Back in 2018 new claims were put forward that the British domestic Security Service, MI5, was not just involved with monitoring and collecting intelligence on political movements and individuals deemed as potential threats to the state in the post-war period, but was also involved in the ‘policing’ of moral standards at the cultural level.
MI5 seemingly infiltrated the UK’s entertainment industry in the 1960s, with the objective of sabotaging and undermining Leftwing theatre and movie productions, and causing Communist and Trotskyite groups to lose substantial sums of money in the process.
According to The Times newspaper (February 27th, 2018), the daughter of one of MI5’s most renowned spies had pointed to evidence that the Security Service was keen to target not just political activists, such as communists, Trotskyists and the peace movement, in the usual way, but also sought to counter what was regarded as Leftwing propaganda in the theatre and movie entertainment world.
MI5 operations
Charlotte Bingham, whose father John Bingham (1908-1988) was a leading MI5 officer (and reputedly the model for John Le Carre’s famous fictional spy George Smiley), had written her memoirs, MI5 and Me (2018), and in these she revealed that her father forced her to join MI5 when she was a teenager (see photo). Moreover, she provided some fascinating new details on the operational tactics of the Security Service, including on how her father allowed various theatre actors to lodge at the Bingham family home in the 1960s.
There was a secret purpose to this apparent generosity. Bingham revealed that her father had told her that the actors could help them know ‘what kind of communist propaganda is going to be pushed at the general public… this is most important for maintaining standards’. John Bingham also apparently added: ‘A country can lose its way overnight after seeing the wrong play or film’.
Charlotte Bingham, who is herself a bestselling novelist and has also written for numerous television productions (such as the very popular Upstairs, Downstairs), claimed in her memoirs that MI5 even helped bring about the closure of a West End theatre production, a play which featured a ‘common man, rich capitalist and poor woman’. One of John Bingham’s actor lodgers had apparently been persuaded to ‘sabotage’ the opening night of the new play by forgetting his lines and coughing throughout the performance. Charlotte Bingham’s father then revealed to his daughter that, because of the ‘political’ nature of the play, Trotskyists had put ‘rather a large amount of party funds in it – and now of course they’ve lost the lot’. Bingham also claimed that her father also later began to target the movie world: he and MI5 became interested in ‘sabotaging’ a film made by a ‘famously up-and-coming film director’, whom she called Leslie Robertson.
‘Loyal’ theatrical agencies provided actors for the new production and then, during the shooting of the movie, two of the actors lodging at the Bingham home were persuaded to be ‘intransigent… about their interpretation of their roles’ in the movie. Bingham revealed that she realised that her father, in his capacity as an MI5 officer, ‘must be using the same tactics the commmunists were adopting to cause strikes in factories’, and was ‘getting at the target from the inside…’. She also noted that the car journeys each morning which ferried the two lodgers to their work on the film set ‘were lightened by the sound of their laughter as they planned yet more fiendish tactics destined to throw Leslie Robertson into chaos and confusion’.
Research challenges
As the Times Arts Correspondent noted, the Security Service files from this period have yet to be released to the National Archives at Kew, so it is difficult to obtain further information or confirmation on MI5’s apparent campaign to counter ‘cultural’ forms of Marxist subversion in the 1960s.
Similarly, the official authorised history of MI5 by Christopher Andrew, Defence of the Realm (published in 2009), does not have any discussion of the Service’s apparent attempt to infiltrate and manipulate the entertainment industry.
However, historians might find further evidence of such strategies in future releases of MI5 files to the National Archives.
If the claims made by Bingham are true, it certainly throws significant new light on how the state and its agencies were determined to counter what they regarded as the dangerous propaganda of the ‘cultural’ Left in the Swinging Sixties. More research on this by scholars is required.
Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics
(All images: WikiMedia Commons)
Note: This is a slightly updated version of a blog first published here in March, 2018.
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