Declassified MI5 files released Thursday by the National Archives show that the agency kept a close tab on Nye Bevan, the architect of the NHS, from 1933 until his 1960 death.
MI5 suspected Bevan of communist sympathies because he was a vocal critic of Winston Churchill’s wartime government and had ties to the Communist Party, but a 1955 note concluded the party and Trotskyists had never secured his cooperation.
Bevan, a former Welsh coal miner and one of Britain’s most prominent socialists, became health minister after World War Two and is credited with launching the NHS in 1948.
A 1962 review of his file described it as surprisingly tame, noting that despite Bevan’s polarising presence the evidence did not justify a deeper investigation.
The archive release also included MI5 files on German diplomat Wolfgang zu Putlitz, Soviet spy Frank Bossard, and other espionage cases.