Director General of MI5 humiliated in whistleblower battle against journalist

Having been left with no option other than to resign from the Security Department of the Home Office, John Francis Smith soon found another job in the NHS and though not as well paid, he survived comfortably enough. But the comfort zone ended there and he must have known that MI5 and MPSB would keep him under surveillance to monitor his whereabouts and also to ascertain if he was going to cause them more trouble.

John contacted his sister Julia in Nottingham some time after and explained that he had been forced to leave the Home Office but did not say why. He enquired about the employment situation at the time in Nottingham and suggested he was thinking of returning to be closer to his family. Julia, who had been embroiled in a long-term relationship with the High Sheriff of Nottingham George Seymour, had problems of her own but offered to give John temporary succour to support his search for work.

It remains unclear but certainly possible that John was simply selling a ruse to the government agencies who were monitoring his postal mail. Indeed, Julia wrote back to her brother but did not receive a reply and likely thought her brother was ignoring her offer of help. In reality, her letter was more likely than not intercepted en route to John and he never had sight of it as happened with many family letters over the years.

And Julia was no stranger to intrigue and should have understood the situation perfectly. After all, her long-term lover, Nottingham Magistrate George Seymour had told her many times "Julia, the higher you get in society, the muckier it gets." And George was right because Britain was in the grip of widespread corruption in public office. There is no evidence to suggest George Seymour was corrupt but certainly he witnessed such corruption and did not make a fuss about it... it was simply part of the process.

But John Francis Smith was not prepared to stand by and allow the tidal wave of corruption washing over Public Office to tarnish his name also. He was a moral man, deeply principled and as such was sickened by the dirty tricks he witnessed. Having complained to his bosses at the Home Office about the extent of the corruption he was being asked to bury, he was simply ignored. Senior Civil Servants at the Home Office had a vested interest in concealing the dirty tricks so as not to "alarm the public."

As the 1970s unfolded and gossip and rumours became rife of an MI5 plot against the Wilson goverment to smear Ministers as KGB agents, Soviet sympathisers and "friends of the IRA", John Francis Smith decided to act against his orders from above. At first he was concerned he may be caught and sacked or worse prosecuted for exposing secrets but HMG agencies seldom want to make a public issue of internal corruption....

MI5's F-branch (domestic subversion) was in overdrive mode against left-wing 'agitators' and dozens of MI5 agents were reporting back on the activities of the anti-Establishment Left. Whilst it is clear that not all sections of MI5 were involved in the plot to overthrow the Wilson government, many senior MI5 officers were in league with like-minded individuals at the Ministry of Defence.

And though to this day MI5 continues to maintain the fiction that there was no plot against Harold Wilson but the facts tell a very different story of shadow government officers plotting to use military force to get rid of a 'government' they considered to be sympathetic to the Soviet Union.

The CIA's James "Jesus" Angleton (Director of Counter-Intelligence) had first mooted the idea that Harold Wilson was a "Soviet Agent" and had told MI5 of his concerns and asked that MI5 keep this Top Secret information away from anyone in the Wilson government. Typically, MI5 claim to this day that they could not withhold such information from the democratically elected government but that is precisely what happened.

Between 1968 and 1976, Britain went through a period of high tension, plots within plots against Labour governments, and even Tory Prime Minister Ted Heath was suspected of "Soviet connections". It was clear to anyone in Government Service at the time that MI5, factions of MI6 and the Ministry of Defence were simply out of control.

Making a decision to blow the whistle on their 'activities' in the public domain would have been suicide and so instead John Francis Smith settled for a less public form of career suicide. He endangered his own safety and that of his family but in act of selflessness he eventually protected his family by accepting the deal put to him by the Home Office.

In a political climate in which trust in one's colleagues was extremely sparse, he began copying sensitive documents at the Home Office and releasing them not to the media but to trusted members of the Harold Wilson government. John Francis Smith had made a decision not to betray his country like the Cambridge Spies did, he decided to act in the interests of democracy. As a deeply committed Conservative he was aghast at the rumours being spread by MI5 officers that Ted Heath was a "suspect".

It was the last straw for John and he saw quite clearly that no one was safe from character assassination as a tidal wave of fear, smear and parnoia gripped HMG departments in London. Who would be next? Clearly, anyone who refused to toe the line and having witnessed at first hand how corruption 'investigations' were being mishandled by the Home Office, he broke ranks and was about to disclose one document which went too far....


Paradigmatic analysis: HO 241 Royal Commission on Standards of Conduct in Public Life 1974-1976

For several months prior to his enforced resignation from the Home Office, he had been writing a book detailing the extent of corruption buried by Government agencies and made several references to the plots against the Wilson government.

John's plan was to leave the Home Office and then publish the first of two books he was writing. He believed that once he was out of Government Service there would be a significantly reduced chance of legal action being brought against him. But unknown to him, MI5's F-branch had been watching him and from sources in the publishing world known as "stringers", they were aware of the manuscript he was working on.

He was 'visited' at home by members of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, MI5 and Home Office officials who seized the manuscript. Once it became clear to them the extent of his knowledge and the massive damage it could do to the 'reputation' of government agencies, he was forced to resign from the Home Office or face 'disciplinary action'.

He was trapped and with no way out he duly resigned from the Home Office and lost his entire pension for which he had worked for almost 20 years. The forces of corruption had prevailed and another decent man was thrown into the wilderness to fend for himself. But John was still determined to have his say and began writing another manuscript in secret to clear his name and put across the story of what had happened from his point of view.

But there was no way he could hide the manuscript from MI5 and the MPSB and this was also seized. He was given a final warning of criminal prosecution if he continued and he yielded to the threats of the State's hired thugs. John knew only too well the extent of the threats levelled against him had to be taken seriously. His brother Leonard was a leading official in the National Union of Mineworkers in the Midlands and as such considered by MI5 to be "subversive".

And given the fact that Leonard had also spent a brief time in the Communist Party (CPGB) before becoming active in the Labour Party; the permutations of smear and character assassination were simply too much for John. He was aware that MI5 could smear him by 'guilt' through association with a known "subversive" and suggest that he was also a Communist sympathiser even though in fact he was a right-wing Conservative.

Despite the threats and clear intimidation from the secret state, he remained unbowed and unbroken. He believed in the purpose of his role as the whistleblower and showed no sign of regret or remorse. He took on the secret state and undermined their dirty tricks and refused to bury corruption in Public Office. His actions cost him is career and a comfortable Home Office pension.

But in the sum of things the same prejudiced system he tried to expose in the 1970s still exists today and has become even more corrupt than then. New Labour and the previous John Major governments speak volumes for this fact and I wear their hatred as a badge of pride.

In part four of this shocking true story of the HMG whistleblower, I will cover the fall-out in the years after my uncle blew the whistle and in graphic detail show the extent of the State's attempts to stop me from finding out anything about my uncle's Government Service....

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 4