MI5 spied on leading British historians for decades, secret files
reveal Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill had phones tapped,
correspondence intercepted and friends and wives monitored
Richard Norton-Taylor The Guardian, Friday 24 October 2014
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/24/mi5-spied-historians-eric
-hobsbawm-christopher-hill-secret-files
MI5 amassed hundreds of records on Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill,
two of Britain’s leading historians who were both once members of
the Communist party, secret files have revealed.
The scholars were subjected to persistent surveillance for decades
as MI5 and police special branch officers tapped and recorded their
telephone calls, intercepted their private correspondence and
monitored their contacts, the files show. Some of the surveillance
gave MI5 more details about their targets’ personal lives than any
threat to national security.
The files, released at the National Archives on Friday, reveal the
extent to which MI5, including its most senior officers, secretly
kept tabs on the personal and professional activities of communists
and suspected communists, a task it began before the cold war. The
papers also show that MI5 opened personal files on the popular
Oxford historian AJP Taylor, the writer Iris Murdoch, and the
moral philosopher Mary Warnock after they and Hill signed a letter
supporting a march against the nuclear bomb in 1959.
Lady Warnock told the Guardian on Thursday night: “I’d love to
see the file, or anybody’s file come to that, to see what was/is
regarded as suspicious … I am completely taken aback and even
faintly flattered.”
Hobsbawm, who was refused access to his files when he asked to see
them five years ago, died in 2012, and Hill died in 2009. Many
passages, sometimes whole pages, of their files remain redacted and
an entire file on Hobsbawm has been “temporarily retained”. The
files include long lists of names and addresses of letters written by
Hobsbawm and Hill.
They make clear that MI5 frequently read – or was sent – copies
of as many as 10 letters a day. At the same time, its officers, or
special branch officers, or their informants – one of whom was given
the codename Ratcatcher – were secretly taking notes of their phone
calls and meetings.
The files show that Hobsbawm, who became one of Britain’s most
respected historians and was made a Companion of Honour by Tony Blair,
first came to the notice of MI5 in 1942 when he and 38 colleagues
were described as being “obvious members of the CPGB [the Communist
party of Great Britain] on Merseyside”. He became number 211,764
on MI5’s index of personal files. Although he was cleared of
“suspicion of engaging in subversive activities or propaganda in the
army”, MI5 noted it was doubtful that he would be suitable for the
Intelligence Corps. Roger Hollis, later head of MI5, and Valentine
Vivian, the deputy chief of MI6, prevented him from joining the
Foreign Office’s political intelligence department.
At the end of the war, in July 1945, an MI5 officer noted: “As he is
known to be in contact with communists I should be interested to see
all his personal correspondence”.
MI5 said the object of keeping checks on Hobsbawm was “to establish
the identities of his contacts and to unearth overt or covert
intellectual Communists who may be unknown to us”. Similarly, Hill
was kept under surveillance, the files note, to establish “the
identity of his contacts at the University [of Oxford] and in the
cultural field generally, and to obtain the names of intellectuals
sympathetic to the [Communist] party who may not already be known to
us”.
Telephone intercepts disclosed that Hobsbawm and his family were
friendly with Alan Nunn May – a British physicist who had confessed
to spying for Russia and was released from jail in 1952 – and on one
occasion put him up for the night. There is no evidence in the files
of any attempt by either Hobsbawm or Hill to spy for Moscow or that
the Russians were interested in them for any such purpose.
One early file on Hobsbawm describes his uncle Harry, with whom he
sometimes stayed, as “sneering, half Jew in appearance, having a
long nose”.
The surveillance intruded into the targets’ relationships. Hobsbawm
is recorded in 1952 as having “difficulties with his [first] wife,
who,” an MI5 officer noted, “does not consider him to be a fervent
enough Communist”.
A report in 1950 revealed how Hill’s first wife, Inez, was becoming
“sick to death” of his Communist party affiliation, which she had
previously shared. “There seems to be some reason to believe that
she is not only fed up with her husband’s politics but also with
her husband’s political activities, especially as his political
sympathies lead him, according to her, to give a considerable amount
of his money to the party,” the report stated. A subsequent report
revealed she was having an affair with another Communist party
official.
Hobsbawm never left the Communist party but the
