WIREDGOV

64 previously top secret files from the UK Security Service, or MI5 were yesterday made available to the public by National Archive.

The records cover a range of subjects and span the Second World War and post-war era up to the mid-1960s. Personal files include Second World War German intelligence agents and suspected agents, double agent operations, Soviet intelligence agents and suspected agents, Right-wing extremists, Communists, and suspected communist and Russian sympathisers.

Searchable from KV 2/4346 to KV 2/4408, KV 4/476 and KV 6/146, the files include:

• Stern gang members Gilberte Elizabeth Lazarus and Yaacov Levstein (KV 2/4362) and Jacques Martinski (KV 2/4363) and their attempt to blow up the Colonial Office in London.
• Intercepted correspondence between diplomat, politician and author Harold Nicolson (KV 2/4364) and Cambridge spy Guy Burgess who had fled to Moscow.
• Details of activity by Portland Spy Ring members Ethel Gee (KV 2/4377) and Harry Houghton (KV 2/4380 to KV 2/4385) at the Navy’s Underwater Detection Establishment up until their arrests in 1961 for supplying secret information to the Soviet Union.
• Hubert Cornelius van Ginhoven (KV 2/4378 to KV 2/4379), a Special Branch officer who was dismissed from the police for supplying sensitive information to the Soviet Union.
• Novelist Kingsley Amis (KV 2/4399), who was a member of the Community Party of Great Britain during his time at Oxford University.
• An MI5 report on counter espionage methods used in the Second World War (KV 4/476).
• Gisela Hendrina Winegard, alias Klein, (KV 6/146), a fashion and photographer’s model who had links with a number of well-connected British military officers, including Army officer and Conservative MP John Profumo from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Read more about the case of Klein.Other individuals include William John Hooper (KV 2/4346-4349) who worked for MI5 but was thought to have been also working for German intelligence in 1938 and 1939, Polish Air Force officer and MI5 double agent Roman Czerniawski (KV 2/4351-4356), and New Zealand Rhodes Scholar Ian Milner, who joined the Communist Party at Oxford University and later became an Australian diplomat (KV 2/4370-4376).

• Listen to a podcast recorded with Professor Christopher Andrew, formerly official historian of MI5 and author of ‘The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5’.