488 • SILLITOE, SIR PERCY
rounds of ammunition were expended and the building destroyed be-
fore the threat from the gunmen was neutralized and their burnt
corpses recovered. The home secretary,Winston Churchill, had ar-
rived at the ‘‘Battle of Stepney’’ to take personal charge of opera-
tions, and later authorized the purchase of 900 .32-caliber Webley
semiautomatics by the Metropolitan force and an increase in surveil-
lance on foreign political extremists.SILLITOE, SIR PERCY.In 1946 the new Labour prime minister,
Clement Attlee, called for Sir Percy Sillitoe, who was then chief con-
stable of Kent, and invited him to become thedirector-general of
the Security Serviceat the end of April, upon the retirement ofSir
David Petrie. A professional police officer with experience that
dated back to the British South African Police in 1908, Sillitoe had
made his reputation as a gang-buster in Glasgow and a no-nonsense
copper with few intellectual pretensions. During the war he had writ-
ten a report for the Home Office on Communist agitation, and this
may have brought him to the attention of the incoming home secre-
tary, Chuter Ede.
As director-general, Sillitoe authorized two of his officers to in-
dulge in literary pursuits:Courtney Younghelped writeHandbook
for Spies, the autobiography of a Briton,Allan Foote, who hadde-
fectedfrom the SovietGRU; andJim Skardonwas encouraged to
collaborate withAlan Mooreheadwho wroteThe Traitors, a study
of the atomic spiesAllan Nunn May,Bruno Pontecorvo, and Klaus
Fuchs. None of this help was acknowledged publicly, but both books
servedMI5’s purposes.
Sillitoe remained as director-general until August 1953, and during
that turbulent period he oversaw some of MI5’s more notorious in-
vestigations, including the arrest of the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs and
the defections ofGuy BurgessandDonald Maclean. The former
case was traumatic for Sillitoe because, reluctantly, he allowed him-
self to be persuaded to lie to the prime minister in order to conceal an
appalling blunder that had been committed by a subordinate. Sillitoe
pretended that MI5’s identification of Fuchs as a traitor in 1949 had
been the culmination of a lengthy investigation that had been con-
ducted properly at every stage. When challenged by Attlee, the direc-
tor-general denied that any mistake had occurred or that Fuchs