After a brief stay with her still-grieving parents in heavily bombed Portsmouth, Manning moved into a London flat. Smith arrived in mid-1945 and found a job in the Features Department of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He was identified as a Communist spy by MI5 in 1947 and placed under surveillance. According to his file, Smith had been working to increase Soviet influence in Romania and the Middle East throughout the war. Manning did not share her husband's political beliefs, but was quite aware that their phone was being tapped and feared that his open support for Communism would lead to him being sacked from the BBC. Smith was soon transferred away from Features to the less politically sensitive Drama department. The surveillance stopped when he resigned from the Communist Party after the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956.