By Prof Christopher Andrew
For many historians, the highlight of the latest MI5 declassification at the National Archives will be the multi-volume files on two of the world’s leading Communist historians, both British: Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm. Christopher Hill’s file, which begins at KV2/3941, shows that he first came to MI5’s attention when he visited Russia in 1935 while an undergraduate at Oxford University. He returned to Russia in 1936 and joined the Communist Party. After WW2 MI5 considered Hill, then a Fellow (and later Master) of Balliol College as Q ‘one of the leading Communists at Oxford University’. In 1951 it applied successfully for a Home Office Warrant (HOW) to intercept Hill’s correspondence and telephone calls in the belief that this would increase MI5’s ‘knowledge of Communism and the Universities’ in general as well as of Hill’s own activities. The product of the HOW adds to our understanding of, for example, Hill’s decision to leave the Party in 1957 in protest against the leadership’s attempt to suppress criticism of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Rising in 1956. The Party leader, John Gollan, was overhead saying that Q ‘out of those who had left, he would not have done much to dissuade any of them, except Christopher Hill’. Hill wrote to Communist Party HQ in an intercepted letter which is on his file: ‘We have been living for too long in a world of illusions. It was a smug, cosy little world…’
Unlike Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, whose file begins at KV2/3980, remained a Party member after the Hungarian Rising, though he fell out with some Party hardliners. The veteran hardliner D N Pritt was overheard complaining angrily to Gollan about Q ‘that nasty piece of work, Eric Hobsbawm’. Other senior Party figures were annoyed to discover that he was writing for the Daily Mail and other non-Communist publications under the pen-name ‘Francis Newton’. Hobsbawm, however, continued to encourage young people to join the Communist Party. In the last volume of his file to be released, which goes up to 1963, he’s reported, for example, as congratulating the West Middlesex Young Communist League on what he called the ‘encouraging results’ of its recruiting drive. The files also contain copies of Hobsbawm’s Party membership cards for the early 1960s, as well as intercepted correspondence and transcripts of telephone calls.
The MI5 files which attracted most media interest in the last declassification earlier this year were those on WW2 deception operations by an MI5 officer using the alias ‘Jack King’, who posed as a secret Gestapo representative in wartime Britain, a subterfuge that enabled him to identify British Nazi sympathisers. Some of the pro-Nazis even passed him secret information, including details of research into the jet engine, in the mistaken belief that he would pass it to Germany. Files in the latest release, beginning at KV2/3873, reveal for the first time that ‘King”s true identity was Eric Roberts. His file includes transcripts of conversations with Nazi sympathisers who suggested ways to damage the British war effort and assist a German invasion.
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