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William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © 2018 Richard Davenport-Hines

Cover design by Kate Gaughran

Cover images © Tallandier/bridgemanimages.com; © Keystone/Getty Images; © Lytton Strachey/Frances Partridge/Getty Images; © Keystone/Getty Images (photographs); Shutterstock.com (background texture & flag)

Richard Davenport-Hines asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007516674

Ebook Edition © January 2018 ISBN: 9780007516681

Version: 2017-12-11

Dedication

With love for † Rory Benet Allan

With gratitude to the Warden and Fellows of All Souls

Epigraph

The lie is a European power.

FERDINAND LASSALLE

Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.

CHARLES DARWIN

No great spy has been a short-term man.

SIR JOHN MASTERMAN

Men are classed less by achievement than by failure to achieve the impossible.

SIR ROBERT VANSITTART

Men go in herds: but every woman counts.

BLANCHE WARRE-CORNISH

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

Glossary

Illustration Credits

Aims

PART ONE: Rules of the Game

Chapter 1: The Moscow Apparatus

Tsarist Russia

Leninist Russia

Stalinist Russia

The Great Illegals

Soviet espionage in foreign missions

The political culture of everlasting distrust

Chapter 2: The Intelligence Division

Pre-Victorian espionage

Victorian espionage

Edwardian espionage

Chapter 3: The Whitehall Frame of Mind

The age of intelligence

The Flapper Vote

Security Service staffing

Office cultures and manly trust

Chapter 4: The Vigilance Detectives

The uprising of the Metropolitan Police

Norman Ewer of the Daily Herald

George Slocombe in Paris

The Zinoviev letter and the ARCOS raid

MI5 investigates the Ewer–Hayes network

Chapter 5: The Cipher Spies

The Communications Department

Ernest Oldham

Hans Pieck and John King

Walter Krivitsky

Chapter 6: The Blueprint Spies

Industrial mobilization and espionage

Propaganda against armaments manufacturers

MI5 watch Wilfrid Vernon

MI5 watch Percy Glading

The trial of Glading

PART TWO: Asking for Trouble

Chapter 7: The Little Clans

School influences stronger than parental examples

Kim Philby at Westminster

Donald Maclean at Gresham’s

Guy Burgess at Eton and Dartmouth

Anthony Blunt at Marlborough

Chapter 8: The Cambridge Cell

Undergraduates in the 1920s

Marxist converts after the 1931 crisis

Oxford compared to Cambridge

Stamping out the bourgeoisie

Chapter 9: The Vienna Comrades

Red Vienna

Anti-fascist activism

Philby’s recruitment as an agent

Chapter 10: The Ring of Five

The induction of Philby, Maclean and Burgess

David Footman and Dick White

The recruitment of Blunt and Cairncross

Maclean in Paris

Philby in Spain: Burgess in Section D

Goronwy Rees at All Souls

Chapter 11: The People’s War

Emergency recruitment

The United States

Security Service vetting

Wartime London

‘Better Communism than Nazism’

‘Softening the oaken heart of England’

Chapter 12: The Desk Officers

Modrzhinskaya in Moscow

Philby at SIS

Maclean in London and Washington

Burgess desk-hopping

Blunt in MI5

Cairncross hooks BOSS

Chapter 13: The Atomic Spies

Alan Nunn May

Klaus Fuchs

Harwell and Semipalatinsk

Chapter 14: The Cold War

Dictaphones behind the wainscots?

Contending priorities for MI5

Anglo-American attitudes

A seizure in Istanbul

Chapter 15: The Alcoholic Panic

Philby’s dry martinis

Burgess’s dégringolade

Maclean’s breakdowns

The VENONA crisis

PART THREE: Settling the Score

Chapter 16: The Missing Diplomats

‘All agog about the two Missing Diplomats’

‘As if evidence was the test of truth!’

States of denial

Chapter 17: The Establishment

Subversive rumours

William Marshall

‘The Third Man’

George Blake

Class McCarthyism

Chapter 18: The Brotherhood of Perverted Men

The Cadogan committee

‘Friends in high places’

John Vassall

Charles Fletcher-Cooke

Chapter 19: The Exiles

Burgess and Maclean in Moscow

Philby in Beirut

Bestsellers

Oleg Lyalin in London

Chapter 20: The Mole Hunts

Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole

Robin Zaehner and Stuart Hampshire

Anthony Blunt and Andrew Boyle

‘Only out for the money’

Maurice Oldfield and Chapman Pincher

Envoi

Picture Section

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Richard Davenport-Hines

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

In MI5 files the symbol @ is used to indicate an alias, and repetitions of @ indicate a variety of aliases or codenames. I have followed this practice in the text.

Illustration Credits

– Sir Robert Vansittart, head of the Foreign Office. (Popperfoto/Getty Images)

– Cecil L’Estrange Malone, Leninist MP for Leyton East. (Associated Newspapers/REX/Shutterstock)

– Jack Hayes, the MP whose detective agency manned by aggrieved ex-policemen spied for Moscow. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

– MI5’s agent M/1, Graham Pollard. (Esther Potter)

– MI5’s agent M/12, Olga Gray. (Valerie Lippay)

– Percy Glading, leader of the Woolwich Arsenal and Holland Road spy ring. (Keystone Pictures USA/Alamy Stock Photo)

– Wilfrid Vernon, the MP who filched aviation secrets for Stalinist Russia and spoke up for Maoist China. (Daily Mail/REX/Shutterstock)

– Maurice Dobb, Cambridge economist. (Peter Lofts)

– Anthony Blunt boating party on the River Ouse in 1930. (Lytton Strachey/Frances Partridge/Getty Images)

– Moscow’s talent scout Edith Tudor-Hart. (Attributed to Edith Tudor-Hart; print by Joanna Kane. Edith Tudor-Hart. National Galleries of Scotland / Archive presented by Wolfgang Suschitzky 2004. © Copyright held jointly by Peter Suschitzky, Julie Donat and Misha Donat)

– Pall Mall during the Blitz. (Central Press/Getty Images)

– Andrew Cohen, as Governor of Uganda, shares a dais with the Kabaka of Buganda. (Terence Spencer/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)

– Philby’s early associate Peter Smolka. (Centropa)

– Alexander Foote, who spied for Soviet Russia before defecting to the British in Berlin and cooperating with MI5. (Popperfoto/Getty Images)

– Igor Gouzenko, the Russian cipher clerk who defected in 1945. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

– Donald Maclean perched on Jock Balfour’s desk at the Washington embassy, with Nicholas Henderson and Denis Greenhill. (Popperfoto/Getty Images)

– Special Branch’s Jim Skardon, prime interrogator of Soviet spies. (Associated Newspapers/REX/Shutterstock)

– Lord Inverchapel appreciating young American manhood. (Photo by JHU Sheridan Libraries/Gado/Getty Images)

– A carefree family without a secret in the world: Melinda and Donald Maclean. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

– Dora Philby and her son in her Kensington flat. (Photo by Harold Clements/Express/Getty Images)

– Philby’s wife Aileen facing prying journalists at her front door. (Associated Newspapers/REX/Shutterstock)

– Alan Nunn May, after his release from prison, enjoys the consumer durables of the Affluent Society. (Keystone Pictures USA/Alamy Stock Photo)

– The exiled Guy Burgess. (Popperfoto/Getty Images)

– John Vassall. (Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Stock Photo)

– George Blake. (Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

– George Brown, Foreign Secretary. (Clive Limpkin/Associated Newspapers /REX/Shutterstock)

– Richard Crossman. (Photo by Len Trievnor/Daily Express/Getty Images)

– Daily Express journalist Sefton Delmer. (Photo by Ronald Dumont/Express/Getty Images)

– Maurice Oldfield of SIS – with his mother and sister outside Buckingham Palace. (©UPP/TopFoto)

Aims

In planning this book and arranging its evidence I have been guided by the social anthropologist Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard. ‘Events lose much, even all, of their meaning if they are not seen as having some degree of regularity and constancy, as belonging to a certain type of event, all instances of which have many features in common,’ he wrote. ‘King John’s struggle with the barons is meaningful only when the relations of the barons to Henry I, Stephen, Henry II, and Richard are also known; and also when the relations between the kings and barons in other countries with feudal institutions are known.’ Similarly, the intelligence services’ dealings with the Cambridge ring of five are best understood when the services’ relations with other spy networks working for Moscow are put alongside them. The significance of Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, and the actions of counter-espionage officers pitted against them, make sense only when they are seen in a continuum with Jack Hayes, Norman Ewer, George Slocombe, Ernest Oldham, Wilfrid Vernon, Percy Glading, Alan Nunn May, William Marshall and John Vassall.

Enemies Within is a set of studies in character: incidentally of individual character, but primarily a study of institutional character. The operative traits of boarding schools, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Intelligence Division, the Foreign Office, MI5, MI6 and Moscow Centre are the book’s subjects. Historians fumble their catches when they study individuals’ motives and individuals’ ideas rather than the institutions in which people work, respond, find motivation and develop their ideas. This book is not a succession of character portraits: it seeks the bonds between individuals; it depicts mutually supportive networks; it explores the cooperative interests that mould thinking; it joins ideas to actions, and connects reactions with counter-reactions; it makes individuals intelligible by placing them in sequence, among the correct types and tendencies, of the milieux in which they thought and acted.

In addition to Evans-Pritchard I have carried in my mind a quotation from F. S. Oliver’s great chronicle of Walpole’s England in which he refers to Titus Oates, the perjurer who caused a cruel and stupid panic in 1678–9 by inventing a Jesuitical conspiracy known as the Popish Plot. ‘Historians’, wrote Oliver in The Endless Adventure,

are too often of a baser sort. Such men write dark melodramas, wherein ancient wrongs cry out for vengeance, and wholesale destruction of institutions or states appears the only way to safety. Productions of this kind require comparatively little labour and thought; they provide the author with high excitement; they may bring him immediate fame, official recognition and substantial profits. Nearly every nation has been cursed at times with what may be called the Titus Oates school of historians. Their dark melodramas are not truth, but as nearly as possible the opposite of truth. Titus Oates the historian, stirring his brew of arrogance, envy and hatred in the witches’ cauldron, is an ugly sight. A great part of the miseries which have afflicted Europe since the beginning of the nineteenth century have been due to frenzies produced in millions of weak or childish minds by deliberate perversions of history. And one of the worst things about Titus Oates is the malevolence he shows in tainting generous ideas.

One aim of this book is to rebut the Titus Oates commentators who have commandeered the history of communist espionage in twentieth-century Britain. I want to show the malevolence that has been used to taint generous ideas.

This is a thematic book. My ruling theme is that it hinders clear thinking if the significance of the Cambridge spies is presented, as they wished to be, in Marxist terms. Their ideological pursuit of class warfare, and their desire for the socialist proletariat to triumph over the capitalist bourgeoisie, is no reason for historians to follow the constricting jargon of their faith. I argue that the Cambridge spies did their greatest harm to Britain not during their clandestine espionage in 1934–51, but in their insidious propaganda victories over British government departments after 1951. The undermining of authority, the rejection of expertise, the suspicion of educational advantages, and the use of the words ‘elite’ and ‘Establishment’ as derogatory epithets transformed the social and political temper of Britain. The long-term results of the Burgess and Maclean defection reached their apotheosis when joined with other forces in the referendum vote for Brexit on 23 June 2016.

The social class of Moscow’s agents inside British government departments was mixed. The contours of the espionage and counter-espionage described in Enemies Within – the recurrent types of event in the half-century after 1920 – do not fit Marxist class analysis. To follow the communist interpretation of these events is to become the dupe of Muscovite manipulation. The myths about the singularity of the Cambridge spies and the class-bound London Establishment’s protection of them is belied by comparison with the New Deal officials who became Soviet spies in Roosevelt’s Washington. Other comparisons are made with the internal dynasties of the KGB and with MI5’s penetration agents within the Communist Party of Great Britain.

The belief in Establishment cover-ups is based on wilful misunderstanding. The primary aim of counter-intelligence is not to arrest spies and put them on public trial, profitable though this may be to newspapers in times of falling sales or national insecurity. The evidence to the Senate Intelligence Committee tendered in 2017 by James Comey, recently dismissed as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation by President Donald Trump, contains a paragraph that, with the adjustment of a few nouns, summarizes the policy of MI5 during the period of this book:

It is important to understand that FBI counter-intelligence investigations are different than the more commonly known criminal investigative work. The Bureau’s goal in a counter-intelligence investigation is to understand the technical and human methods that hostile foreign powers are using to influence the United States or to steal our secrets. The FBI uses that understanding to disrupt those efforts. Sometimes disruption takes the form of alerting a person who is targeted for recruitment or influence by the foreign power. Sometimes it involves hardening a computer system that is being attacked. Sometimes it involves ‘turning’ the recruited person into a double agent, or publicly calling out the behavior with sanctions or expulsions of embassy-based intelligence officers. On occasion, criminal prosecution is used to disrupt intelligence activities.

For MI5, as for Comey’s FBI, the first priority of counter-espionage was to understand the organization and techniques of their adversaries. The lowest priorities were arrests and trials.

The Marxist indictment of Whitehall’s leadership takes a narrow, obsolete view of power relations. Inclusiveness entails not only the mesh of different classes but the duality of both sexes. In the period covered by this book, and long after, women lacked the status of men at all social levels. They were repulsed from the great departments of state. The interactions in such departments were wholly masculine: the supposed class exclusivity of the Foreign Office (which is a partial caricature, as I show) mattered little, so far as the subject of this book is concerned, compared to gender exclusivity. The key to understanding the successes of Moscow’s penetration agents in government ministries, the failures to detect them swiftly and the counter-espionage mistakes in handling them lies in sex discrimination rather than class discrimination. Masculine loyalties rather than class affinities are the key that unlocks the closed secrets of communist espionage in Britain. The jokes between men – the unifying management of male personnel of all classes by the device of humour – was indispensable to engendering such loyalty. Laughing at the same jokes is one of the tightest forms of conformity.

Enemies Within is a study in trust, abused trust, forfeited trust and mistrust. Stalinist Russia is depicted as a totalitarian state in which there were ruthless efforts to arouse distrust between neighbours and colleagues, to eradicate mutual trust within families and institutions, and to run a power system based on paranoia. ‘Saboteurs’ and ‘wreckers’ were key-words of Stalinism, and Moscow projected its preoccupation with sabotage and wrecking on to the departments of state of its first great adversary, the British Empire. The London government is portrayed as a sophisticated, necessarily flawed but far from contemptible apparatus in which trust among colleagues was cultivated and valued. The assumptions of workplace trust existed at every level: the lowest and highest echelons of the Foreign Office worked from the same openly argued and unrestricted ‘circulating file’; in the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police, until the 1930s, matters of utmost political delicacy were confided to all men from the rank of superintendent downwards.

At the time of the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951, the departments of state were congeries of social relations and hierarchical networks. They were deliberate in their reliance on and development of the bonding of staff and in building bridges between diverse groups. Government ministries were thus edifices of ‘social capital’: a broad phrase denoting the systems of workplace reciprocity and goodwill, the exchanges of information and influence, the informal solidarity, that was a valued part of office life in western democracies until the 1980s. The era of the missing diplomats and the ensuing tall tales of Establishment cover-ups chipped away at this edifice, and weakened it for the wrecking-ball that demolished the social capital of twentieth-century Britain. The downfall of ‘social capital’ was accompanied by the upraising of ‘rational choice theory’.

This theory suggests that untrammelled individuals make prudent, rational decisions bringing the best available satisfaction, and that accordingly they should act in their highest self-interest. The limits of rational choice theory ought to be evident: experience shows that people with low self-esteem make poor decisions; nationalism is a form of pooled self-regard to boost such people; and in the words of Sir George Rendel, sometime ambassador in Sofia and Brussels, ‘Nationalism seldom sees its own economic interest.’ Rational choice is the antithesis of the animating beliefs of the British administrative cadre in the period covered by this book. The theory has legitimated competitive disloyalty among colleagues, degraded personal self-respect, validated ruthless ill-will and diminished probity. The primacy of rational choice has subdued the sense of personal protective responsibility in government, and has gone a long way in eradicating traditional values of institutional neutrality, personal objectivity and self-respect. Not only the Cambridge spies, but the mandarins in departments of state whom they worked to outwit and damage would be astounded by the methods and ethics of Whitehall in the twenty-first century. They would consider contemporary procedures to be as corrupt, self-seeking and inefficient as those under any central African despotism or South American junta.

The influence of Moscow on London is the subject of Enemies Within. As any reader of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism will understand, Soviet communism was only one version of a Marxist state. ‘As the twenty-first century advances,’ writes Stephen A. Smith, editor of the Oxford Handbook, ‘it may come to seem that the Chinese revolution was the great revolution of the twentieth century, deeper in its mobilization of society, more ambitious in its projects, more far-reaching in its achievements, and in some ways more enduring than its Soviet counterpart.’ All this must be acknowledged: so, too, that Chinese revolutionaries took their own branded initiatives to change the character of western states. These great themes – as well as reactions to the wars in Korea and Vietnam – however lie outside my remit.

If I had attempted to be comprehensive, Enemies Within would have swollen into an unreadable leviathan. Endnotes at the close of paragraphs supply in order the sources of quotations, but I have not burdened the book with heavy citation of the sources for every idea or judgement. I have concentrated its focus by giving more attention to HUMINT than to SIGINT. There are more details on Leninism and Stalinism than on Marxism. The inter-war conflicts between British and Soviet interests in India, Afghanistan and China get scant notice. There are only slight references to German agents, or to the activities of the Communist Party of Great Britain. There is nothing about Italian pursuit of British secrets. Japan does not impinge on this story, for it did not operate a secret intelligence service in Europe: a Scottish aviator, Lord Sempill, and a former communist MP, Cecil L’Estrange Malone, were two of its few agents of influence. The interference in the 1960s and 1970s of Soviet satellite states in British politics and industrial relations is elided. Although I suspect that Soviet plans in the 1930s for industrial sabotage in the event of an Anglo-Russian war were extensive, the available archives are devoid of material. The Portland spy ring is omitted because, important though it was, its activities in 1952–61 are peripheral to themes of this book. The material necessary for a reliable appraisal of George Blake is not yet available: once the documentation is released, it will need a book of its own. I have drawn parallels between the activities of penetration agents in government departments in London and Washington, and have contrasted the counter-espionage of the two nations. There is a crying need for a historical study – written from an institutional standpoint rather than as biographical case-studies – of Soviet penetration of government departments in the Baltic capitals, of official cadres in the Balkans and most especially of ministries in Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Madrid, Paris, Prague, Rome and Vienna.

Enemies Within is not a pantechnicon containing all that can be carried from a household clearance: it is a van carrying a few hand-picked artefacts.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1
The Moscow Apparatus

When Sir John (‘Jock’) Balfour went as British Minister to Moscow in 1943, he was given sound advice by the American diplomat George Kennan. ‘Although it will be very far from explaining everything,’ Kennan said, ‘it is always worthwhile, whenever the behaviour of the Soviet authorities becomes particularly difficult, to look back into Russian history for a precedent.’ Current ideas and acts, he understood, encase past history. Similarly, in 1946, Frank Roberts surveyed post-war Soviet intentions from his vantage point in Britain’s Moscow embassy. ‘Basically, the Kremlin is now pursuing a Russian national policy, which does not differ except in degree from that pursued in the past by Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great or Catherine the Great.’ The chief difference between imperial and Stalinist Russia, according to Roberts, was that Soviet leaders covered their aims in the garb of Marxist-Leninist ideology, in which they believed with a faith as steadfast as that of the Jesuits during the Counter-Reformation.¹

Although Tsar Alexander II had abolished serfdom in 1861, most of the subjects of his grandson Nicholas II lived in conditions of semi-vassalage in 1917. It was the promise of emancipation from Romanov controls, exploitation, injustice and ruinous warfare that made the Russian people give their support to the Bolsheviks. Lenin’s one-party state faced the same crisis of economic and institutional backwardness that had overwhelmed the last Tsar: industries, agriculture, bureaucracy, the armed forces and armaments all needed to be modernized, empowered and expanded at juddering speed. As Kennan and Roberts indicated, a sense of the historic continuities in Leninist and Stalinist Russia helps in evaluating Moscow’s ruling cadres and in appraising the function and extent of communist espionage. It matters as much to stress that the pitiless energy and ambition of the Bolshevik state apparatus surpassed any previous force in Russian history.²

Tsarist Russia

Russia’s earliest political police was the Oprichnina. It was mustered in 1565 by Ivan the Terrible, Grand Duke of Muscovy and first Tsar of Russia. Ivan’s enforcers dressed in black, rode black horses and had saddles embellished with a dog’s head and broom to symbolize their task of sniffing out and sweeping away treason. During the European-wide reaction after the Napoleonic wars, a new apparatus called the Third Section was formed in 1826. It was charged with monitoring political dissent and social unrest, operated in tandem with several thousand gendarmes and employed innumerable paid informers. Annual summaries of the Third Section’s surveillance reports were made to the tsarist government. ‘Public opinion’, declared the Third Section’s Count Alexander von Benckendoff, ‘is for the government what a topographical map is for an army command in time of war.’³

From the 1820s political dissidents, criminals, insubordinate soldiers, drunkards and vagabonds were deported in marching convoys to Siberia. They were consigned to this harsh exile (often after Third Section investigations) partly as condign punishment, but also to provide labour to colonize and develop the frozen wastes beyond the Ural Mountains. The rape of women, male and female prostitution, trafficked children, flogging, typhus, tuberculosis, the stench from human excrement, the hunger and destitution that occurred inside the penal colony became notorious as the number of exiles mounted (in the century before the Russian revolution of 1917, over a million individuals had been sent to Siberia).

After the fatal stabbing of the Third Section’s chief in 1878, a new state security apparatus named the Okhrana was instituted to eradicate political crime. Its draconian prerogatives were exercised with restraint in some respects: only seventeen people were executed for political crimes during the 1880s; all were assassins or implicated in murderous plots (a youth hanged for conspiring to kill Tsar Alexander III in 1887 was elder brother of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who took the alias of Lenin). But Okhrana’s policemen were empowered to imprison and exile suspects in Siberia on their own authority. Thousands of deportees died there of disease, hunger and exhaustion. The overseers of one gang of convict roadbuilders starved their men into cannibalism. Exiles were regularly flogged with the cat-o’-nine-tails.

Not everyone suffered intolerably. Conditions were generally ameliorated at the time of Lenin’s exile in Siberia in 1897–1900. While living in a peasant hut surrounded by steppe, swamp and the village dung-heaps, he was able to borrow statistical, political and economics books from libraries, and published The Development of Capitalism in Russia, which established him as a Marxist ideologue. He secured a lucrative contract to translate into Russian The History of Trade Unionism by Beatrice and Sidney Webb. The authorities allowed him to keep a two-bore shotgun, cartridges and an Irish setter to hunt duck and snipe. Throughout his exile, Lenin played chess by correspondence across Russia and abroad. His letters were intercepted but seldom stopped: he maintained contacts with conspirators and subversives far away in Moscow, Kiev, Geneva and London. ‘Lenin’s letters from Siberia make strange reading,’ writes Victor Sebestyen. ‘They might be the letters of an indolent country squire of outdoor tastes but gentle epicurean philosophy which forbade him to take such tastes too seriously.’⁴

At 1 January 1901 there were as few as 1,800 political exiles confined in Siberia, with a few thousand more kept under police supervision, in remote provincial districts, as punishment for political crimes. About 10 per cent of those confined in Siberia in 1901 had been condemned to hard labour. Trotsky, who was exiled to a forlorn village in 1904, used his time to study Marx’s Das Kapital, to father two children and to play croquet. In the aftermath of the revolutionary uprisings of 1905 there was renewed and intensified repression. The total of those sentenced to exile rose from 6,500 in 1905 to 30,000 in 1910. The living conditions of exiles deteriorated hideously. Some sixty of the leaders of the October revolution in 1917 were, like Lenin and Trotsky, former Siberian exiles. They learnt there to be merciless and vengeful, to cherish personal enmities, to bide their time, to foster fratricidal resentments. Bolshevism was Siberian-made.⁵

During the 1890s anti-tsarist conspirators developed new underground networks, which no longer plotted to seize power by sudden violent blows against the authorities but sought instead to topple tsarist absolutism by organizing the oppressed workers in a mass movement that would be too populous for Okhrana repression. They adapted the methods of German social democracy for the Russian environment. Okhrana agents continued to penetrate the revolutionary movement, report on discussions and remit secret material (the young Stalin, it has been suggested, acted as an Okhrana informer and agent provocateur). The Okhrana’s foreign agency – based in the Russian embassy in Paris – kept émigrés and fugitive revolutionaries under trans-European surveillance. To counter the Okhrana’s countless paid informers, revolutionaries became expert in running clandestine groups, holding undetected meetings and evading surveillance. Bolsheviks learnt, as one example, to write secret letters, which were to be sewn into the lining of clothes, not on paper, but on linen, which did not rustle incriminatingly if a courier was searched.

The Bolsheviks’ organizational culture was conspiratorial from top and bottom. Their leaders acted under protective party disguises: Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili took the revolutionary pseudonym of Stalin because it resembled the sound of Lenin; Leon Trotsky had begun life as Lev Davidovich Bronstein; Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev was the fighting name of Hirsch Apfelbaum alias Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky; Maxim Litvinov was born Meir Henoch Mojszewicz Wallach-Finkelstein, and had the intermediate alias of Max Wallach; Vyacheslav Scriabin took the hard man’s name of Molotov, meaning ‘hammer’. Bolsheviks were indoctrinated with the need for secrecy: they grew adept in subterfuge and misdirection, and remained hyper-vigilant about enemies long after seizing power in 1917. As revolutionaries they pursued both overt and covert operations to weaken the institutions and governments of their enemies. The necessary crafts for survival in tsarist Russia, including secret cells and the transmission of secret material, were adaptable for foreign espionage.

Leninist Russia

Marx belittled the Lumpenproletariat who made mid-nineteenth-century revolutions: the urban forces that brought Louis Bonaparte to power in 1848 were, he wrote, a rabble of decayed roués, bourgeois chancers, ferret-like vagabonds, discharged soldiers, ex-prisoners, spongers, drifters, pickpockets, confidence-tricksters, pimps, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers and tinkers. Marx regarded universal suffrage as a fetish, Bonaparte as a reckless gambler, his election by popular vote as head of the French state as a pathological symptom, and Bonapartism as little different from tsarism. He regarded the working of economic laws as the paramount and predestined cause of revolution, and considered assertions of collective social will as subordinate factors. ‘The strength of Marxism’, wrote R. C. (‘Robin’) Zaehner, a Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer in Iran during the 1940s, ‘is that it is a revolutionary creed which offers an earthly paradise here and now, which claims to be scientific, and which would have us believe that the classless society is the inevitable result of the evolutionary process.’ Communism, continued Zaehner, repudiates individualism, self-regard, personal enterprise and the rights of private property: indeed considers them as condemned at the bar of historic destiny.⁶

The Bolshevik revolution in 1917 did not fit the principles of Das Kapital. Mechanized slaughter rather than, as Marx predicted, the breakdown of capitalism brought communist revolution to Russia. It was not the Bolshevik insurgents who made the revolutionary situation, but the European ‘total war’, which overwhelmed tsarist autocracy, brought military collapse, civilian exasperation, hunger and fatigue, and forced the abdication of Nicholas II in March 1917. The decision of the provisional government, which replaced the Romanov monarchy, to continue participation in that war led to the swift rise of several distinct mass movements: the urban proletariat (organized in ‘soviets’, viz. councils elected by manual workers), the peasantry, soldiers and sailors, non-Russian nationalities and a numerically small number of bourgeois all coalesced into different groups. The war-induced crisis discredited monarchism, liberalism and moderate socialism in turn. The collapse of state authority in 1917 had little resemblance to the military coups of politically minded soldiers, such as overthrew the Obrenović royal dynasty in Serbia in 1903 or mustered for the Young Turk revolt of 1908. Nor did it resemble the crowd pressure represented by the March on Rome led by Mussolini in 1922. It arose from the mass mobilization of peasants, soldiers and workers who were provoked by the injustice, exploitation, inequity and incompetence of their rulers, and yearned to be freed from a failed autocracy.⁷

On taking power the Bolsheviks sought to placate the mass movements. They signed the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Germany, devolved power to the soviets, redistributed confiscated lands to the peasantry and tried to vest control of factories in their workers. A giddying spiral of economic collapse, unemployment and mass privation renewed urban proletarian and peasant discontent. ‘In the course of a bitter civil war, the Bolsheviks forged a Red Army that defeated a succession of enemies, including the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Whites, Allied interventionists, and peasant partisans,’ as the historian of communism Stephen A. Smith has put it. ‘In so doing, they instituted key elements of what would become the generic communist system: a highly centralized state under a single party, the crushing of dissent, and the curtailment of popular organizations.’ Some scholars argue that this outcome was the result of Lenin’s determination to concentrate power in a single party and to eliminate political opposition. Others contend that the totalitarian state was necessitated by ‘the desperate problems the Bolshevists faced in defeating the counter-revolution, in feeding the Red Army and the urban population, in maintaining production for the war effort and in combating tendencies to crime and social anomie’. Once the Bolsheviks had trounced their adversaries, they did not revert to the decentralized socialist structures that had achieved the revolutions of 1917.⁸

Other preliminary points must be stressed in contextualizing the history of communist espionage in England. Nicholas II, whose Romanov dynasty had ruled since 1613, believed that he was a divine instrument, and that it was by God’s command that his subjects owed unconditional submission to his autocracy. He preferred sacred duties, mysticism and superstition to secular expertise: specialist cadres of ministers and bureaucrats were anathema to him. The Russian Orthodox Church had been a temporal instrument of the Romanov empire since the reign of Peter the Great: icons and local saints – but also devils and sprites – were vivid, active forces in the lives of the peasantry; apostasy was a criminal offence. Bolshevik Russia was the antithesis of the Tsar’s ramshackle theocracy: it was the first state in world history to be atheistic in its foundation and to deny the merit in any religion. ‘The working class has elaborated its own revolutionary morality, which began by dethroning God and all absolute standards,’ Trotsky declared in 1922. Although the Orthodox Church was one of the few Romanov institutions to survive 1917, its influence was truncated. Atheists across Europe welcomed the ruthless hostility of the pioneer socialist state to religious hocus-pocus. Kim Philby particularly but also Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were drawn to Marxism by its repudiation of Christianity.⁹

Secondly, the civil war of 1917–22 was the crucible in which the Soviet Union was forged. By one reliable computation, deaths in combat, endemic disease, disappearances and emigration led to a fall in population of 12.7 million between 1917 and 1922. During those years of savage combat the Bolshevik leadership made the communist party into a disciplined fighting force: they shed the vitiating residue of revolutionary romanticism and utopianism; they abjured clemency, lenience and individualism; and they asserted the historical inevitability of victory. Bolshevism was set on breaking the sovereignty and capitalism of nation states, installing an international workers’ dictatorship and thus accomplishing global revolution. These great aims were used to justify the exaction of huge sacrifices by the present generation for the benefit of their successors; to justify, too, forced labour and show-trials.

During the 1920s Litvinov developed a diplomatic negotiating style suitable for the dictatorship of the proletariat: exhausting, outrageous insistence on predetermined objects, regardless of truth, reason or facts. Soviet officials had neither the training nor the capacity to argue with foreign negotiators. They declared their position with immovable aggression, and never deviated from it. Molotov was true to his nom de guerre and during the 1930s and 1940s continued this hammering, defiantly mendacious manner of diplomatic exchanges. Andrei Gromyko, who in 1957 began his twenty-eight years as Minister of Foreign Affairs, was a past-master in the old Bolshevik brand of brutal diplomacy and ersatz furious indignation.

During the civil war, the Bolsheviks lost control of large parts of the Romanov empire to the anti-Bolshevist, monarchist and nationalist forces known as the White armies. At first the Ukraine, the Caucasus, the Baltic provinces and central Asia were wrested back; but by the treaty of Riga in 1921 Ukraine was partitioned between the Soviet Union and an expanded Poland. Ground was lost in Finland, the Baltic littoral, western Belorussia and Bessarabia. Soviet Russia was seen by the Bolshevik leadership as a dismembered version of imperial Russia. Russian military advances into Poland and Finland in 1939–40 show the Stalinist priority in regaining the lost territories of 1918–20. In the spring of 1945 Russia was able to reoccupy Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and to begin renewing its territorial and ideological control elsewhere. Britain, with its history of intervention in the civil war and as the only western European power with a major Asiatic empire, was a primary adversary, which needed to be met with espionage, subversion and ultimately sabotage.¹⁰

‘How can you make a revolution without firing squads?’ Lenin asked in 1917. ‘Do you really believe that we can be victorious without the very cruellest revolutionary terror?’ he demanded a year later. Soon he instituted so-called People’s Courts, which have been described by Victor Sebestyen as ‘essentially ad hoc mob trials in which twelve “elected” judges, most of them barely literate, would rule less on the facts of the case than with the use, in Lenin’s words, of “revolutionary justice”’. After issuing a decree in 1918 permitting the summary shooting by Red Guards of enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans and counter-revolutionary agitators, Lenin regretted that it would be impolitic to rename the Commissariat of Justice the Commissariat for Social Extermination.¹¹

Walter Krivitsky, the first major Soviet intelligence defector, said in his MI5 debriefing of 1940 that the moment when Bolshevism swung from socialism with benevolent hopes to an entrenched tyranny occurred in 1921, with the crushing of the revolt at Kronstadt naval base. A mass meeting of sailors of the Baltic fleet demanded free parliamentary elections, the establishment of non-communist trade unions and the abolition of internal political police. Their defiance was suppressed by 20,000 Red Army soldiers whom Trotsky had promised would shoot the sailors like partridges. The quashing of the Kronstadt protest was nasty, brutish and short: reading Trotsky’s book Whither England? in 1925, the political theorist Harold Laski reflected that ‘the whole Bolshevik psychology is merely Hobbes redressed in Marxian costume’. The Hobbesian absolutist system was intended to optimize the subject’s peace and security; but, as Locke said, the tranquillity of Hobbes’s ideal commonwealth was the peace and security of a dungeon.¹²

Dissidents across ancien régime Europe had to contend with ‘perlustration’ (government interception and reading of mail to discover what the population is thinking and writing). The Okhrana had cabinets noirs, or ‘black chambers’, where private and diplomatic correspondence was intercepted and read, in the ten main post offices of tsarist Russia, although this involved a total staff nationwide of only forty-nine people in 1913. After the Bolsheviks had attained power in 1917, they found that a state monopoly of propaganda was the best way to monitor thoughts, control the masses and inculcate them with socialism. By 1920 they had 10,000 officials trained to read the post in Russia. They destroyed letters that criticized the regime, and quoted from representative samples when compiling summaries of mass opinion. Surveillance reports were indispensable to policing public opinion in inter-war totalitarian states, whether Bolshevik Russia, Nazi Germany or fascist Italy, and to maximizing the effects of state propaganda. Most militant Marxist revolutionaries before 1917 were ‘staunch fighters for political freedom’, as Lars Lih, the historian of Leninism, has written. ‘One of the most important political facts about the rest of the twentieth century was that the most orthodox and militant advocates of revolutionary Marxism were devoted to regimes that crushed political freedom to an unprecedented degree.’¹³

‘Russia is a country which it is very easy to invade, but very difficult to conquer,’ Lloyd George told parliament in 1919. ‘Starvation, bloodshed, confusion, ruin, and horror’ had been the outcome of the revolution two years earlier: he loathed ‘Bolshevik teachings’, but ‘would rather leave Russia Bolshevik until she sees her way out of it than see Britain [go] bankrupt’ as the result of military intervention against the revolutionaries. Soviet Russia nevertheless felt itself to be the target of relentless encirclement by capitalist forces and secret agents. This federation of socialist republics covered a huge area without natural defensible frontiers. Amid multitudinous evidence of London’s malign intentions, there was the agreement in 1920 between the English armaments company Vickers and its French counterpart Schneider-Creusot to develop the Polish metallurgy firm Starachowice into a munition works. Similarly, in 1921–3, Vickers invested in the privately owned naval yards at Tallinn in Estonia, becoming sole technical advisers and purchasing agents as recompense for its investment: they were, said their manager in Estonia, seeking orders for their British factories, but ‘also guided by the necessity of safeguarding as far as lay in our power the higher interests of British influence’. Both ventures proved unprofitable; but it is not surprising that the Soviets felt defensive security measures were needed.¹⁴

The Bolshevists’ first Soviet intelligence agency, named the Cheka, was formed in December 1917 with the intention of defending and extending the dictatorship of the proletariat. Much of the Cheka’s tradecraft was derived from the Okhrana, including the use of agents provocateurs to identify, incriminate and eliminate opponents. ‘Every Bolshevist should make himself a Chekist,’ Lenin once said. This was tantamount to saying that every communist must spy, steal, cheat, falsify documents, double-cross and be willing to kill. The Cheka’s emblems of a shield to defend the revolution and a sword to smite its foes were used as the insignia of its ultimate successor organization, the KGB. Until the disbandment of the KGB in the 1990s, many of its officers, including Vladimir Putin, described themselves as Chekists.¹⁵

The Cheka’s priority was arresting, shooting, imprisoning or exiling in forced labour camps Russian counter-revolutionaries, class enemies and putative conspirators whom they accused of being financed by foreign capitalism. As one of its internal documents asserted in 1918: ‘He who fights for a better future will be merciless towards his enemies. He who seeks to protect poor people will harden his heart against pity and will become cruel.’ The Chekists of the 1920s believed themselves superior to bourgeois scruples about guilt and innocence, or truth and lies. ‘Give us a man, and we’ll make a case,’ their interrogators said with pride. As Nadezhda Mandelstam testified, the pioneer generation of Chekist leaders had modish cultural pretensions. ‘The Chekists were the avant-garde of the new people and they revised, in the manner of the Superman, all human values,’ she wrote. After their liquidation in 1937, they were succeeded by a very different type of political-police enforcer.¹⁶

The tsarist Okhrana had been anti-semitic, stoked pogroms and thus drove many Jewish people into revolutionary sympathies. Under the Romanovs, Jews were barred from Russian citizenship and forbidden to print in Hebrew. Violent persecution, injustice and exclusion caused retaliatory resentment, which took political form. Many of the Chekist avant-garde were Jewish. If the fact that Lenin’s maternal grandfather was Jewish was then unknown, the identification of Kamenev, Litvinov, Radek, Trotsky and Zinoviev as Jews led to widespread European perceptions of Bolshevism as a Judaic influence. Lord D’Abernon, British Ambassador in Berlin, reflected in 1922 that Jewish small-traders in Germany felt ‘sneaking affection for the Bolsheviks. Many of them are inclined to regard their co-religionaries at Moscow as rather fine fellows, who have done something to avenge the misfortunes of the Jewish race; they consider Trotsky and the Cheka the apostolic successors to Judith and Deborah.’¹⁷

During the civil war of 1917–22, the Cheka was responsible for as many as 250,000 executions (possibly exceeding the number of deaths in combat). Lenin took a close interest in its operations, and discounted its brutality. He was less concerned by five million Russians and Ukrainians starving to death in 1921 than by his paranoia that the American Relief Administration was a front for subversion and espionage. In Odessa captured White officers were tied to planks and used to feed furnaces. In Kiev cages of rats were attached to prisoners’ bodies, and the rats then maddened by the heat until they gnawed their way into the prisoners’ intestines. In Tiflis the Cheka hauled persons of superior education from their beds, tied them head to foot, piled them into the back of a lorry, laid planks cross-wise over their captives so that the firing-party could clamber on board the lorry too and motored to a nearby agricultural college. There the victims were thrown into trenches and shot through the cervical vertebrae. ‘The Russian government is composed of utter brutes,’ wrote Sir Eyre Crowe, Permanent Under Secretary (PUS) at the Foreign Office, in 1924. It is important to add that atrocities were not all on the Red side. Between 50,000 and 200,000 Jews were massacred during the civil war period, and another 200,000 injured. Anti-Bolshevik forces seized the Jews from some soviets and boiled them alive in what they called ‘communist soup’. Peasants disembowelled members of Food Requisition Detachments sent by Lenin from the cities to harvest or collect grain. Violence, as Stephen Smith shows, had variable purposes: it killed enemies, intimidated opponents, punished ‘speculators’ who intruded into peasant communities, protected criminals, enabled the seizure of booty, settled neighbourly disputes, enforced ideological convictions, gave depraved pleasure and bonded group loyalties.¹⁸

The history of Soviet espionage is disfigured by permutations of acronyms. In December 1920 the Cheka formed a new foreign department, known as INO, to run operations outside Soviet frontiers. In 1923 the Cheka was reconstituted as OGPU. George Slocombe, who spied for the Soviet Union during the 1920s, paid his only visit to Russia in 1926. Kept awake by Moscow’s summer heat, he gazed through his open window: ‘the red star burning in the tower of the OGPU headquarters, a sign of the never-relaxed vigilance of the defenders of the revolution, shone steadily, like a great red eye above the roofs and chimneys of Moscow’. Reader Bullard, who arrived in Moscow as British Consul General in 1930, was oppressed by a huge placard outside the opera house urging Muscovites to ‘strengthen the sword of the dictatorship of the proletariat – the OGPU’. In 1934 OGPU was reincorporated into the NKVD. The later permutations were the NKGB (February 1941), NKVD again (July 1941), NKGB again (1943), MGB (1946), MVD (1953) and, from March 1954 until December 1991, the KGB. These bodies had a counterpart in the military intelligence section, which was known as the Fourth Department until it was renamed the GRU in 1942. The breaking or foiling of Fourth Department activities in Austria in 1931, in China in 1931–2 and in Latvia, Germany and Finland in 1933 was a chain-reaction caused by weak security between different cells. It proved ruinous for the department’s standing with Stalin, who transferred it in 1934 from the superintendence of the Red Army to INO and limited its remit to Finland, Poland, Germany, Romania, Britain, Japan, Manchuria and China. As Jonathan Haslam reminds us, the KGB ‘may have been the largest intelligence service in the world, but it was heavily weighted in favour of its domestic role, a role never played by its military counterpart, the GRU, the second largest intelligence service in the world’. KGB sources give a valuable if incomplete sense of events: the Fourth Department archive is unavailable to historians.¹⁹

The career of one Fourth Department man must represent hundreds of his colleagues. Ivan Zolov Vinarov @ Josef Winzer @ MART was born in 1896 to a family of prosperous Bulgarian landowners. He fled to Soviet Russia in 1922 to escape arrest for his part in the Bulgarian communist party’s arms-smuggling. He was trained in military intelligence, sent on clandestine missions and involved with the communists who detonated an ‘infernal machine’ beneath the dome of a cathedral in Sofia during the state funeral of an assassinated general in 1925. A total of 123 people (including thirteen generals and seven children) were killed in the atrocity, which failed in its objective to liquidate Bulgaria’s Prime Minister, Prince Alexander Tsankov, and his political cadre. Nor did it spark the intended communist revolution. The outcome was thousands of arrests, hundreds of executions and bitter destabilizing misery.

Two Labour MPs visiting Bulgaria, Josiah Wedgwood and William Mackinder, failed to dissuade Tsankov’s government from reprisals. Returning to Bradford, Mackinder told journalists that he would not revisit Bulgaria under Tsankov’s government for a million pounds, but was not quoted as condemning the communist bomb outrage. Wedgwood contributed a report on ‘Bulgarian vengeance-politics’ to the Manchester Guardian. ‘A Communist is outside the law, and the hunt is therefore up for Communists,’ he told liberal-minded readers. Torture was being used to obtain confessions and denunciations: ‘prisoners come back from Bulgarian prisons maimed for life, the bones of the feet all broken with the bastinado [caning the soles of feet]’. Wedgwood judged that Bulgaria’s leaders were less frightened of Bolshevism from Russia than of western European radicalism. He found patriotic solace, amid the reprisals following the explosion, in noting that the English community in Bulgaria ‘are doing their best to stem the spate of horrors. It is on occasions such as this that even the Labour member may thank God for an English gentleman.’²⁰

The Communist International, abbreviated to Comintern, was established in Moscow in 1919–20 to act as the ‘global party of the proletariat’ organizing communist revolutionary activism across Europe and America. From the outset it stipulated that its affiliates must expel moderates, conform to Leninist domination and obey Moscow’s orders. Disbursements to foreign communist parties in the Comintern’s first financial year exceeded five million rubles: far more than was allotted for famine relief in 1921–2 when some five million Russians starved to death or died in epidemics. In accordance with Leninist paranoia, it developed its own spy network during the 1920s. The Comintern’s enforcement of the ‘Bolshevization’ of foreign Marxist parties, its inordinate demands of fealty and its rejection of collaboration with European social democrats all proved major obstacles to the spread of socialism, enabling left-wing parties to be depicted by their opponents as the dupes or fifth columnists of Moscow. The insistence on mental submission certainly alienated intellectual members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the late 1920s, and caused defections from the party. The Comintern made headway in colonial territories with predominantly peasant economies. Factory workers in European capitalist economies proved averse to risking their limited prosperity and security by rising in support of revolutionary socialism, which had proved so impoverishing in Bolshevist Russia. Until 1934 the Comintern forbade cooperation with anti-fascists in Mussolini’s Italy or with anti-Nazis in Hitler’s Germany; thereafter it accepted a Popular Front policy, of which the first great achievement was the formation in 1936 of a French government supported by communists. The Comintern became Stalinized in the 1930s, it received directives from the Politburo and its officials and agents increasingly cooperated with Soviet diplomats in Europe and the USA.²¹

‘In our era,’ the Comintern propounded, ‘imperialist wars and world revolution, revolutionary civil wars of the proletarian dictatorship against the bourgeoisie, wars of the proletariat against the bourgeois states and world-capitalism, as well as national revolutionary wars of oppressed peoples against imperialism, are unavoidable.’ Many of the officers and agents in the Comintern’s international department were able linguists and seasoned travellers of central or eastern European birth. Cities like Prague produced alert, responsive men who noticed changing tendencies and were effective in getting what they wanted because their ambitions and insular pride were never as exorbitant as those of Londoners, Berliners and Muscovites brought up in imperial capitals. They were resourceful in selecting targets, laying plans and reading motives. By contrast, many of their counterparts in INO, OGPU and the NKVD were ill-educated, with the guile and brutality that fitted them for suppressing dissidents in provincial Russia and harassing counter-revolutionaries overseas, but less apt for collecting foreign intelligence material.²²

Stalinist Russia

Shrewd appraisals of Marxism-Leninism were provided by Sir Robert Hodgson, Britain’s resilient diplomatic representative in Moscow during 1921–7. He chronicled the Bolshevik government’s continuous conflicts with its founding principles, and the pressures which forced it to forsake the revolutionary ideals of 1917. It was a huge challenge to misdirect attention so that ‘a trusting proletariat’ could continue to cherish the illusion that they, rather than a hefty, humdrum bureaucracy, governed Russia, Hodgson reported after the May Day celebrations of 1926, when Lenin had been dead for two years. ‘Moscow, however much nonsense is exhibited on red banners, stuffed into youthful brains, or poured out through loud-speakers to the populace, has to deal with precisely the same problems as any of its neighbours – and is dealing with them in very much the same way.’²³

This focus became less helpful in assessing events after Stalin achieved undisputed supremacy in the Soviet Union in 1928–9. Wars, civil wars, threats of foreign wars and domestic class warfare were constant factors in the political careers and personal experiences of all Bolshevik leaders. Marxist-Leninist theory propounded the inevitability of wars between empires, of socialist revolution as a result of these imperialist wars, and of warlike interventions by capitalist powers against socialist states. Fears of internal adversaries and external encirclement were never assuaged. Stalin, though, intensified and invigorated this aspect of the Bolshevik mentality. He convinced the party cadres and general membership that he was a relentlessly industrious pragmatist who could manage the domestic and foreign crises that threatened the Soviet Union. He gained a well-deserved reputation for achievement. ‘He was assiduous in consolidating his power base throughout the party, state, secret police and military hierarchies,’ writes the historian of deStalinization Kevin McDermott. ‘His increasingly radical policies in the years after 1928 proved attractive to the new brand of militant unschooled proletarians who formed the base of the party at that time.’²⁴

Stalin’s supremacy was characterized by crisis-paroxysms of socialist modernization. He sought to transform a ravaged agrarian economy into a global industrial power. The upheaval of forced agricultural collectivization and accelerated manufacturing capacity were akin to social and economic mobilization on a war footing. The first of Stalin’s Five Year Plans for headlong economic expansion was ill-considered, and caused huge instabilities. Bolshevik fears of counter-revolutionary plots, of foreign saboteurs and internal wreckers, of encirclement by hostile foreign powers all grew in ferocity. Opposition was equated with terrorism. Frank discussion and rational argument were precluded within the Moscow apparatus. Britain’s paramount instrument of civilized administration, the ‘circulating file’, which will be discussed later (p. 78–9), was unthinkable in communist bureaucracy.

A new ruling echelon was consolidated by Stalinism. Economic and social hierarchies were restored. The early Bolsheviks had been anti-patriarchal, had promoted the emancipation of women by improved educational and work opportunities, and had attempted to punish drunken wife-beaters. These advances halted after 1928. Stalin, whose wife shot herself in 1932 after being humiliated by him at a banquet, reconfigured masculine authority with his notions of motherhood and the criminalization of abortion in 1936. The early Bolshevik rejection of bourgeois morality ceased. Creative experimentation was stifled: stereotyped party hackwork dominated the arts; nonconformity was penalized. ‘Crucially,’ as Stephen Smith summarizes the development, ‘although the institutions of rule did not change, personal dictatorship, the unrestrained use of force, the cult of power, paranoia about encirclement and internal wreckers, and the spiralling of terror across an entire society, all served to underline the difference between Stalinism and Leninism.’ Smith sees Stalinism as a reversion to an earlier type: ‘the resurgence of … a patrimonial regime in which the tsar’s absolute and unconstrained authority derived from his ownership of the country’s resources, including the lives of his subjects’.²⁵

Bolshevik foreign policy tactics were innovative. ‘The Soviet Government’, reported Sir Esmond Ovey soon after his appointment as the first British Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1929, ‘have inverted the normal methods of diplomacy, and are past-masters in the fanning of hostility to a point which is useful for their internal political plans, without actually provoking an armed attack from outside.’ The desirable norm of Soviet diplomacy was a ‘vociferously cantankerous state of peace’, Ovey judged after some months in Moscow. Relatively minor incidents, such as the defection of Gregori Bessedovsky, the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires in Paris, could excite ‘a fever of alarm’ at ‘the sinister intentions of the ring of capitalist countries who are waiting, watching, scheming and plotting to destroy them’.²⁶

Intelligence-gathering and subversion managed by SIS representatives, under cover of passport control officers, in Scandinavia and the Baltic states, made Moscow feel beset by fears of foreign capitalist intervention. This feeling was shared by members of the CPGB, which was founded in 1920. Norman Ewer, a loyal upholder of Bolshevist ideology who ran a spy network for Moscow in London during the 1920s, felt sure that capitalist governments must be plotting to overthrow the world’s first and only worker-peasant state by either invasion or secret subversion. As he wrote in 1927 in Labour Monthly, a magazine edited by a CPGB founder, Rajani (‘Raymond’) Palme Dutt: ‘I would lay heavy money that to-day the War Office, the Admiralty and the Air Ministry are very busy with their plans for a Russian war. For a variety of Russian wars, I expect. There would be one plan for a war in defence of “gallant little Esthonia”: another for a war to safeguard India from the Afghans … another for Manchurian possibilities; all these plans quite possibly interlocking and correlating, as did the pre-1914 plans for the aiding of France and for the conquest of Mesopotamia.’ Ewer saw the Tory government as pushing ‘a continuous movement in one direction and to one end. That end is war. War will come as certainly as harvest follows sowing.’²⁷

After his defection from the Soviet embassy in Paris in 1929, Gregori Bessedovsky published his revelatory ‘Souvenirs’ in Le Matin. Summary translations, which were supplied to the British counter-espionage agency MI5 by the SIS station in Paris, show the ferocity of communist extremism. Ivanov, one of the Cheka chiefs, had confided to Bessedovsky ‘that passing sentences of death was not so difficult as one might think. It was all a matter of getting used to it. At first, of course, it made one feel a bit queer, but afterwards one no longer thought of the man – the living person – in front of one, and the only thing one saw was a “dossier” of documents and papers.’ Ivanov admitted that he never attended executions, although he was nominally in charge of them, because ‘he feared the madhouse’. Ivanov’s executioner-in-chief Gourov, who had killed 3,000 people and intended to reach the figure of 5,000, ‘could no longer “work” unless he made himself drunk’. Ivanov continued: ‘every Saturday night it is Hell’, with the condemned in the cellars shrieking like beasts in a slaughter-house. Ivanov’s assistant, who attended most executions, proposed gagging the prisoners’ mouths to stop their cries; but, so Ivanov told Bessedovsky, ‘I forbade him doing so. It would look too much like ordinary murders.’²⁸

Maurice Dobb, an economist and pioneer Cambridge communist who was a key influence in assembling his university’s spy network, minimized these enormities in a lecture at Pembroke College. He admitted the famine, executions and reprisals against hostages – undoubtedly ‘the Red Terror has been at times exceedingly brutal’ – but most stories, including those of ‘torture’ or ‘the massacre of everyone with a white collar’, were fables spread by tsarist exiles. His optimism was not ignoble, although time would discredit it. The Bolshevik programme was committed to the abolition of standing armies and to establishing the workers and peasantry as the new ruling class. Dynastic absolutism and bigoted theocracy had already been replaced by a federation of soviet socialist republics. Ownership of the means of production had been transferred from exploitative capitalism to the socialist state. Reactionary hereditary landowners had been usurped by peasant uprisings. In consequence of these revolutionary changes, Dobb averred, ‘the extremes of riches & poverty exist no longer’. Although there were food shortages, rations were equitably shared. In Moscow ‘there are no slums; their former inhabitants having been accommodated in the flats & palaces of the former bourgeoisie … children are especially well cared for’. Dobb idealized Lenin as ‘a stern realist. Siberia & exile no doubt have tended to embitter him to a considerable degree. His political writings, which display acumen, erudition & logical reasoning, are invariably marred by virulent vilification of his opponents.’ Lenin resembled a Jesuit priest, continued Dobb, ‘with all the Jesuit’s sincerity & idealism, and at the same time the Jesuit’s callousness, casuistry, & bigotry’. He was ‘a man with a mission, subordinating all else to a single goal … a great leader, a great thinker and a great administrator’; but withal ‘a modest man, who regards himself as the mere instrument of the inexorable forces of social progress’.²⁹

By contrast the diplomat Owen O’Malley, who journeyed through Russia in 1925 and 1941, described it as ‘a spiritual gas-chamber, a sinister, unnatural and unholy place’. People trudged through the streets of Leningrad with averted eyes: they had to efface themselves to stay safe; greeting a neighbour might prove fatal; children spied on parents. A red-bearded Cheka agent dressed in an engine driver’s peaked cap, black drill blouse and blue serge riding-breeches was charged with watching and eavesdropping on him in 1925. O’Malley believed that after he threw this tail, the ‘poor fellow’ was put to death. Even as a temporary visitor to the ‘Worker’s Paradise’ he grew nerve-racked by ‘the horrible feeling of being alone and in the power of these revolting barbarians’. After a few months as Consul General in Moscow in 1930, Reader Bullard felt repelled by what he saw: ‘the unscrupulous deception, the unrelenting despotism, and above all the cruelty’.³⁰

The Great Illegals

Between March and June 1927 the Chekists suffered major reverses in their clandestine work in Poland, China, France and London. Stalin attributed these setbacks to hidden traitors: ‘London’s agents have nestled in amongst us deeper than it seems.’ The detection of espionage and subversion by accredited members of Soviet embassies, consulates and trade missions resulted in bad publicity and diplomatic tension. Accordingly, in August, the Politburo ordained that secret agents from OGPU, INO, the Fourth, the Comintern and cognate international bodies could no longer be members of embassies, legations or trade delegations. Top-secret communications must henceforth be transmitted as encrypted letters carried in the diplomatic bag: never by telegraph or wireless traffic. Although these orders were only partially implemented in 1927, they inaugurated the era of the Great Illegals.³¹

The illegal system had been pioneered in Berlin from 1925, and had subsequently been developed in Paris. The designation ‘illegal’ referred not to the illegality of agents’ intentions or conduct, but to the nature of their foreign posting. These were men and women who worked and travelled under false documentation and had no official ties to Moscow. If their activities were detected or they were arrested, they had no incriminating direct link to Moscow and could be disavowed. The presence of illegals did not obviate the use of agents and officers who were designated as ‘legal’, because they operated under the cover of a diplomatic post in a legation, consulate or trade delegation. (The exception to this was the USA, where successive administrations refused diplomatic recognition to Soviet Russia until 1933: perforce Soviet agents working in Washington or other locations had no official ties to Moscow, and usually worked and travelled under false documentation.) ‘Legal’ officers and agents had the advantages of easy communications with Moscow through official codes and by diplomatic bags. If their espionage activities were detected, they could claim diplomatic immunity. The chiefs of both legal and illegal operations based in European capitals were denominated the rezident. It was usual for each country to have both a legal rezident and an illegal rezident. These rezidents supervised a spying apparatus called the rezidentura.

The illegal rezidenturas were seldom involved in actual recruitment, but ran paid and unpaid agents, and cultivated sources who might unwittingly provide them with information. Many illegals had canny psychological insight, which they used to assess the ability, temperament and vulnerability of potential sources. These informants might receive an explicit approach or else be tapped for information without realizing the nature of their contacts. Officials were targeted, but also sources in journalism, politics, commerce and manufacturing. Informants were recruited by appeals to ideological sympathies or by exploiting the vanity of people who felt superior if their lives involved the exciting secret cleverness of espionage. The illegals identified people who needed money and would supply material in return for cash. They used sexual enticement, too. The illegals and their sub-agents often had to forfeit their human decency by cheating, lying, betrayal and abandonment of the weak. They rationalized their loss by arguing that only exploitative capitalists who were secure in power could afford scruples. Leninists or Stalinists who baulked at orders or confessed to scruples were betraying their cause and doubting its supreme value.

Following the Sofia cathedral massacre, the Bulgarian Vinarov served in 1926–9 as an illegal in China, where his wife worked as a cipher clerk in the Soviet legations in Peking and Harbin. During 1930–3 he was the senior illegal in Austria, where he riddled the French alliance system in eastern Europe and the Balkans with a network of agents and sources. He formed a trading company as cover for illicit movements across national frontiers, and penetrated the radio-telegraphic departments in Balkan capitals handling ciphered wireless traffic from foreign legations and embassies. This yielded good product until 1933, when the activities of Vinarov’s penetration agents were discovered, although misunderstood, in Bucharest. In 1936, after further training, he went to Spain under the cover of a commercial attaché, but was purged in 1938. Recalled to guerrilla warfare in the 1940s, he was appointed the Bulgarian communist government’s Minister of Transport and Construction in 1949.³²

The illegals never travelled to and from Moscow under their own names. Nor did they use the passport attached to their primary alias. If Walter Krivitsky, who was the illegal in The Hague using the alias of Martin Lessner, had to return to Moscow, he travelled via Stockholm using the cover and documentation of an Austrian engineer named Eduard Miller. Elizabeth Poretsky, in her moving group memoir of Krivitsky and her husband Ignace Reiss, who served as an illegal in Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France and the Netherlands (with oversight of England), shows that local conditions and the aptitude of the rezident counted for much. ‘Soviet agents’, Poretsky recalled, ‘were convinced that their historic role gave them an innate advantage in dealing with world politics.’³³

The illegals’ commitment is incomprehensible unless one understands their certitude in their historical destiny. They all experienced the reality of the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin while they underwent indoctrination and training in Moscow. They knew the cruelty, hardship and scarcities while never doubting the future abundance. In their temporary Red Army accommodation in Moscow, Reiss and Poretsky gave parties at which they could serve only bad herring, horsemeat sausages, salted fish which made their gums bleed, and beetroot. On one occasion a visitor from Kiev described conditions in Ukraine to them: ‘the famine in the cities, the bloated corpses in the streets, the hordes of abandoned children hanging around the railway stations, the ghostly villages where people were dying of starvation and typhus’. Their other guest was a Red Army colonel who, hearing this recital, started sobbing. ‘He, he, is doing this,’ the colonel raged between sobs and obscenities, ‘he is ruining the country, he is destroying the party.’ Then he opened a window and vomited his meal outdoors.³⁴

The development of this ramified illegal apparatus was required because Soviet military attachés dispersed in European capitals were otiose for intelligence work. Active combat in the war of 1914–17 or in the civil war of 1917–22 was poor training for gathering and evaluating political intelligence reports. The military attachés despised capitalism, but seldom understood it. They were easily duped by spurious material, especially forgeries emanating from White Russian émigré organizations or local counter-intelligence. Poretsky recalled one document, purportedly composed by the French General Staff, outlining a secret agreement between Poland and France on military collaboration against the Soviet Union, which was couched in excruciating French, with blunders of syntax and spelling which no Frenchman could have committed. This palpable fraud was bought, photographed and sent to Moscow because no one working for military intelligence at the Soviet embassy in Vienna knew a word of French. Poretsky considered that ‘a surprising number [of Soviet military attachés] showed signs of mental instability’.³⁵

A costly apparatus watched its citizens, monitored public opinion, identified recalcitrant individuals and determined whom to kill. A Cheka circular of 1920–1 declared: ‘Our work should concentrate on the information apparatus, for only when the Cheka is sufficiently informed and has precise data elucidating organisations and their individual members will it be able … to take timely and necessary measures for liquidating groups as well as the individual who is harmful and dangerous.’ Moscow killed their own. The illegal Fedia Umansky @ Fedin @ Alfred Krauss predicted in 1929, ‘there are only two things in store for the likes of us. Either the enemy will hang us or our own people will shoot us.’ None of the illegals was executed by western imperialism: most were killed by the cannibal paranoia of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This phenomenon led to several damaging Soviet defections.³⁶

In January 1930 Georges Agabekov (born Grigory Sergeyvich Arutyunov @ Nerses Ovsepyan @ Azadoff), who was chief of OGPU’s eastern section in 1928–9, tried to defect to the British in Istanbul. He was motivated by both ideological estrangement and infatuation with an Englishwoman whom he had met in Turkey. Defectors at that time were treated as despicable funks rather than valuable assets. They ranked as the civilian equivalent of selfish deserters who had been put before the firing-squad in wartime. Accordingly Agabekov was rebuffed by his girlfriend’s compatriots, although six months later he successfully defected in Paris. The French government, rather than cultivating him as a source, expelled him as a trouble-maker after the girlfriend’s parents denounced him as a heartless seducer. Before his deportation, it was recognized in London by Guy Liddell of Special Branch and by MI5’s Kathleen (‘Jane’) Sissmore and Oswald (‘Jasper’) Harker that, as the most senior OGPU officer to have defected, he was worth monitoring and interviewing. The Home Office warrant of 27 July 1930 requesting the interception of his mail was phrased in the patronizing, mistrustful terms with which foreign sources were often approached: ‘The individual named, who states himself to have been a member of the Russian OGPU, has made a rather theatrical “escape” from Constantinople to Paris. He has given a lurid account of orders from his former chiefs including the liquidation of recalcitrant Soviet employees. It is strongly suspected … that he may be acting as agent provocateur.’ London’s Morning Post newspaper sent its Paris correspondent to interview Agabekov, ‘chief of the OGPU for the five Mahomedan countries’, and duly reported: ‘He calls himself an American, and is a typical Levantine with yellow eyes and a coffee-coloured complexion.’ These were yet further expressions of that British condescension – a complacent amalgam of pride and insularity – that had led Robert Bruce Lockhart, the British acting Consul General in Moscow, to liken Lenin to a provincial grocer in 1917.³⁷

The deaths or flight from Russia of the tsarists’ world-leading cryptographers lowered the quality of Soviet code-making and code-breaking. Partly as compensation for this deterioration in SIGINT (signals intelligence), but also as an outcome of their inclinations, the Bolsheviks collected excellent HUMINT (human intelligence) from other countries’ missions, legations and embassies both in Moscow and in other European capitals. There is a myth, as Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky write, that brilliant mathematicians achieved the major code-breaking successes. The reality is that HUMINT had a part in most major breaks of high-grade code and cipher systems. During the 1930s Moscow’s informants in the Communications Department of the Foreign Office supplied plain-text British diplomatic telegrams which Soviet code-breakers could, in some instances, compare with the ciphered versions as an aid to breaking the ciphers. Soviet SIGINT experts were, however, decimated during Stalin’s Great Terror. The cryptographer Gleb Boky, who led the SIGINT operations of the NKVD and the Fourth Department, was shot in 1937 together with his deputy. Boky’s successor survived in post only a month.³⁸

Soviet espionage in foreign missions

Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) did not have a Moscow station in the 1920s or 1930s. Muscovites were too cowed to be approachable by foreign diplomats. Sir Robert Hodgson reported in 1924 on Soviet espionage on diplomatic missions in Moscow: ‘It is unfortunate that, in order to establish the new régime – the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat – the Soviet Government should find itself compelled to … extend on an unheard-of scale the most revolting expedients of dilation, espionage and administrative tyranny which disfigured the old régime.’ Foreign missions in the capital were beleaguered ‘panic-centres’, he said. Russians were afraid to attend Hodgson’s lawn-tennis tournaments; musicians were scared to perform at evening concerts. He regarded the Soviet regime as akin to a fundamentalist religious cult at the height of its zeal: a year later he told Lord D’Abernon that he hoped Russia’s government ‘will be laicised, and that normal human interests will resume their sway’. When Anglo-Russian diplomatic relations were temporarily severed in 1927, all but two of the Russian staff of Hodgson’s mission were given diplomatic protection with jobs at the Norwegian legation. Dire punishment for collaborating with capitalism befell the unfortunate pair who were not hired by Norway: the doorkeeper Vera Rublatt was exiled for three years in Siberia; the messenger Surkov was sent to the dreaded penal camp in the Solovetsky Islands.³⁹

Security measures were primitive for most of the inter-war period not only in British embassies and legations but in those of the other powers. The need for specialist advice or strict procedures occurred to almost no one in the 1920s. In 1927 it was found that Soviet diplomats in Peking had recruited Chinese staff in the British, Italian and Japanese legations to supply copies of secret diplomatic documents.

The most grievous lapse began on the watch of Sir Ronald Graham, who was the Ambassador in Rome for twelve years from 1921. Graham made the embassy at the end of the Via XX Settembre, with its beautiful garden shaded by the city wall, into a salon for literary and artistic connoisseurs as well as a political and diplomatic congregation point. Amid these amenities Francesco Constantini, an embassy messenger, was recruited by INO in 1924 and given the codename DUNCAN. When two copies of the diplomatic cipher went missing shortly afterwards, diplomats did not think to suspect him. In addition to cipher material, he stole dispatches on Anglo-Italian relations and often supplied the ‘confidential print’ which was circulated from London to heads of its overseas diplomatic missions giving up-to-date material from important Foreign Office documents and selected dispatches and summaries. Constantini was a mercenary who wanted to enrich himself. Some 150 pages of classified material left the embassy on average each week by 1925. In Moscow, Constantini was reckoned to be INO’s most valuable agent, whose material would betray British plots to destroy the Soviet Union and provide early warnings of the expected British invasion. ‘England is now the organizing force behind a probable attack on the USSR in the near future,’ Constantini was instructed by Moscow in 1925. ‘A continuous hostile cordon [of states] is being formed against us in the West. In the East, in Persia, Afghanistan and China we observe a similar picture … your task (and consider it a priority) is to provide documentary and agent materials which reveal the details of the English plan.’⁴⁰

Security did not improve after Sir Eric Drummond had succeeded Graham as Ambassador in 1933. Slocombe’s pen-portrait of the new chief in Via XX Settembre evokes an unassuming, dejected, exact and unimaginative Scot who was heir-presumptive to the earldom of Perth: ‘the least elegant Foreign Office official who ever carried a neatly rolled umbrella in Whitehall … he had a small head, a long neck with a prominent Adam’s apple, a long nose’. Drummond and his staff could not think how to react to the brazenness of Mussolini in 1936 in publishing a secret British report on Abyssinia which had been filched from the embassy. They were confounded when Il Duce bragged that he had a copy of a memorandum ‘The German Danger’ circulated to the Cabinet by the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. They did not know that the Italians forthwith gave the text of Eden’s paper to Hitler.⁴¹

No action was taken to improve security until in 1937 a necklace belonging to Lady Drummond vanished from a locked red box in the Ambassador’s office. Valentine Vivian of SIS, who was sent by the Foreign Office to report on the Rome embassy, warned that there was no ‘such thing as an expert in security measures, and I make no pretensions to being one’. He nevertheless made sound recommendations – of which one is especially notable. Although diplomats assumed that telephone conversations were tapped, they were unaware that telephones might be doctored so as to act as microphones recording conversations in embassy offices. Vivian suspected a new telephone on the cipher officers’ table, and after Foreign Office discussions, the PUS Sir Robert (‘Van’) Vansittart instructed that henceforth telephones should be excluded from the cipher-room. A month after Vivian’s visit to Rome, the Foreign Office discovered that the summary of a confidential talk with the Regent of Yugoslavia about his policy towards Italy had been leaked to Mussolini’s government.⁴²

When Vivian inspected British embassy offices in Berlin a few months later, he found them vulnerable to breaches. Security in embassies, legations, consulates and the Foreign Office was seen as a matter of lowly office administration. Officials of mature judgement were dismissive and even scornful of crude espionage scares. Basil Liddell Hart was military correspondent of The Times, adviser to the Secretary of State for War and one of England’s most up-to-date tactical planners. ‘This ugly rash is again breaking out on the face of Europe,’ he warned of ‘spy-mania’ in 1937. ‘Its justification is probably slender, as usual. For the knowledge that matters is rarely gained by the methods that thrill the lover of sensational spy-stories: safer, in every sense, is the knowledge that comes by the application of ordinary deductive methods to a mass of data that is common property.’ It took the discovery in September 1939, after the outbreak of war, that for ten years Moscow had been buying secrets from the Foreign Office’s Communications Department (see Chapter 5), and the further belated revelation by SIS in January 1940 that Berlin had (during the previous July and August) received secrets from the Office’s Central Department, for an embryonic Security Department to be formed. ‘I can trust no one,’ exclaimed the Office’s exasperated Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, who had been equally astounded on first hearing the long history of betrayals in Rome.⁴³

It is easy to disparage these attitudes with hindsight. These were men, though, who never purged an enemy, and were never deluded that history was on their side. Their arrangements were no more defective or naive than those of the United States. William Bullitt was appointed as the earliest American Ambassador to Soviet Russia in 1933: he had earlier been psychoanalysed by Freud, and had co-authored with Freud a psychoanalytical biography of Woodrow Wilson. ‘We should never send a spy to the Soviet Union,’ Bullitt advised the State Department after three years in Moscow. ‘There is no weapon so disarming and so effective in relations with the Communists as sheer honesty.’ The corporate lawyer Joseph Davies, who replaced Bullitt in 1936, was a dupe who attended the Moscow show-trials and believed the evidence. The embassy at first had no codes, no safes and no couriers, but sent messages through the Moscow telegraph service where they could be read by anyone. The US Marines who guarded the embassy, and some of the cipher clerks, were provided with NKVD girlfriends. When an FBI agent, posing as a courier, visited the embassy in 1940, he found that the duty code clerk had left the code-room unattended, with the door open, for forty-five minutes. At night the code-room safe was left open with codebooks and messages on the table. It did not occur to the FBI agent to search for listening devices. When this was belatedly done in 1944, a total of 120 hidden microphones were found in the first sweep of the building. Further sweeps found more microphones secreted in furniture legs, plastered walls and elsewhere.⁴⁴

The political culture of everlasting distrust

The most effective British Ambassador to Stalinist Russia was Sir Archie Clark Kerr, who was created Lord Inverchapel as a reward for his success. ‘Nearly all of those who now govern Russia and mould opinion have led hunted lives since their early manhood when they were chased from pillar to post by the Tsarist police,’ he wrote in a dispatch of December 1945 assessing diplomacy in the new nuclear age. ‘Then came the immense and dangerous gamble of the Revolution, followed by the perils and ups and downs of intervention and civil war.’ Later still came the deadly purges, when ‘no one of them knew today whether he would be alive tomorrow’. Through all these years Soviet apparatchiks ‘trembled for the safety of their country and of their system as they trembled for their own’. Their personal experiences and their national system liquidated trust and personal security.⁴⁵

Stalin achieved supremacy by implementing a maxim in his book Concerning Questions of Leninism: ‘Power has not merely to be seized: it has to be held, to be consolidated, to be made invincible.’ To Lev Kamenev, whom he was to have killed, he said: ‘The greatest delight is to mark one’s enemy, prepare everything, avenge oneself thoroughly, and go to sleep.’ Dissidents who had fled abroad were assassinated. In 1938, for example, Evgeni Konovalets, the Ukrainian nationalist leader, was killed in Rotterdam by an exploding chocolate cake. Stalin compared his purges and liquidations to Ivan the Terrible’s massacres: ‘Who’s going to remember all this riffraff in twenty years’ time? Who remembers the names of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one … He should have killed them all, to create a strong state.’⁴⁶

Stalin rewarded his associates with privileges so long as they served his will. ‘Every Leninist knows, if he is a real Leninist,’ he told the party congress of 1934, ‘that equality in the sphere of requirements and personal life is a piece of reactionary petit-bourgeois stupidity, worthy of a primitive sect of ascetics, but not of a socialist society organized on Marxist lines.’ But Stalin was pitiless in ordering the deaths of his adjutants when they no longer served his turn. The first member of his entourage to be killed on his orders was Nestor Apollonovich Lakoba, who was poisoned during a dinner at which his attendance was coerced by Stalin’s deadly subordinate Lavrentiy Beria in 1936. Beria then maddened Lakoba’s beautiful widow by confining her in a cell with a snake and by forcing her to watch the beating of her fourteen-year-old son. She finally died after a night of torture, and the child was subsequently put to death.⁴⁷

The enemies of the people were not limited to saboteurs and spies, Stalin said at the time that he launched his purges. There were also doubters – the naysayers to the dictatorship of the proletariat – and they too had to be liquidated. The first of the notorious Moscow show-trials opened in August 1936. Chief among the sixteen defendants were Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had agreed with Stalin to plead guilty and make docile, bogus confessions in return for a guarantee that there would be no executions and that their families would be spared. They were faced by the Procurator General, Andrei Vyshinsky, the scion of a wealthy Polish family in Odessa, who had years before shared food-hampers from his parents with his prison cell-mate Stalin. Vyshinsky was ‘ravenously bloodthirsty’, in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s phrase, producing outrushes of synthetic fury at need, and using his vicious wit to revile the defendants as ‘mad dogs of capitalism’. The promises of clemency were ignored, and when all sixteen defendants were sentenced to death, there was a shout in court of ‘Long live the cause of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin!’ Stalin never attended executions, which he treated as ‘noble party service’ and which were officially designated the Highest Measure of Punishment. Vyshinsky seldom saw the kill, for he too was squeamish. At the Lubianka prison, Zinoviev cried: ‘Please, comrade, for God’s sake, call Joseph Vissarionovich [Stalin]! Joseph Vissarionovich promised to save our lives!’ He, Kamenev and the others were shot through the back of the head. The bullets, with their noses crushed, were dug from the skulls, cleaned of blood and brains, and handed (probably still warm) to Genrikh Grigorievich Yagoda, the ex-pharmacist who had created the slave-labour camps of the Gulag and was rewarded with appointment as Commissar General of State Security.⁴⁸

Yagoda, who was a collector of orchids and erotic curiosities, labelled the bullets ‘Zinoviev’ and ‘Kamenev’, and treasured them alongside his collection of women’s stockings. At a subsequent dinner in the NKVD’s honour, Stalin’s court jester Karl Pauker made a comic re-enactment of Zinoviev’s desperate final pleading, with added anti-semitic touches of exaggerated cringing, weeping and raising of hands heavenwards with the prayer, ‘Hear oh Israel the Lord is our God.’ Stalin’s entourage guffawed at this mockery of the dead: the despot laughed so heartily that he was nearly sick. A year later Pauker himself was shot: ‘guilty of knowing too much and living too well: Stalin no longer trusted the old-fashioned Chekists with foreign connections’. When Yagoda in turn was exterminated in 1938, the ‘Zinoviev’ and ‘Kamenev’ bullets passed ‘like holy relics in a depraved distortion of the apostolic succession’ to his successor Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov. Two years later Yezhov was convicted of spying for Polish landowners, English noblemen and Japanese samurai. When taken to a special execution yard, with sloping floor and hosing facilities, Yezhov’s legs buckled and he was dragged weeping to meet the bullet. Similarly the executioner who shot Beria after Stalin’s death stuffed rags in his mouth to stifle the bawling.⁴⁹

Denis Pritt attended the first Moscow show-trials of 1936. A former Tory voter and a King’s Counsel with a prosperous practice in capitalist Chancery cases, he had turned Red, and became the barrister chosen by the CPGB to defend party members accused of espionage. For fifteen years he was MP for North Hammersmith: after his expulsion from the Labour party in 1940 he continued for a decade to represent the constituency as a communist fellow-traveller; he was rewarded with the Stalin Peace Prize. ‘The Soviet Union is a civilised country, with … very fine lawyers and jurists,’ Pritt reported of a criminal state which deprived its subjects of every vestige of truth. The Moscow trials were a ‘great step’ towards placing Soviet justice at the forefront of ‘the legal systems of the modern world’. Vyshinsky, he said, resembled ‘a very intelligent and rather mild-mannered English businessman’, who ‘seldom raised his voice … never ranted … or thumped the table’, and was merely being forthright when he called the defendants ‘bandits and mad-dogs and suggested that they ought to be exterminated’. Any doubts about the guilt of Zinoviev and Kamenev were dispelled for Pritt by ‘their confessions [made] with an almost abject and exuberant completeness’. None of the defendants had ‘the haggard face, the twitching hand, the dazed expression, the bandaged head’ familiar from prisoners’ docks in capitalist jurisdictions. Bourgeois critics who vilified socialist justice exceeded the bounds of plausibility: ‘if they thus dismiss the whole case for the prosecution as a “frame-up”, it follows inescapably that Stalin and a substantial number of other high officials, including presumably the judges and the prosecutors, were themselves guilty of a foul conspiracy to procure the judicial murder of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and a fair number of other persons’.⁵⁰

Stalin’s obsession with ‘wreckers’ and ‘saboteurs’ working within the Soviet Union is certainly a projection of Moscow’s activities abroad: plans and personnel for sabotage of British factories, transport and fuel depots in the event of the long-expected Anglo-Russian war were probably extensive. More than ever, after the purges, Stalin used gallows humour to intimidate his entourage. At a Kremlin banquet to welcome Charles de Gaulle in 1942, he proposed a toast: ‘I drink to my Commissar of Railways. He knows that if his railways failed to function, he would answer with his neck. This is wartime, gentlemen, so I use harsh words.’ Or again: ‘I raise my glass to my Commissar of Tanks. He knows that failure of his tanks to issue from the factories would cause him to hang.’ The commissars in question had to rise from their seats and proceed along the banqueting table clinking glasses. ‘People call me a monster, but as you see, I make a joke of it,’ he chuckled to de Gaulle. Later he nudged the Free French leader and pointed at Molotov confabulating with Georges Bidault: ‘Machine-gun the diplomats, machine-gun them. Leave it to us soldiers to settle things.’⁵¹

Soviet Russia killed its own in their millions, tortured the children of disgraced leaders, urged other children to denounce their parents for political delinquency, used threats of the noose or the bullet as a work-incentive for its officials, and built slaughter-houses for the extermination of loyal servants. ‘There are no … private individuals in this country,’ Stalin told a newly appointed Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Maurice Peterson, in 1946. The best-organized and most productive Stalinist industry was the falsification of history. Blatant lies were symbols of status: the bigger the lies that went unchallenged, the higher one’s standing. Communist Russia liquidated trust throughout its territories. Every family constantly scrutinized their acquaintances, trying to spot the informers and provocateurs, or those who by association might bring down on them the lethal interest of the secret police. By the culmination of the purges in 1937, people were too scared to meet each other socially. Independent personal judgements on matters of doctrinal orthodoxy became impermissible. As Hugh Trevor-Roper noted in 1959, ‘the Russian historians who come to international conferences are like men from the moon: they speak a different language, talk of the “correct” and “incorrect” interpretations, make statements and refuse discussions’. When after thirty years of internal exile, Nadezhda Mandelstam returned to Moscow in 1965, she found that fear remained ubiquitous. ‘Nobody trusted anyone else, and every acquaintance was a suspected police informer. It somehow seemed as if the whole country was suffering from persecution mania.’⁵²

In Stalin’s toxic suspicions we reach the kernel of this book: the destruction of trust. Purges, so Nikolai Bukharin told Stalin in 1937, guaranteed the primacy of the leadership by arousing in the upper echelons of the party ‘an everlasting distrust’ of each other. Stalin went further, and said in Nikita Khrushchev’s presence in 1951, ‘I’m finished, I trust no one, not even myself.’ Soviet Russia’s ultimate triumph was to destroy reciprocal trust within the political society of its chief adversary.⁵³

CHAPTER 2
The Intelligence Division

Every power system must defend itself against spies, traitors, rebels, saboteurs and mutineers. Cunning ambitions – both internal and external – threaten every sovereignty. Individual vanities endanger national security. Accordingly, hidden away inside the great machinery of states, there have always been the smaller apparatuses of espionage, counter-espionage and counter-subversion. Yet spies, double agents, couriers and informers are little use abroad or in the homeland, nor can the collection by licit means of foreign and domestic information be made intelligible, without offices to process material and turn it into intelligence. In England, as in Russia, the organized collection of reports and intercepts on exiles, foreign enemies and domestic rebels reached maturity in the sixteenth century.

Pre-Victorian espionage

One of the ablest men in Elizabethan England, Sir Francis Walsingham, was the country’s earliest spymaster. When in 1571 the Florentine banker Roberto di Ridolfi led an international conspiracy to kill England’s Protestant Queen Elizabeth and to crown the Catholic Queen of Scotland, Mary, in her stead, Walsingham’s organization foiled the plot, with the help of informants, torture, intercepted messages and deciphered codes. He had fifty-three agents at foreign courts, and was adept at persuading Catholics to betray one another. His apparatus detected further plots to depose Elizabeth. After the foiling of the most notable of these conspiracies, led by Anthony Babington in 1586, the Queen told her parliament, ‘Good Neighbours I have had, and I have met with bad; and in Trust I have found Treason.’¹

Sectarian animosity between Catholics and Protestants, and dynastic rivalries between adherents of the Tudors, the Stuarts and the Hanoverians, involved foreign conspirators, aggrieved exiles, domestic malcontents and headstrong adventurers. European power-centres were monitored from London. The Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, used countless paid spies during the 1650s and was said to have ‘carried the secrets of all the Princes of Europe at his girdle’. The Venetian Ambassador in London, reporting on the Protectorate, declared that ‘no Government on earth discloses its own acts less and knows those of others more precisely than that of England’.²

During the 1720s the South Sea Company financial scandal set other precedents in the spiriting away from prosecutors of malefactors with disturbing secret knowledge. The company’s cashier, Robert Knight, after attempting to blackmail government ministers into protecting him, and reluctant to undergo close interrogation, took ship for Calais with his son and namesake. The two Robert Knights then hastened to the Austrian Netherlands, where a junior English diplomat acted on his own initiative, pursued the elder Knight with a troop of hussars and had him incarcerated, under heavy security, in the citadel of Antwerp. Although the House of Commons sought Knight’s extradition, their purpose was not punishment but political gamesmanship: the opposition wished him to divulge material incriminating office-holders. The monarch and the government were correspondingly anxious to prevent his repatriation and to silence the disruptive stories that he might tell. There followed an intricate ‘screen’: the Georgian word for a cover-up. After negotiations between London and Vienna, Knight was transferred to Luxembourg, and then taken at night to the Ardennes and set free. The authorities meanwhile arranged for a hole to be dug in the wall of the Knights’ cell, and for a rope-ladder to be lowered from it, in order to bolster the pretence that they had escaped. The determination of London office-holders that the secrets of Knight’s financial chicanery should not be publicly aired was akin to the aversion of twentieth-century authorities to sharing security failures.³

Eighteenth-century uprisings by Scottish Jacobites against the government in London were defeated by secret intelligence, disinformation and betrayals as well as by force of arms. Both sides employed messenger-spies, such as the Jacobite innkeeper who in 1745 tried to cut his throat after being captured with papers from Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, hidden in his glove. The London government gained an important advantage when the Jacobite cipher code was seized by a mob in Cumberland from the Duke of Perth’s travelling servant. After two years of imprisonment in the Tower of London, the clan chief Alastair Ruadh MacDonell of Glengarry was turned, and under the alias of Pickle acted as a secret informant on Jacobite activities after 1747. ‘Tall, athletic, with a frank and pleasing face, Pickle could never be taken for a traitor,’ wrote his biographer. ‘The man was brave, for he moved freely in France, England, and Scotland, well knowing that the sgian [small dagger] was sharpened for his throat if he were detected.’ He was not a paid informer, but a conceited man who enjoyed the secret importance of double-dealing. His second alias was Random, which suggests his liking for risk. Collectors of antiquities and works of art, who roamed Europe in pursuit of their avocation, as well as the dealers from whom they bought their rarities, had good cover for underhand activities as political agents. There were ample opportunities for gossip, covert surveillance, gambits and counter-espionage by connoisseurs who encountered Jacobites in exile. Much useless tittle-tattle from Rome or Florence about the Old and Young Pretenders was sold to London at high prices, which were paid tardily or not at all.⁴

The Home Office employed informers and agents provocateurs during the French revolutionary wars and their turbulent sequel. Lord Sidmouth, Home Secretary during 1812–22, became convinced by his sources, so he told the House of Lords in 1817, that ‘scarcely a cottage had escaped the perseverance of the agents of mischief’. Radicals, warned Sidmouth, ‘had parliamentary reform in their mouths, but rebellion and revolution in their hearts’. The Cato Street conspirator Arthur Thistlewood was incriminated by a bevy of police spies, including John Castle, a maker of paper dolls for children, who was also a bigamist and pimp, and George Edwards, a maker of plaster figurines, whose bestselling line was a bust of the headmaster of Eton which pupils bought to use in the manner of a coconut shy. The defence of the realm from internal foes has always needed its Pickles, Randoms and Castles.⁵

Mid-nineteenth-century London became a haven for political exiles (predominantly German, but some Italian). Most were quiescent refugees who sat smoking, talking, eating and drinking in Soho dives, but one account of 1859 presents a minority group of active conspirators gathering in a small Whitechapel Gasthaus known as the Tyrants’ Entrails: ‘the incandescent ones, the roaring, raging, rampaging, red-hot refugees; the amateurs in vitriol, soda-bottles full of gunpowder, and broken bottles for horses’ hoofs’. The surveillance of these irreconcilables was the preserve of foreign police spies. A Prussian spy reported in 1853 on one exile who had been born in the Rhineland, had been radicalized in Berlin and was living in two rooms in Dean Street, Soho: ‘everything is broken down, tattered and torn, with a half inch of dust over everything … manuscripts, books and newspapers, as well as children’s toys, and rags and tatters of his wife’s sewing basket, several cups with broken rims, knives, forks, lamps, an inkpot, tumblers, Dutch clay pipes, tobacco ash – in a word, everything top-turvy’. As to the paterfamilias, ‘Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he rarely does, and he likes to get drunk. Though he is often idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has great work to do. He has no fixed times for going to sleep and waking up. He often stays up all night, and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the comings and goings of the world.’ It was in this squalid chaos that Karl Marx did the preliminary thinking that led to Das Kapital.⁶

Victorian espionage

Every successful military leader valued intelligence reports. ‘I am always preceded by a hundred spies,’ the all-conquering Frederick the Great of Prussia said in the 1750s. His decision to go to war in 1756 was based partly on the intelligence received from his spy in the Austrian embassy in Berlin, and from the interception and decoding of messages sent by the Dutch envoy in St Petersburg to The Hague. Half a century later Napoleon declared, ‘one spy in the right place is worth 20,000 men in the field’. International diplomacy also suborned well-placed informants among the desk-bound officials of other great powers. As one example, Lord Cowley, Ambassador in Vienna during the 1820s, had the private secretary of the Austrian Foreign Minister Metternich in his pay.⁷

An intelligence department to measure, limit and manage the risks entailed by the territorial rivalry in Asia between England and Russia was developed in London from the 1850s. This department worked with successive prime ministers and the Foreign Office to inform and strengthen imperial policy-making. William Beaver, in his pioneering study of Victorian military intelligence, argues that the Pax Britannica was intelligence-based and intelligence-led. The London government’s success during Victoria’s reign in protecting its ideals of progress, prosperity and peace was achievable only by investigating, watching and listening to hostile powers, and by collating, interpreting and acting on intelligence about potential foes. The efforts of this War Office sub-division meant that for over half a century the British Empire waged colonial wars in Asia and made localized interventions in Africa, but avoided major warfare in either Europe or Asia. ‘Britain’, says Beaver, ‘played her cards well because she sat facing the mirror.’⁸

This systematic intelligence-gathering was instigated by Thomas Jervis, a retired Indian Army officer of whom it was said that cartography was second only to Christianity as the ruling passion of his life. Shortly before the outbreak of the Crimean war, he bought copies of the Russian army’s secret map of the Crimea and of the Austrian staff map of Turkey-in-Europe from a source in Brussels. At his own expense he then provided the War Office with tactical maps of the seat of war. These proved invaluable at a time when British military inadequacy in the Crimea was being exposed by The Times war correspondent and by war artists whose drawings dismayed readers of illustrated magazines. The politicians sought to deflect public anger at the maladministration and tactical failures in the Crimea by incriminating the military. Sidney Herbert, the reform-minded Secretary of State for War, told the House of Commons that responsibility for the bungles ‘lies with that collection of regiments which calls itself the British Army and not with the Government!’⁹

Jervis campaigned for peacetime map-making, fact-gathering and tactical analysis. In 1855 he was appointed director of a new Topographical & Statistical Department (T&S) charged with supporting reconnaissance in war and intelligence-gathering in peacetime. This was reconstituted in 1873 as the Intelligence Department (ID). Although the Horse Guards generals were relentless in disliking the ID as an incipient General Staff which would reduce their prerogatives, the ID soon proved its value to the great offices of state by discounting the bellicose opinions of the military hierarchy. It provided prime ministers and foreign secretaries with evidence-based intelligence shorn of the generals’ bluster. ‘If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome,’ the Foreign Secretary and future Prime Minister Lord Salisbury said in 1877: ‘if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.’ By the 1880s the ID was a major supplier of intelligence to the Foreign Office as well as a prototype general staff for the War Office.¹⁰

ID officers scoured the foreign daily press, and weekly and monthly periodicals, for material on foreign armies, territories and thinking. This was later known as open source intelligence (OSINT). Interesting items were indexed under four or five headings, and pasted into cuttings-books. The cellars of the nondescript ID offices at 16–18 Queen Anne’s Gate, Westminster, two minutes’ walk from the Foreign Office and Downing Street, bulged with the largest secret military library in the world. Within months of the advent of the Dewey Decimal system of cataloguing in 1876, the ID had begun cataloguing the information in its holdings to as much as seven decimal points. Its officers took pride in map-making, and established cartography as a valued precision craft. Their voracity in amassing facts, and their canny analysis of material, provided the Foreign Office, the Cabinet and ministries with product that was both hallmarked as reliable and based on innovative thinking. The ID was a paper-bound bureaucracy, in which lucid, clarifying desk-work brought promotion: Sir John Ardagh, Jervis’s ultimate successor as the ID’s mastermind, was renowned for producing ‘beautifully expressed far-seeing memoranda on the most abstruse questions’.¹¹

The Indian Army remitted recurrent scares about Afghan uprisings and the mustering of Russian battalions. Lord Dufferin was rare among viceroys in discounting the likelihood of a Russian invasion of India: he protested in 1885 against ‘putting a frightful hole in our pocket’ by mobilizing the Indian Army ‘every time that a wretched Cossack chooses to shake his spear on the top of a sand-hill against Penjdeh’. Prime ministers learnt to trust ID reassurances about Russian intentions. Responding to an Indian Army alarm that Russia was preparing a major invasion of Afghanistan and India, the ID obtained and analysed the annual contract for procuring flour for the Russian army. It ascertained that there were no plans to build or expand flour points for bakeries on the trajectory of the planned invasion. As bakeries on lines of march to the Hindu Kush were indispensable to invasion plans, the ID advised the Foreign and India offices that without bread supplies there would be no military advance. This was a radical new way of assessing risk and laying plans.¹²

Politicians like to rely on instinct, which is inherently a primitive force, or on flair, ‘which means you guess what you ought to know’, as Robert Vansittart noted. The ID countered the makeshifts of instinct and flair with factually grounded intelligence assessments that gave reassurance about imperial security when rabble-rousers, apoplectic generals and press stunts seemed to presage impending Russian invasions of India. In the words of an ID paper of 1880 dispelling rumours of Russian expeditions into Afghanistan, ‘Ignorance is weakness, and this weakness we constantly show by the undignified fear displayed at every report of the threat of Russian movements.’ Just as military reverses were often attributable to poor field intelligence, so British diplomacy was sometimes outwitted by other European powers through deficient information.¹³

The ID attracted a new breed of ‘scientific officers’, mainly engineers and artillerymen. Unusually for the nineteenth-century army, at least a dozen had attended Oxford, Cambridge or Dublin universities; almost all were good linguists. Humour was prized: each section kept a screen on which were displayed ‘screamingly funny’ cuttings from foreign newspapers, such as an Austrian officer’s account of a Gibraltar cricket match and a Spanish scheme to train swans to tow reconnaissance balloons. The ID during the last quarter of the nineteenth century eventually produced three chiefs of the Imperial General Staff, two field marshals, six generals, eleven lieutenant generals and fifteen major generals. Over half were gazetted with knighthoods or peerages. Fewer than half ever married. Beaver identifies the ID as ‘the first real meritocratic cadre in modern British government’. As Stalin told the graduates of the Red Army Academy in a Kremlin speech of 1935, ‘cadres decide everything’.¹⁴

The ID trained men who later attained non-military but intelligence-informed positions of power: Vincent Caillard, an ID officer who served on the Montenegrin frontier commission, was rewarded with the presidency of the administrative council of the Ottoman Public Debt (1883–98), which brought him rare influence and privileged information in Constantinople. He corresponded with Salisbury on Turkish affairs, and was knighted at the age of thirty-nine. After 1906 he became central to military and naval preparedness as financial comptroller of the armaments company Vickers. In 1915–18 he was involved with the arms dealer Sir Basil Zaharoff in a fruitless scheme to bribe the Young Turks out of the war.¹⁵

After the European powers began to scramble for African territories in the 1880s, the Intelligence Division (as the Intelligence Department was renamed in 1888) became active in that continent. Its officers knew how to hold their tongues, said Ardagh, and could commit crimes while remaining gentlemanly. Theirs, he continued, were ‘the qualities disowned by the bishop who “thanked God that Providence had not endowed him with the low cunning necessary for the solution of a quadratic equation”’. All this was accomplished despite the Treasury keeping, in the words of an ID section head in the 1890s, ‘a frightfully tight hold on every sixpence’.¹⁶

‘Spies have a dangerous task, and not an honourable one; consequently, except in very rare and extreme cases, officers will not accept the invidious duty,’ wrote Captain Henry Hozier in 1867 after espionage had helped Prussia to its battle victories over Austria. Nevertheless, ‘adventurers and unscrupulous men will, if well paid, do the work, and, for the sake of a sufficient sum, run the risk of certain death’. Despite this disavowal, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century ID officers traversed the globe, ran networks in Egypt, the Sudan, the Upper Nile and the new French spheres of influence along the west coast of Africa. Always and everywhere they drew maps: cartography was an English weapon to box the French, the Germans and the Italians in Africa, the Austrians and Turks in the Balkans, and the Russians in Asia. Medals were bestowed in order to distinguish officers who were willing to reconnoitre enemy positions from those whom Hozier stigmatized as ‘mercenary wretches who will sell friend and foe alike’. Claude Dansey, the Vice Chief of SIS during the 1940s, had a soldier uncle who was awarded the Victoria Cross for his courage as a scout in the Ashanti war of 1874, and a military cousin who won the VC in 1914 for reconnaissance of enemy positions in the German West Africa protectorate.¹⁷

Clive Bigham, Lord Mersey’s young son and heir, who had distinguished himself in China during the Boxer rebellion of 1900, was recommended by the Foreign Office to Ardagh, and served in the ID until 1904. Almost his first task was to go to Paris, where he bribed newspaper editors to halt their abuse of Queen Victoria (his expenses for this task were put under the heading ‘Remounts’). Next he was posted to ID’s Section E, which covered Austria, Hungary, the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire, and commissioned to compile handbooks on Abyssinia, Morocco and Arabia. ‘These were long and interesting jobs,’ Bigham recalled, ‘for I had to sift, check, compile and arrange a mass of material; but the work attracted me and taught me a lot.’ Section E was headed first by George Forestier-Walker, who rose to the rank of major general, and then by George (‘Uncle George’) Milne, afterwards CIGS, field marshal and Lord Milne. Among Bigham’s colleagues William (‘Wully’) Robertson also became field marshal and CIGS, while Herbert (‘Lorenzo’) Lawrence became both a general and chairman of Vickers from 1926.¹⁸

In contrast to the Soviet Union’s confidence after 1917 in communism’s inevitable triumph over capitalism, the rapidly expanding British Empire showed imperialism at its most pessimistic. Bravado about national destiny and chauvinism about the British genius for world leadership were super-abundant; but they always raised countervailing voices which decried the interminable wars against the weak: Zulus, Ashanti, Benin, Afghans, Burmese and others. The colonial expansion and ‘scramble for Africa’ of the 1880s and 1890s were both vaunted and beset by misgivings. ‘Military adventure … is extremely distasteful to me,’ commented Dufferin when in 1885 he was instructed by London politicians to annex Burma. ‘The Burmese are a nice people, easily managed, and I cannot bear the thought of making war upon them.’ After the conquest of Burma, Dufferin anticipated ‘nothing but trouble and annoyance’. Sir Cecil (‘Springy’) Spring Rice, future Ambassador in Washington, wrote in 1899 after the outbreak of the South African war: ‘We are surrounded in the world by a depth and intensity of hatred which is really astonishing. If we fall we shall have a hundred fangs in our throat.’ He disliked the new bellicosity: ‘Imperialism is not so bad a thing if you pay for it in your own blood, but spending 3 per-cent out of your stock exchange gains to buy people to fight for you in picturesque places, in order to provide you with interesting illustrated papers (or new investments) is a different thing.’ On the eve of the twentieth century Spring Rice saw ‘great danger threatening’ and wished British imperialists ‘hadn’t boasted and shouted so much and spoilt our own game and turned the whole thing into a burglar’s prowl’.¹⁹

In the post-mortem after the South African war of 1899–1902, the ID was the only branch of the army to avoid censure. Scorching public anger at the humiliating defeats of British imperial forces by Boer irregulars required the Edwardian generals to submit to organizational reform: a general staff was belatedly instituted in 1904. This coincided with the reorientation of British foreign policy, which embraced its traditional enemies France and Russia as allies against its new chief adversary, Germany. The Directorate of Military Intelligence, which replaced the ID, continued the old successful methods of combining reports of British officers travelling overseas, the gleaning of OSINT from newspapers and gazettes, diplomatic and consular reports, and espionage. The Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division (NID) relied on similar sources, supplemented by commercial and business informants. The Foreign Office however disliked the use of military and naval attachés for espionage, fearing that they might be entrapped by counter-espionage officers and thus embarrass their embassy. Accordingly, in Berlin and other power centres, service attachés collected open material by legal methods, but shunned covert or illicit acquisition of official secrets. It was partly to keep attachés clear of spy work that new security agencies were established in 1909. It is indicative of the relative standing of military and naval intelligence that the ‘MI’ in the designations ‘MI5’ and ‘MI6’ represents Military Intelligence, not Naval Intelligence.²⁰

The ID had further long-term influence for the good in the quality and activities of military attachés appointed to foreign embassies. They were skilled in using the well-tried ID techniques: they cultivated cordial contacts with the military officers of the countries to which they were posted; they attended manoeuvres, and watched new tactics and armoured formations; they were politically aware and kept alert to changing social and economic trends in their territories; they read newspapers and monitored specialist periodicals. Linguistic skills were a prerequisite. Noel Mason-MacFarlane, who was Military Attaché at Vienna and Budapest in 1931–5 and at Berlin in 1937–9, spoke excellent French and German and was conversant in Spanish, Hungarian and Russian. His Assistant Military Attaché in Berlin, Kenneth Strong, began intelligence work as a subaltern in Ireland in the early 1920s. During the struggle against Sinn Fein he ran informants such as railway porters, shopkeepers and barmen who would warn him of suspicious strangers in his district. He was fluent in four foreign languages and had smatterings of others. During the 1930s he was instrumental in starting the War Office’s Intelligence Corps. ‘The task of the Intelligence Officer’, Strong wrote, ‘is to exercise a spirit of positive inquiry and faculty of judgement, above all in discarding that large part of the incoming material which does not appreciably alter the known or anticipated situation, and from the residue to form a coherent and balanced picture, whether for a Supreme Commander, a Prime Minister … or for someone less elevated.’²¹

Edwardian espionage

The power, the pride and the reach of the British Empire seemed in constant jeopardy after the defeats in South Africa. Lord Eustace Percy, who began his diplomatic career in Washington in 1911, recalled Edwardian England as always ‘overshadowed by premonitions of catastrophe’. He had been reared in a ducal castle, but ‘whatever privileges my generation enjoyed in its youth, a sense of security was not one of them’. There was no time ‘when a European war did not seem to me the most probable of prospects, or when I forgot my first ugly taste of public disaster in the Black Week of Colenso and Magersfontein, which had darkened the Christmas school holidays of 1899’.²²

The temper of Edwardian England remained apprehensive. Newspapers profited by intensifying public anxieties. In 1906 the Daily Mail paid columns of morose men to march along Oxford Street in London wearing spiked helmets, Prussian-blue uniforms and bloodstained gloves. They carried sandwich-boards promoting a new novel of which the newspaper had bought the serialization rights, William Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910 – a novel catering, as the Daily Mail’s shameless proprietor said, to his readers’ need for ‘a good hate’. Daily Mail readers were urged to refuse to be served by German waiters: ‘if your waiter says he is Swiss, ask to see his passport’. Le Queux was a bombastic sensationalist who pretended to intimate knowledge of European secret services. The fearful insecurity aroused by his next booming scare-stunt, Spies of the Kaiser (1909), overcame the Liberal government’s sentiment that domestic counter-espionage was a mark of despotic regimes. In October 1909 a Secret Service Bureau was established in rooms in Victoria Street.²³

After months of dispute over purposes and responsibilities, the Bureau was sub-divided. The home section, which was known as MI5 from 1915 and also after 1931 as the Security Service, was given the purview of counter-espionage, counter-subversion and counter-sabotage in Britain and its overseas territories. The foreign section, known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI1c, also later as MI6) was charged with collecting human intelligence (HUMINT) from non-British territories. In addition, Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) was formed to monitor the activities of Indian nationalists, revolutionaries and anarchists and their allies not only in Britain but across Europe. There were also three divisions of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, which had been formed in 1883 in response to Irish dynamite attacks in London. A draconian Official Secrets Act of 1911 was a further signal that national security was being treated more systematically, and also being kept determinedly from informed public comment.

Vernon Kell, the first Director of MI5, was a graduate of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, whose father had been an English army officer and whose maternal grandfather was a Polish army surgeon. After his parents’ divorce, he travelled widely in Europe with his mother, visiting exiled members of her family and mastering French, German and other European languages. The War Office in the late 1890s posted him to Moscow and Shanghai to learn Russian and Chinese. There was no insularity about this multilingual man of action. He had the type of keen, alert efficiency that allows no time for showiness. The great hindrance to his work was that he had funds for only a small staff. Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary when European war erupted in 1914, said with revealing naivety: ‘if we spend anything on Secret Service, it must be very trifling, because it never comes to my knowledge’. As Lord Eustace Percy noted, the ‘Secret Service’ account at the Office was devoted to the financial relief of impoverished British subjects overseas.²⁴

There was a clear understanding by the new intelligence services of the benefits of watch-and-learn. In 1911 Heinrich Grosse was convicted of spying on the Royal Navy at Portsmouth, but the network of which he was part was left all but undisturbed. Identities were established, addresses, correspondence and activities were monitored. One or two individuals were arrested, when it was considered unavoidable, but the majority were allowed to continue transmitting inaccurate material. ‘In other words, we just played them,’ recalled Superintendent Percy Savage of Scotland Yard. Karl Ernst, a hairdresser at King’s Cross, who acted as the postbox for this spy network, was arrested in the first round-up of German agents in August 1914. Once the two nations were at war, it was no longer safe enough to keep him under surveillance: he had to be detained.²⁵

England’s cabinet noir for intercepting and reading private and diplomatic correspondence, the Decyphering Branch, had been abolished in 1844 after parliamentary protests at the opening of the correspondence of the exiled Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini and the sharing of their contents with the Austrian and Neapolitan governments. Perlustration was not resumed for seventy years. At the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, the Post Office (which was a government department, headed by a minister, the Postmaster General) employed a single censor intercepting, opening, reading and resealing suspect letters. By the Armistice in 1918 the Censor’s Office employed over 2,000 staff, who were expected to open at least 150 letters a day each.

At the outset of war MI5 comprised Kell, six officers, its chief detective William Melville (formerly the Metropolitan Police superintendent in charge of Special Branch), two assistant detectives, six clerks and a caretaker. Its initial priority was to catch spies and saboteurs; but from 1916–17 its political masters were equally anxious about civil unrest and subversion. By 1918 MI5 had a staff of over 800, including 133 officers. Jervis would have rhapsodized at the amplitude of their records: over 250,000 index-cards cross-referencing 27,000 personal files in its central registry by the time of the Armistice that halted the European war in November 1918. Similarly Kell’s counterpart at SIS, Sir Mansfield Cumming, numbered his staff (exclusive of agents) as 47 in June 1915 and 1,024 by October 1916.

The months after the Armistice were a time of political instability, strange alliances and imponderable risk. Exterior perceptions might mislead. In the east London slum district of Limehouse, during the last months of the war, Irish nationalists combined with socialists to organize a militant constituency cohort led by a pharmacist called Oscar Tobin. One day in January 1919 a newly demobilized soldier, carrying a nondescript suitcase like the terrorist in Conrad’s Secret Agent, visited Tobin’s shop, went up the backstairs with him and laid plans for socialists to take control of Stepney Borough Council. Tobin was a Jewish Romanian who was to be refused naturalization as a British subject in 1924. To a watcher the confabulation above his shop might have seemed the inception of a revolutionary cell; but the demobbed soldier was Clement Attlee, and this was the first step in a political career that always upheld constitutionalism and culminated in his leadership of his country during the Cold War. History is full of misleading appearances. The balance between trust and treason, as Queen Elizabeth said, is seldom easy to get right.²⁶

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