Senior UK Security Service (MI5) officials believed that black people could not be trusted in high-level spying roles, as they could pose a security risk, documents uncovered by an academic showed.
Declassified files show that black people were actively being discriminated against in Whitehall in the 1960s because of their race.
The details emerged after University of Salford international history professor Dan Lomas scoured through papers from the UK Standing Interdepartmental Committee on Security.
Lomas looked at documents from a period when the Labour Party government considered introducing racial equality legislation in 1967.
The papers reveal deepening concern in Whitehall at proposals making it illegal to refuse employment to a person on the grounds of skin color, which would become enshrined in the 1968 Race Relations Act.
Although it was widely known that MI5 had a deep distrust of Jewish people, there was a “surprising omission” of any reference to security concerns about black people in the agency’s official history, Lomas said
“Since the 1940s, there were bans on communists and fascists working in government. In the 1950s, this was extended to what was described as ‘character defects,’ such as homosexuality, mental illness and alcoholism — on the grounds that this would make people vulnerable to blackmail — but these papers reveal the officials also saw race as a security issue,” he said.
“The discussions around new legislation on racial discrimination being introduced in the 1960s seem to have presented a threat to the established, but unspoken, rule that black people risked national security,” he added.
By the 1960s, government departments had started to recruit black people into junior clerical or manual posts, but they were not trusted with secret documents, the files show.
Race Equality Foundation chief executive Jabeer Butt said that he was not surprised.
“Various investigations into the civil service, as well as a recent report, have all pointed towards the lack of diversity,” he said.
Earlier this year, the UK spy agencies were criticized for their lack of black executives.
A report by the UK Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament said that there is a shortage of black and Asian staff in senior posts.
Neither the UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), which deals with overseas intelligence-gathering, nor MI5 had any people from a black, Asian or minority ethnic background in top posts from 2016 to last year.
UK surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was the only agency listed as having any staff at a senior level from a BAME (“black, Asian and minority ethnic”) background.
“To discover that this has been a long-running issue is not surprising considering what the recent report said,” Butt said. “It shows yet again that things are not changing and haven’t for a very long time.”
“They [the papers] show that identity has always been a big part of who has been appointed, yet history shows those who have gone on to betray the country have nearly always been white British men,” he added.
Minutes from a meeting in the UK Cabinet Office, attended by the secretary of state for defense, the director of GCHQ and a senior civil servant from the Treasury, show MI5’s concerns about members of the Windrush generation and others living in the UK under the 1948 British Nationality Act.
Security chiefs were concerned that enabling members of ethnic minorities to apply for positions in secret posts would pose a security risk, as they lacked the usual information for background checks.
Officials said that since 1964, “colored staff” had to have been resident in the UK for 10 years or more for vetting purposes.
However, the minutes of the meeting, also attended by then-MI5 director-general Martin Furnival Jones, made it clear that security issues went deeper than the amount of time spent in the UK.
MI5 believed that the risks of employing “colored staff” stemmed “simply from the color of a man’s skin, which gave him a chip on his shoulder. It would be a long time before this chip was removed,” the minutes said.
It is understood the “chip” referred to the possibility that black people were more likely to become disaffected due to fractious race relations in the UK and therefore susceptible to being persuaded to spy for another country.
“It must be assumed that the communist intelligence services were fully aware of the possibilities of recruiting agents from among disaffected colored people in this country,” Furnival Jones told the committee.
“This was just two years before Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech,” Lomas said. “It seems MI5 seriously believed that disaffected ‘colored people’ could be recruited by the KGB to spy on Britain.”
“However, there is nothing anywhere in MI5’s declassified files to suggest that there were ever any black British spying on Britain. Their relatively small numbers in Whitehall and junior positions would have made them of limited use to the KGB anyway,” Lomas said.
“Perhaps ironically, the real threat had come from elite members of the British establishment, the so-called Cambridge spy ring, who had been passing British secrets to the Soviets, or intelligence officials and civil servants who had been blackmailed or passed information for ideological or financial rewards,” he said.
“Nevertheless, the suggestion here is that MI5 simply did not employ black people,” he added. “So it is essential to our success that ours is an inclusive workplace offering varied, rewarding and challenging careers for all.”
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