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MI5 and NALGO (1)

01 January 1991

MI5 and NALGO
artdoc June=1991

Alan Jinkinson, the general secretary of the National Association of Local
Government Officers(NALGO), has revealed how MI5 tried to recruit him when
he was a district officer for the union.
In l952 while on national service Jinkinson worked in Austria for the
Signals Corps which supplied intelligence to the Government Communications
Headquarters(GCHQ). Fifteen years later in 1967 when he was a rising
district officer for NALGO he received a `plain brown envelope' at his home
inviting him to a meeting. The meeting was in a `dingy, spartan little
room at the end of a musty corridor in Whitehall'. The meeting was presided
over, much to Jinkinson's surprise, by an old army friend and fellow member
of the South Kensington Labour Party now dressed in a smart
pin-stripe suit. The friend told Jinkinson details of his recent life
including the names of partners, meetings he attended at the Labour Party
Conference, and what he had for dinner with a prominent diplomat. At the
end of the meeting Jinkinson signed the Official Secrets Act.
At a second meeting Jinkinson was given the strong impression that MI5
viewed him as a potential recruit. `I always remember the reply I gave him.
I told him: "Sorry mate, I'm a coward" '.
Public Service, the NALGO monthly newspaper, says that intelligence
analysts have told it that NALGO and NUPE have been the subject of
increasing levels of surveillance and interference by MI5's F2 Branch which
specialises in surveillance of the labour movement. The two unions are
involved in merger talks together with the health workers union COHSE which
could create the largest public sector union in Europe. The paper says:

Measures being taken include increasing attempts to gain access to
"friendly" union officials, interference with telephone and postal
communications, the placing of false or slanted information in the
media, and deliberate smears of union personnel, analysts said.

Public Service, April 1991; NALGO News, 6.9.90; Independent, 21.3.91.

Statewatch, no 2, May/June 1991