarters and its predecessor institutions to complete the secret agency set, as it were, and make it three.

I like to think that in this House we have a keen sense of history across all our Benches; in fact, I know we do. I know, for example, that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, would have added his wisdom to our deliberations this evening had he not been involved with our other business today. I will finish by giving my thanks to all those across the departments and agencies who provide us with such a rich paper trail—although regrettably not to the noble Lord, Lord Prescott—and those who care for the documentary product permanently at the National Archives. We are truly in their debt.