External Affairs' annus horribilis: Ken Ross recalls the diplomatic service's trials and tribulations in 1954.

• Author: Ross, Ken

'I feel like hell and appear to be suffering from smallpox, cholera, typhus and typhoid, and to add to my uncomfortable state, we had a very hard night with the Nihottes and I had the most awful hangover--and still have it at nearly six o'clock at night. However, within an hour or so I have to face the [primary] school concert!' --Alister McIntosh (1954). (1)

This McIntosh quip jumps out from his final missive for the year to George Laking in Washington: it symbolises his sombre mood as 1954 concluded. McIntosh, two decades later, reflected that External Affairs 'lost eight people in 1954 that was at the height of the McCarthy business--we didn't really recover from that'. (2)

Who were the eight? His year-end mood appeared not to have been much brightened by his gathering in eight new diplomats and having eased out several poor performers. He also wrote in that final missive to Laking that he currently had vacancies for a further eight diplomats but only a single desk for them.

McIntosh's major staffing accomplishment in 1954 was not to lose his most brilliant colleague, Frank Corner. That year Corner seemed intent on crashing out of External Affairs, having alienated most of his colleagues by his sharp, disheartening in-house communications. McIntosh was forced to remonstrate benignly with Corner to curb his sharp wit. (3)

Regularised vetting

While prime minister, Peter Fraser himself shrewdly handled what amounted to a security vetting of McIntosh's proposed recruits for External Affairs: the pressure was not great, there were barely a dozen. Regularised vetting commenced in 1951: a ripple-on reaction to the 1948 Attlee purge initiative in Britain that barred communists from national security positions in the civil service. (4) External Affairs staff employed prior to 1951 likely had their first formal vetting when completing five years' service, but new staff had to gain a security clearance ahead of beginning at the department. From numerous comments McIntosh made to others, he and Foss Shanahan had offered jobs in External Affairs to around a dozen individuals (names not known) who never made it in the door blocked by the 'tiny, shadowy wing of the New Zealand police, modelled on the domestic British counter-espionage MI5, [which] had responsibility for covert surveillance and intelligence activity, and vetting of public servants'. (5)

Paddy Costello, Doug Lake and Dick Collins are three of the eight: James McNeish names them in his The Sixth Man: the extraordinary life of Paddy Costello (2007). Costello's was not the most galling departure in 1954 that McIntosh handled: his going had already been paced out with Costello's input for three years with his resignation inevitable at year's end. For a decade, McIntosh had been assiduous in pushing back at MI5 wanting Costello gone: they saw him as a security risk to London. Costello's story has been much told in this journal. (6) His scholarship has recently received new recognition, which lessens persisting claims of his having been a Soviet agent. Paolo Mancosu illustrated his finding that Costello is the 'source of the Tamizdat phenomenon' with Costello's compiling the new edition of The Oxford Book of Russian Verse for Oxford University Press in 1948, given that it included Boris Pasternak's poetry. This was the first instance of Tamizdat--the smuggling of Soviet era writing published first in the West. Soon after, Costello 'was the first link in a chain that would lead to the eventual publication of Doctor Zhivago in the West in 1957'. (7) Mancosu affirms it was Costello who, as 'Anonymous', authored the much regarded 1958 perspective on Boris Pasternak. (8)

Doug Lake was respected by McIntosh. His departure was inevitable once the Special Branch tagged him as a security risk. The centre-piece of their assessment was his loyalty to his wife Ruth, particularly after the appearance of her pamphlet witheringly critiquing Mrs Boswell's nine New Zealand Herald articles which ran...