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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: 2019-01-07

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 are 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 was 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

CHAPTER 3
The Whitehall Frame of Mind
The age of intelligence

At the acme of dynastical insecurity in November 1918, when the monarchies in Austria, Bavaria, Hungary, Prussia, Saxony and Württemberg followed the Romanov empire into extinction, Sir Basil Thomson, the bristling, pushy head of Special Branch at Scotland Yard, wrote a memorandum intended for the eyes of King George V. ‘Every institution of any importance has depended during the war for its existence on an intelligence organization,’ he began with his usual bounding confidence. The Foreign Office, the Admiralty, the War Office and the Ministry of Blockade all had departments collecting data, evaluating rumours, making predictions and trying to stabilize the future. Additional officials in Downing Street were amassing political intelligence for the Prime Minister, Lloyd George. His predecessor, Asquith, had fallen from power in 1916, Thomson continued, ‘not so much because he failed in policy, as because he had no intelligence organization to keep him warned of the intrigues and movements around him’. Similarly, among factors in the recent Russian revolution and overthrow of the Romanov dynasty, defective intelligence had a leading part: ‘Petrograd was in the hands of the revolutionaries before any hint of trouble was heard at Tsarsky’ (Tsarskoye Syelo, the imperial compound outside the capital). Thomson’s lesson for the Royal Household was terse:

(1) The only safe organizations are those that possess an efficient intelligence system.

(2) Those persons or organizations that have failed to develop such systems have been destroyed.

Statecraft had mutated. Europe’s age of intelligence had begun.¹

Opposing power blocs had different explanations for these new necessities. Soviet Russia attributed the world’s great changes to the communist revolution of 1917, and to the irresistible impetus towards the dictatorship of the proletariat. The European powers attributed them to the convulsion of continental warfare in 1914–18. Certainly the clashes of the Russian, British, German and Austro-Hungarian empires, and of the French and American republics, had changed their governments’ attitudes to their populations. For centuries monarchs had levied troops to fight wars, governments had repressed civil disorder and reformers had tried to harness popular sentiments. But the military, industrial and transport mobilization of 1914–18 turned the civil population into a new concept called manpower. People of working age – women as well as men – were deployed as a war resource in factories and transport systems as well as on battlefields. The Defence of the Realm Act was enacted in London in 1914, and extended at intervals so as to manage the mass of adults to an unprecedented extent.

When the Russian revolution erupted in 1917, MI5 was focused on German espionage, subversion and sabotage. With the start of the Comintern’s international activities and the foundation of the CPGB in 1920 it changed target to Bolshevism. It relied on the police officers of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch, which chewed communists, anarchists, Indian nationalists, pacifists, atheists, self-important but insignificant cranks, Soho rakes, unemployed marchers and mutinous merchant seamen in its greedy, indiscriminate maw. Special Branch reports were often unimaginative if not obtuse. ‘I should wait a long, long time before acting on the advice of the present authorities at Scotland Yard,’ wrote a Tory MP, Sir Cuthbert Headlam, at the time of a botched police raid on the offices of the Soviet trading agency ARCOS in 1927. Special Branch lost control of monitoring domestic subversion after the discovery in 1929 that it had been betrayed by two Bolshevik informants, Hubert van Ginhoven and Charles Jane. Complicated cross-jurisdictional clashes between MI5 and SIS were considered at ministerial level by the Secret Service Committee in 1919, and again by senior officials in 1921, 1922, 1925 and 1927. Committee members found it hard to adjudicate between the two agencies. A resolution was not reached until Kell’s organization was named as the lead national security service in 1931.²

MI5 was primarily an advisory agency, which existed to inform government decisions and to assess and manage risks. Its staff collected, filtered, indexed and filed information gleaned from confidential informants, passport and customs officers, intercepted mail, the garbled chatter heard by covert bugging of offices and telephones, watching of addresses, shadowing of individuals and surveillance of bank accounts, public meetings and publications. Counter-intelligence officers used this data to assess the risks posed by individuals who might be subversives or spies. They resembled historians scouring documentary fragments, unravelling confused memories, checking false trails, re-evaluating doubts and discounting persecution complexes. Their re-examination of past bungles was often more informative than success stories. In the search for long-term patterns, material from multitudinous sources was assembled, allowed to fester, pondered, evaluated, deconstructed, rejected and revised. Every intelligence service was a paper-driven bureaucracy. Officers in MI5, the Cheka, OGPU and the NKVD commissioned reports, compiled profiles, read and reread their dossiers. Every small detail was committed to paper. Successful counter-intelligence usually means following a paper-trail.

The arrest of spies was not the invariable first object of counter-espionage. It was often more profitable to watch and learn. If a spy was allowed to go free, watchers could study his methods and identify his contacts. That was why SIS betrayed its inexperience of domestic counter-espionage when, in 1927, its men arrested Georg Hansen, the Soviet handler of the spy Wilfred Macartney, three days after his arrival in England, before he had found his bearings or met his contacts. Arrests might lead to exciting public denouements, but counter-espionage officers prefer to accumulate and refine intelligence rather than arrest suspects, put them on trial and thus risk disclosure of their methods.

One early example of their watch-and-learn procedure can be given. Theodore Rothstein was ‘a short, stumpy, bearded, bespectacled revolutionary who looked like Karl Marx’. Before 1914 he had collaborated with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s campaigns against British imperialism in Egypt and India: during the war he was a triple agent working for Lenin’s Bolsheviks, British military intelligence and the Turkish secret service. In 1919 he wished Leonard Woolf, a former colonial official turned radical activist, to publish Lenin’s recent speeches and insisted on delivering the texts in person. Woolf was instructed to walk on the inside of the pavement along the Strand eastwards towards Fleet Street on a Wednesday afternoon, timing it so that he passed under the clock of the Law Courts at 2.30. At that exact moment he met Rothstein walking westwards from Fleet Street on the outside of the pavement. Rothstein carried in his right hand an envelope containing Lenin’s speeches, which, without either man speaking or looking at each other, he transferred into Woolf’s right hand. These precautions were in vain, for Rothstein was shadowed everywhere by Special Branch and the handover was seen. A few days later the police raided Woolf’s printers and seized the documents. Although Rothstein was kept under surveillance, he had been neither arrested nor dismissed from his wartime job at the War Office: officials judged that it was better to keep him in sight rather than expel him to Russia, where out of reach he might prove a dangerous opponent. This was a pattern of behaviour that was to be repeated in cases over the next century.³

In 1919 there was a sensation when the miners’ leader Robert Smillie, as a member of the Royal Commission on the Coal Industry, browbeat three coal-mining magnates, the Duke of Northumberland, the Marquess of Londonderry and the Earl of Durham, and quoted egalitarian extracts from the Christian gospels at them. ‘The public is amused by the spectacle, but few realize its sinister significance,’ commented Hensley Henson, Bishop of Durham. ‘The very foundations of the whole social fabric are challenged. The tables are plainly turned; and it requires very little to transform the Commission into a revolutionary tribunal, and Smillie into an English Lenin … preparing an immense catastrophe.’⁴

Lord D’Abernon, who was an eyewitness to the Russian advance into Poland in 1920, felt sure that ‘Western civilisation was menaced by an external danger which, coming into being during the war, threatened a cataclysm equalled only by the fall of the Roman Empire.’ He had little hope that the European powers would forget their rivalries and combine to prevent ‘world-victory of the Soviet creed’. The communist threat to ‘England’s stupendous and vital interests in Asia’ was graver than those posed by the old tsarist regime, judged D’Abernon, for ‘the Bolsheviks disposed of two weapons which Imperial Russia lacked – class-revolt propaganda, appealing to the proletariat of the world, and the quasi-religious fanaticism of Lenin, which infused a vigour and zeal unknown to the officials and emissaries of the Czar’.⁵

There was no English Lenin. The nearest home-grown version of him was the foolhardy Cecil L’Estrange Malone. Born in 1890, the son of a Yorkshire clergyman and nephew of the Earl of Liverpool, he entered the Royal Navy in 1905, and trained as a pioneer naval aviator in 1911. He flew off the fo’c’sle of a battleship steaming at 12 knots in 1912, planned the historic bombing raid by seaplanes on Cuxhaven harbour on Christmas Day of 1914 and commanded the Royal Navy’s converted packet-steamer from which the first seaplanes flew to drop torpedoes from the air and to sink enemy vessels in 1916. He became a lieutenant colonel aged twenty-seven, and the first air attaché at a British embassy – Paris – in 1918. With this reputation for derring-do Malone was elected as a Liberal MP in the general election after the Armistice. Crossing frontiers illicitly, making night marches through forests and swamps and armed with a Browning automatic, he reached Petrograd in 1919. There he met Litvinov, Chicherin and Trotsky, visited factories and power stations under workers’ control and was converted to communism. He forsook the Liberals and joined the CPGB at its formation in 1920. He was thus the first communist MP to sit in the House of Commons (two years before the election of Walton Newbold). In October 1920 Special Branch raided his flat in Chalk Farm, and arrested Erkki Veltheim, a twenty-two-year-old Comintern courier from Finland who was in possession of seditious literature. Although Veltheim was evidently staying as a guest, Malone pretended that he was a burglar who had broken in while he was away. The young Finn was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, and then deported. During the police search of the flat in Wellington House, they found two railway-cloakroom tickets wrapped in plain unmarked paper inside an envelope addressed to Malone. The tickets led them to parcels containing a booklet, probably written by Malone, which was a training manual for officers of a British ‘Red Army’. It contained instructions on improvised guerrilla tactics, street-fighting, execution of provocateurs and traitors, machine-gun drill, building barricades by overturning buses and trams, blockading coal-mines, seizing banks and post offices, cutting telephone and telegraph lines, and instigating naval mutinies.⁶

At a meeting organized by the CPGB and the Hands Off Russia Committee, held at the Royal Albert Hall on 7 November 1920, Malone made an inflammatory speech extolling the Bolshevik revolution and denouncing ‘the humbug’ of traditional parliamentary candidates. Capitalist manipulation of the proletariat was foundering, he averred: ‘the day will soon come when we shall pass blessings on the British revolution, when you meet here as delegates of the first all-British congress of workers, sailors and soldiers. When that day comes, woe to all those people who get in our way. We are out to change the present constitution, and if it is necessary to save bloodshed and atrocities we shall have to use the lamp-posts.’ From the Albert Hall stage he promised vengeance to an audience of over 8,000 Bolshevik sympathizers: ‘What, my friends, are a few Churchills or a few Curzons on lamp-posts compared with the massacres of thousands of human beings? … What is the punishment of these world-criminals compared to the misery which they are causing to thousands of women and little children in Soviet Russia?’ At this juncture there were cries of ‘Hang them’, ‘Burn them’ and ‘Shoot them’.⁷

Malone was arrested and tried for sedition. The prosecutor at Malone’s trial, Travers Humphreys, suggested that ‘young alien East End Jews of a disorderly type’ in the Albert Hall audience might have been roused by Malone’s violent exhortations. As to the revolutionary pamphlet, Humphreys warned that in many large British towns there were ‘persons of weak intellect, of vicious and criminal instincts, largely aliens, who will … act in response to any incitement for looting, murdering and brawling’. Malone was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment: his mother died of dismay a few weeks later. On his release he went abroad to recover, refused to respond to CPGB overtures and failed to organize a campaign to defend his parliamentary seat at the 1922 general election. Subsequently he travelled in the Balkans, visited Siberia, China and Japan, and rethought his ideas. As a Labour candidate avowing constitutionalism and disavowing extra-parliamentarianism, he was re-elected as an MP in a by-election of 1928 but lost his seat three years later. He then became an international wheeler-dealer, working for the Armenian oil millionaire Calouste Gulbenkian to extend Soviet influence in the Persian oilfields, and from 1934 served as the paid propagandist of Tokyo, running the venal East Asia News Service, defending Japan’s invasion and atrocities in Manchuria, acting as London agent of the South Manchuria Railway and operating the Japan Travel Bureau.⁸

Malone was a Lenin who took two years to fizzle out. The civil war in Ireland in 1920–2 caused little disruptive aftermath elsewhere in the British Isles. The workers’ challenge to capitalism represented by the General Strike in 1926 was only moderately divisive. The extension of the parliamentary franchise to younger women in 1927 was a voluntary act by the government rather than a sop to appease civil unrest. Demonstrations against high regional unemployment did not erupt into riots. Men parading in Trafalgar Square holding aloft banners bearing empty slogans – ‘Workers of the World, Unite’, ‘Long Live the World Solidarity of the Proletariat’, ‘Walthamstow Old Comrades’, ‘Balham Branch of the Juvenile Workers League’ – never endangered national security.⁹

Westminster and Whitehall worried, though, about Walthamstow and Balham. The police strike of August 1918, the return of demobilized troops after the Armistice in November 1918 and firebrand propagandists led to the inauguration of the Cabinet’s Secret Service Committee in February 1919 and to the formation of the Home Office’s Directorate of Intelligence, which was charged with combating domestic sedition. The Directorate’s chief Sir Basil Thomson (hitherto head of Special Branch) reported direct to the Cabinet. His summaries of opinion and sentiment from across the country – intelligence from human sources (later called HUMINT) – were a piecemeal version of the Cheka’s surveillance of opinion. In time his reports were recognized by their recipients as opinionated, subjective and contradictory. His animosity towards workers, foreigners, theoreticians, voters and those elected leaders who had the temerity to disagree with him led to increasing mistrust of his product. Suspicions that he had made disruptive, unauthorized leaks of foreign signals and communications (since known as SIGINT) prompted his dismissal in 1921. As a reaction to Thomson’s biased HUMINT, Cabinet ministers and senior officials preferred SIGINT because it seemed neutral and enabled them, if they chose, to assess it themselves without tendentious interpretations urged on them by forceful outside advisers.

Good intelligence officers remind their customers that they cannot give iron-clad guarantees about the future, although they can make informed predictions. This wariness does not make them beloved by politicians in search of certainties or by officials who want to limit the risk of mistakes. In the 1920s particularly, when Westminster politicians and Whitehall officials were still inexperienced in the techniques and benefits of intelligence-collection, SIS and MI5 were not cherished. There was more concern about subversion than about espionage. It seemed preferable to pay for police to control social disorder than to fund counter-intelligence work by MI5 or SIS. The Armistice brought slashing cuts to intelligence agencies and soaring expenditure on policing. The Secret Service Vote (money voted by parliament for the purchase of secret information in the British Isles and abroad to thwart the machinations of enemies of the nation) fell from £1,150,000 in 1918 to £400,000 in 1919 and £300,000 in 1921. It sank to £180,000 a year from 1925 to 1929. SIS expenditure fell from £766,247 in 1918 to £205,200 in 1919. It lost fifty-eight staff in the first quarter of 1919, although its Chief Sir Mansfield Cumming claimed that its commitments had increased by 300 per cent. Cumming volunteered in 1921 to reduce SIS expenditure in the coming year from £125,000 to £87,500. SIS operated from a relatively cheap house at 1 Melbury Road, on the edge of Holland Park in Kensington, during 1919–25, but thereafter found the means to occupy larger and more costly offices in Broadway, near St James’s Park and a few minutes’ walk from Whitehall and Westminster.

MI5’s budget was cut from £100,000 in the last year of the war to £35,000 in the first year of peace: it was £22,183 in 1921. These budgetary cuts were made despite the unrelenting efforts of the Bolshevik regime throughout the 1920s to spread world communist revolution, with propaganda, subversion and espionage deployed to weaken the British Empire and sundry groups and individuals enlisted to give overt or covert help in damaging British imperial capitalism. As an economy measure MI5 moved in 1919 from its offices near Haymarket, close to Whitehall and Westminster, to smaller, cheaper premises at 73–75 Queen’s Gate, Kensington, where it remained until shifting in 1929 to Oliver House at 35 Cromwell Road, Kensington. In contrast to the reduced spending on domestic counter-espionage and security, police outlay in England and Wales rose from £106,521 in 1917 to £1,159,168 in 1918, to £5,511,943 in 1919 and to £6,679,209 in 1921. Thereafter, it edged upwards to £7,239,694 in 1929.

The need to impress politicians in order to protect or expand budgets contributes to a perennial failing of intelligence services. ‘What we want’, Desmond Morton of SIS instructed the head of station in Warsaw in 1920, ‘is absolutely inside information or none at all … if you start with the idea that nothing that ever appears in a newspaper is of the least value, I am sure everything will be all right.’ This was not invariably sound procedure. ‘S.I.S. values information in proportion to its secrecy, not its accuracy,’ Stuart Hampshire was recorded as telling his wartime intelligence chief Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1943. ‘They would attach more value, he said, to a scrap of third-rate and tendentious misinformation smuggled out of Sofia in the fly-buttons of a vagabond Rumanian pimp than to any intelligence deduced from a prudent reading of the foreign press.’ The eighth of the ten commandments of intelligence propounded by the SIS veteran Brian Stewart made the same point more prosaically: ‘secret and official sources have no monopoly of the truth. Open, readily accessible sources are also important.’ This was a lesson that the Intelligence Division had first taught in the 1870s.¹⁰

With depleted budgets, the activities of both MI5 and SIS were kept peripheral to central government, although anxieties about Bolshevism were rampant throughout the 1920s. ‘We naturally ascribe all of our ills to this horrible phantom,’ wrote the industrialist-aristocrat and former Cabinet minister Lord Crawford in 1927, ‘always lurking in the background, and all the more alarming because it is tireless and unseen.’ Diplomatic relations between London and Moscow were likened by Vansittart in 1934 to that of card-players whose opponents kept a fifth ace up their sleeves and a Thompson sub-machine gun under the table. Yet there was no anti-communist section operated by SIS in 1939.¹¹

Special Branch officers were often prejudiced, but unlike J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation they had no programme to harass, entrap and incriminate. State underfunding of the intelligence agencies during the 1920s nudged them into closer reliance on right-wing individuals and organizations than was desirable. Instead of picking and paying trustworthy agents, they had to use (although they dared not rely on) dubious informants. There were unsavoury, self-dramatizing confidence-tricksters making quick improvisations on their way to the main chance. One example is a young public schoolboy named James McGuirk Hughes. In 1923 he posed as ‘a Red’, and claimed membership of the CPGB so as to penetrate Liverpool trade unionism and remit secret reports to the super-patriotic British Empire Union. He was part of a gang associated with the future MI5 agent-runner Maxwell Knight which repeatedly burgled and wrecked the Glasgow offices of the CPGB. Hughes supplied ‘oddments of information’ to MI5, which mistrusted him as a boastful and indiscreet ‘windbag’. When in 1926 he failed to get on to the payroll of MI5 or the Daily Mail, he convinced Sir Vincent Caillard, financial comptroller of the armaments company Vickers and former officer in the old Intelligence Division, that he could supply dirt on workers’ militancy. Caillard gave him a retainer of £750 a year, with an additional £750 to pay informants (which Hughes probably pocketed).¹²

Another unreliable informant was George McMahon @ Jerome Bannigan, who supplied Special Branch and MI5 with bogus information about gun-running to Ireland and about a communist plot to disrupt the Trooping of the Colour. He was arrested in 1936 after hurling a loaded revolver at King Edward VIII in St James’s Park as part, so he claimed, of a Nazi conspiracy. At McMahon’s trial Sir Donald Somervell, the Attorney General, was determined to suppress mention in court of either Moscow or Berlin and to stop indiscretions about McMahon’s earlier use as an informant: ‘We did not particularly want the names of our emissaries whom he had seen to come out, or the previous history,’ Somervell noted.¹³

The security services understood – as Special Branch seldom did – the necessity of evaluating the trustworthiness of informants. Material from a paid informant named Kenneth Stott @ MARMION began to be supplied, through a trusted intermediary, to Desmond Morton of SIS in 1922. Stott informed on militant Scottish trade unionism, secret German industrial activities, the Brotherhood of Russian Truth, German secret agents and the French intelligence service. ‘He is badly educated, his personal conceit is enormous and his methods are unscrupulous and peculiar,’ Morton was warned in 1923. ‘While Stott’s knowledge of the Labour movement in this country is undoubtedly very extensive … his knowledge of foreign espionage methods seems to be sketchy.’ When he named suspects he allowed colourful ‘imagination and animus to have full play’. He was accordingly dropped by SIS in 1923; but, like Hughes, he continued to be paid by a credulous rich man, Sir George Makgill, for titbits on trade union conspiracies until 1926.¹⁴

Most British military attachés were intelligent in their collection and sifting of material. Charles Bridge, the cavalry officer who was Military Attaché at Warsaw and Prague until 1928, when he went to run the foreign intelligence operations of the Vickers armaments company, spoke French, German and Italian, with a smattering of central European languages. When he left Vickers in 1934, it was to become inaugural secretary general of the British Council, in which post he was able to place informants and cultivate ‘Friends’ across Europe. Bridge, it was said, had ‘the energy and exactitude of a first-rate staff officer, the courtesy and knowledge of the world expected of a military attaché, and … an indefinable mixture of devilry and charm’.¹⁵

Equally impressive was James (‘Jimmy’) Marshall-Cornwall, the Military Attaché at Berlin in 1928–32, who spoke French, German, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Turkish, modern Greek, Chinese and colloquial Arabic. Although he knew how to open sealed envelopes without detection and how to tap telephone and telegraph lines, as Military Attaché he had no need of ancillary skills such as burgling safes, forging passports and concocting invisible ink. His reports never failed to interest. ‘The National-Socialist Movement is a real danger, and far more of a menace to the present constitution than is Communism,’ he reported from Berlin to the Foreign Office as early as 1930. ‘The trouble about the “Brown Shirts” is that their principles and theories are entirely destructive. They wish to destroy the present fabric of the State, but have no constructive programme with which to replace it, except a sort of mad-dog dictatorship.’ The Nazis were, Marshall-Cornwall advised, ‘far more akin to Bolshevism than to Fascism’. As to Hitler, ‘He is a marvellous orator, and possesses an extraordinary gift for hypnotizing his audience … Even though his policy is a negative one, his personal magnetism is such as to win over quite reasonable people to his standard, and it is this which constitutes the chief danger of the movement.’ Subsequently Marshall-Cornwall wrote a thoughtful treatise on geography and disarmament. In 1943 he was transferred from a post in the Special Operations Executive to be Assistant Chief of SIS.¹⁶

The Admiralty’s grasp of naval intelligence was weaker than the War Office’s hold on military intelligence, perhaps for lack of the sound traditions derived from the old Intelligence Division and possibly for lack of brainpower. ‘All simple-minded, religious, semi-literate, and amazingly unadaptable’, concluded Harold Laski of the London School of Economics after lunching at the Admiralty in 1929. ‘No doubt they are technically superb,’ he conceded, ‘but they never see beyond their noses.’¹⁷

Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, who had been acting Consul General in Moscow when it became the Soviet Union’s capital in 1918 and survived a month’s imprisonment in the Lubianka, exchanged confidences during the 1930s with ‘Commander Fletcher … of the Secret Service’. Reginald (‘Rex’) Fletcher had become a Royal Navy cadet in 1899 aged fourteen. After wartime service on destroyers in the Dardanelles, he became post-war head of the Near East section of the Naval Intelligence Division. He sat as Liberal MP for Basingstoke in 1923–4, became an SIS officer supervising overseas operations, joined the Labour party in 1929 and was elected as Labour MP for a Midlands mining constituency in 1935. During the 1930s he worked at SIS headquarters in Broadway during the morning before crossing Westminster to the House of Commons in the afternoon. Fletcher and Bruce Lockhart agreed in their response when, in 1936, Admiralty intelligence became excited by obtaining ‘absolute proof’ of a secret treaty between Italy, Germany and Franco whereby Italy was to receive the Balearics and Ceuta and Germany the Canary Islands in return for helping the Nationalists in the Spanish civil war. ‘No intelligence reports can be taken at more than twenty per cent of truth,’ commented Bruce Lockhart, when the story reached him. ‘Secret treaties, etc., are the kind of thing intelligence officers keep supplying all the year round.’ Fletcher of SIS told him, ‘Admiralty Intelligence is particularly bad, no grey matter in it.’ Rear Admiral Sir James Troup, Director of Naval Intelligence, ‘however good he may be as a sailor, is an absolute child about intelligence’. In 1938, using SIS sources while explicitly denying that he had access to any intelligence sources, Fletcher contributed an essay on European air power (containing strictures on the Air Ministry) to a rearmament survey entitled The Air Defence of Britain. The savagery of his Commons speech in January 1939 attacking Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement was remarkable as coming from an SIS man. The Foreign Office’s liaison with SIS Patrick Reilly perhaps had Fletcher (afterwards Lord Winster) in mind when he later wrote of ‘that dangerous type often found in Naval Intelligence, the Commander passed over for promotion, bitter because he thinks, probably rightly, that he is cleverer than his contemporaries who have been promoted’.¹⁸

Starting in 1919 SIS officers were installed in British embassies and legations under the guise of passport control officers (PCOs). Many heads of diplomatic missions mistrusted the PCOs’ activities being run under cover from their buildings. A few PCOs were gung-ho buffoons, several were spivs, but others were discreet and conscientious. Ambassadors and heads of legations however preferred formal sources of official information, received unofficial confidences which they could evaluate for themselves and disliked material of obscure and untested origins which might mislead when transmitted to London. They further feared that sub rosa activities by PCOs might cause diplomatic incidents or compromise the mission. This attitude was so pronounced that in 1921 the Foreign Office (codenamed ZP inside SIS) sent a circular to all its embassies and legations in Europe which outlined its attitude to espionage during the 1920s. ‘Today the old type of Secret Service has disappeared, and melodrama has given place to a more sober style of enquiry from which the diplomat need no longer, as he was very properly required to do before, withdraw the hem of his garment,’ wrote the PUS, Sir Eyre Crowe. ‘It is largely concerned with subterranean revolutionary movements and individuals, and instead of spying on the military defences of individual countries, devotes itself principally to detecting tendencies subversive of the established order of things, irrespective of whether these are directed against the United Kingdom or are International in character.’ This circular did little to reduce the hostility of traditional diplomats to spies operating in their territories. As one example, Sir Tudor Vaughan, the British Minister to Latvia, was outraged by the breach of propriety and possible complications when the files of the SIS station in Riga were moved for safety to the legation after the ARCOS raid in 1927.¹⁹

In addition to the PCOs, Admiral Sir Hugh (‘Quex’) Sinclair, Chief of SIS in 1923–39, financed the parallel Z Organization – a network of businessmen based overseas, acting as informants and collecting Friends who could amplify their reports. Claude Dansey, the PCO at Rome, left his post in 1936 with the cover story that he had been caught embezzling SIS funds. He subsequently opened an import-export business based at Bush House in the Strand, from which he ran the Z Organization. Dansey was a self-mystifying and sinister man: ‘I’m sure he’s very clever & very subtle, but I have no proof of it because I can’t hear 10% of what he says’, wrote Sir Alexander Cadogan, PUS of the Foreign Office, at the time of Dansey’s appointment as wartime Vice Chief of SIS.²⁰

The successes of the Admiralty’s wartime code-breakers, known as ‘Room 40’, are celebrated. Their greatest SIGINT coup came in 1917 with the interception of the Zimmerman telegram, in which the German Foreign Minister promised to award three southern USA states to Mexico if it joined the Germans and declared war on the USA. The War Office’s MI1B did equally important work. The two sections, which veered between cooperation and rivalry between the wars, were merged into one agency, the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), in 1919. It was swiftly recognized as the most secretive and effective British intelligence agency. The Russian section of GC&CS was led in the 1920s by a refugee from the 1917 revolution, Ernst Fetterlein, who had decrypted British diplomatic material in the tsarist cabinet noir before decrypting Bolshevik diplomatic messages for the British. For most of the inter-war period the Chief of SIS, Admiral Sinclair, was also Director of GC&CS. GC&CS had no more immunity from histrionic fantasists craving attention than other security services. One Cambridge mathematician and GC&CS officer, who committed several indiscretions in 1938–40, had ‘a kind of secret service kink’, Guy Liddell noted. ‘He likes to imagine himself as a cloak-and-dagger man, and is given to relating hair-raising stories about himself which have absolutely no foundation in fact.’ He also drank Chartreuse by the bottle.²¹

Lord Curzon of Kedleston, Foreign Secretary in 1919–24, was as peremptory and touchy as minor royalty, but unfortunately without their laziness. During 1920 he became wrathful about the deciphered wireless messages exchanged between Moscow and the Soviet trade delegation in London. ‘That swine Lloyd George has no scruples or shame in the way he deceives,’ Lenin declared in one intercepted message. ‘Don’t believe a word he says, but gull him three times as much.’ Lloyd George was nonchalant about the insults; but eight messages from Lev Kamenev, the head of the Moscow communist party (who was in London for the trade negotiations), referring to the CPGB and to Moscow’s secret subsidy of the Daily Herald, inflamed Curzon and other extreme anti-Bolsheviks in the Cabinet. They insisted on publication of these incriminating messages: a rash, flamboyant gesture which betrayed to Moscow that its codes had been broken. Alastair Denniston, head of GC&CS, blamed the short-term Kamenev publicity coup for the plummeting output of deciphered Soviet radio traffic after 1920. Thereafter, although GC&CS intercepted much secondary material on Asia and Bolshevik subversion in the British Empire, it was weak on central Europe. In addition to Curzon’s blunder, it seems likely that White Russians, who had been captured by Bolshevik forces in Crimea and had been indiscreetly told by their English contacts of GC&CS’s cryptographic abilities, disclosed that the English could understand most secret Bolshevist signals.²²

Further political indiscretions jeopardized GC&CS’s good work in decoding intercepted signals traffic: in 1922 more Soviet decrypts were published by the London government; on 2 May 1923 Curzon sent a formal protest about Bolshevik subversion in Britain to the Soviets. This so-called Curzon Note was the first protest by one government to another that acknowledged that it was based on the intercepted radio traffic of the recipient nation. There were further calamitous revelations about signals interception at the time of the police raid in 1927 on the London offices of the All Russian Co-operative Society (ARCOS) searching for purloined secret official documents. Cabinet ministers quoted from Soviet diplomatic dispatches that had been sent from London to Moscow in code. The Soviet Union dropped its encryption procedure and introduced the more secure one-time pad method.

The Foreign Office replaced the Admiralty in 1922 in its supervision of GC&CS. There was no one of sufficient seniority there to halt the misjudged disclosures of 1922–3 and 1927. The three old-guard diplomatists who served as PUS at the apex of the Office hierarchy during the 1920s, Sir Eyre Crowe, Sir William Tyrrell and Sir Ronald Lindsay, regarded intelligence as a subordinate aspect of diplomacy. They doubtless agreed with the Berlin Ambassador, Lord D’Abernon, that ‘the Secret Service’ product was ‘in a large majority of instances of no political value, based mainly upon scandal and tittle-tattle, and prepared apparently with no discrimination as to what is really important’. By contrast, the rising younger men of the 1920s understood the value and necessity of secret intelligence. Vansittart, who replaced Lindsay in 1930, and Cadogan, who succeeded him, were the first PUS to value this new ingredient in statecraft. This was held against them by officials and politicians who preferred to work by their own settled assumptions and hunches. ‘No one questions Van’s patriotism,’ wrote the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey, in explanation of his enforced retirement in 1938, ‘but he is apt to get rather jumpy. He pays too much attention to the press of all countries and to S.I.S. information – useful pointers in both cases, but bad guides.’²³

The Flapper Vote

One momentous fact is always overlooked: for MI5’s first two decades Britain was not yet a full parliamentary democracy. Property-owning qualifications restricted the franchise, and all women were excluded from parliamentary elections. In 1910, at the first general election after the formation of the security services, the electorate numbered 5.8 million for England, 357,566 for Wales, 785,208 for Scotland, 698,787 for Ireland, making a total of 7.6 million. The combined population of England, Scotland and Wales was about 40 million (this includes children). During the war of 1914–18, Britain was depicted as the world’s leading parliamentary democracy, although only about 40 per cent of its troops had the vote, whereas universal male suffrage had prevailed in Germany since 1871. In Britain in 1918 the franchise was extended to all men over the age of twenty-one and to women aged over thirty. The English electorate accordingly rose to just over 16 million, the Welsh to 1.2 million, the Scottish to 2.2 million and the Irish to 1.9 million – a total of 21.3 million. There was subsequent discussion of equalizing the franchise for both sexes at twenty-five, but in 1927 ‘the Cabinet went mad’, as one of its members, Lord Birkenhead, explained, and authorized the extension of the vote to women above the age of twenty-one – ‘a change so dangerous and so revolutionary’ that Churchill fought it. This was called the Flapper Vote.²⁴

The general election of 1929 was the first in which the British parliamentary franchise was extended to all men and women aged over twenty-one, except for prisoners, peers and lunatics. For the first time women comprised the majority of the electorate: 52.7 per cent were female and 47.3 per cent were male (15.2 million women and 13.7 million men). There had been an almost threefold increase in the electorate in under twenty years. Conservative activists believed that the Baldwin government’s defeat by Labour was made inevitable by the extended franchise. Other conservative thinkers saw this as part of a wider dégringolade. ‘The two most important happenings in my lifetime’, said Hensley Henson, Bishop of Durham, ‘are the revolt of women against their natural and traditional subordination, and the repudiation of Christianity lock, stock and barrel in Soviet Russia. The one destroys the family, and the other banishes God.’²⁵

‘The Flapper Vote … had to come, but came too soon,’ Vansittart judged. After the election of 1929, ‘electoral power passed from the thoughtful – pessimists said the educated – in a crucial decade, which first popularized the impracticable’. His deputy Sir Victor Wellesley was likewise convinced that the instability of British foreign policy during the 1930s was ‘largely due’ to the recent expansion of the electorate to include women. ‘The pressure of an uninstructed public opinion’ after the Italian invasion of Abyssinia resulted in policy swerves and a fatal diplomatic crash which forced the resignation of the Foreign Secretary. ‘We like to think of democracy’, wrote Wellesley, ‘as the best guarantee against war. The events of 1935 prove that it can be as dangerous as a war-minded autocracy.’ Wellesley, writing from the perspective of 1944, made a further point: universal adult suffrage was obtained just at the moment when ‘the authority and prestige of parliaments’ were declining in democratic countries; legislatures were ‘steadily losing their sovereign power’. The volume and intricacy of public business required such specialization that parliaments were slackening control of the administrative machinery: real power had shifted to highly capitalized international companies, argued Wellesley, who founded the Foreign Office’s Economic Relations section in 1933. Britain’s epoch of full democracy began just as the deification of the nation state was occurring elsewhere in Europe: Italy had its Duce, Germany its Führer, Spain its Caudillo and Hungary its Serene Regent; but the most enduring absolutism was in Soviet Russia, where the dictatorship of the proletariat became the dictatorship of Generalissimo Stalin.²⁶

One fact about the departments of state was so enormous, omnipotent and matchless that it is seldom mentioned. Whitehall was overwhelmingly masculine. The departmental culture was a body of assumptions, judgements, tastes and habits that, even when they underwent adaptation and reformulation, remained irrefragably male. No woman exerted any influence within any ministry. The security services were exceptional in employing women – Jane Sissmore, Ann Glass and others – in positions that mattered. Women were required to resign from the civil service if they married: their first thoughts must henceforth be for their husbands and their homes, so the Home Civil Service judged, and they should not be taking a salary into a household which already had a male breadwinner. The first marriage waiver was given to a principal at the Ministry of Labour in 1938. A year or so later Jane Sissmore, afterwards Jane Archer, became an outstanding exception to this rule. The former Oxford communist Jenifer Hart at the Home Office obtained a marriage waiver in 1941 with the support of her boss, Sir Alexander Maxwell, who advised her to announce in The Times that she wished to be regarded as married although she was barred by the civil service from being so. (She also endured sexual advances in the office from Sir Frank Newsam, who succeeded Maxwell as PUS in 1948.) Under wartime conditions most other women were required to resign on marriage, and were then re-employed as temporary civil servants for the duration of the war.

The married-women ban was formally lifted from the Home Civil Service in 1946, although it endured unofficially for many years longer. In the 1960s officials of the Civil Service Commission justified the bar in the Diplomatic Service on married women as necessary to clear the way for men to get promotion. The interdiction on married women continued in the Service until 1973. There were three women Cabinet ministers between 1919 and 1964 with a combined length of service of seven years. The first female PUS was installed at the suitably domestic Ministry of Housing in 1955. Although the bicameral Westminster legislature was idealized as ‘The Mother of Parliaments’, women were excluded from membership of its upper chamber, the House of Lords, until 1958. Such were the sacrifices expected of mothers that all the early life peeresses were childless. Hereditary women peers, unlike their male counterparts, were debarred from the Lords until 1963. The first woman judge was appointed in 1962, the first woman ambassador in 1976 and the first married woman ambassador in 1987; the first female chief of a security agency was Stella Rimington of MI5 in 1992; the Whitehall mandarins’ preferred club, the Athenaeum, admitted its first women members in 2002. Women were excluded from full membership of Cambridge University until 1948: the first all-male colleges there began admitting female undergraduates in the 1970s.

These facts were more important to departmental temper, to office procedures and to relations between colleagues than the fluid or ductile gradations of class. It is compelling to note that critiques of the Whitehall ministries – starting in earnest after 1951, when Burgess and Maclean absconded from the Foreign Office – as class-bound in their recruitment, sectional and exclusive in their operations, inimical to modern technological progress, averse to private enterprise were all written by men. The position of women in government employment was seldom raised before a woman prime minister took office in 1979. Even then, it was treated as an issue for women writers, whose criticisms were discounted, sometimes with contempt, as a minority issue – despite Disraeli’s axiom that the history of success is the history of minorities. The hegemony of class explanations belonged to a phase of thinking that should be long gone. As this book will show, gender exclusivity – not class exclusivity – helped men in their espionage for Soviet Russia. Whitehall’s response to the discovery of such espionage was fashioned by male affinities, not class connivance.

The ideal of fraternity among men was fundamental to the way that everything worked. Collin Brooks, editor of the Sunday Dispatch, was among thirty journalists invited to the Treasury for a briefing on gold-conversion policy in 1932. ‘We had tea and plum-cake in the Chancellor’s room, talking very informally over pipes,’ Brooks recorded. ‘It was an interesting confidential pow-wow, and a beautiful example of the informality of British government.’ This relaxed manliness in action required gender exclusivity: women subordinates may have prepared the tea and plum-cake, but they were not present to inhibit the men pulling on their pipes.²⁷

Manliness can be defined in many ways: virility, fortitude, enterprise, aggression, logical powers, compassion, gullibility, boorishness, sentimentality, lumbering thoughts. ‘They can laugh at anything – including themselves,’ Vansittart said of his male compatriots. ‘They boast of their smallest possession, common sense, and win victories for which no foresight qualified them.’ Among colleagues, in offices and committees, nicknames proliferated as a way of bringing cheerful cohesion: ‘Waterbeast’, ‘Snatch’, ‘Moly’ and the rest. (Unaffectionate nicknames, such as ‘Sir Icicle’ for Alexander Cadogan, were not used openly.) Manly good humour was prized. ‘I doubt if he has a very powerful head,’ the Solicitor General, Sir Donald Somervell, said of the Home Secretary, Sir John Gilmour, in 1934; but ‘he has a very robust & humorous outlook … & knows how to deal with men’. This seemed preferable to the volatility of brilliance.²⁸

Masculine hardness was especially valued by Conservative leaders: their admiration for fascists and Nazis was expressed in gendered terms. Speaking of ‘national glories’ to the Anti-Socialist Union in 1933, Churchill thundered: ‘I think of Germany, with its splendid, clear-eyed youths marching forward on all the roads of the Reich, singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into an army; eagerly seeking the most terrible weapons of war; burning to suffer and die for their Fatherland.’ He praised, too, the Italian hard man Mussolini for inspiring his fascists with their ‘stern sense of national duty’. This was men’s stuff.²⁹

Security Service staffing

What of the officers and men who worked for MI5? Edwin Woodhall joined the Metropolitan Police at the age of twenty in 1906. Before the war he worked for the Special Branch squad protecting Cabinet ministers from suffragette aggression and for MI5. Later he was personal protection officer to the Prince of Wales in France. He described the auxiliary officers with whom he served in wartime counter-espionage as drawn from ‘the best class of educated British manhood’ procurable in wartime: ‘stockbrokers, partners of big business houses, civil, mechanical, and electrical engineers, artists, journalists, surveyors, accountants, men of travel – men of good family, men of the world. In fact, the finest types.’³⁰

Typical of wartime MI5 officers was William Hinchley Cooke, who had been born in Germany to an English father and German mother. He attended school in Dresden and university in Leipzig, spoke German with a Hamburg accent and was fluent in French and Dutch. Like Woodhall he spent much of the war in counter-espionage on the Western Front. After his release from full-time government service, he had an attachment with the Birmingham city police; studied law at Gray’s Inn, but was never called to the bar; and then joined the staff of the armaments company Vickers, which gave him cover for travelling in Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Yugoslavia.

Vernon Kell sought the finest types for MI5: he liked men to be linguists, to enjoy outdoor life, to be shrewd readers of character, to be monuments of solid sense. In 1912 he recruited Reginald (‘Duck’) Drake, an army officer who spoke excellent French and passable German and Dutch, and whose listed recreations included hunting, shooting, beagling, skiing, golf, cricket, hockey, polo, otter-hunting, swimming, tennis and squash. Another recruit of 1912, Eric (‘Holy Willy’) Holt-Wilson, was an Old Harrovian, an instructor in military engineering at Woolwich Military Academy, a champion revolver shot and a keen skier. Holt-Wilson was seconded to the Inter-Allied Intelligence Bureau in Paris in 1915, and headed the Rhineland police commission after the Armistice. MI5’s first graduate recruit, in 1914, Maldwyn (‘Muldoon’) Haldane, studied at Jesus College, Cambridge and the University of Göttingen, spoke German, French and Hindustani, and gave his recreations as trout-fishing, rowing, rugby, walking, poultry-farming, gardening, history, ethnology, palaeontology and biology.³¹

Haldane’s recruitment belies the story that Dick White, who had read history at Christ Church, Oxford, was the earliest graduate to join the Security Service in 1936. Criticisms that Kell recruited from a narrow social group are similarly unfair. His budget for salaries was tight, and became more constricted by the funding cuts of the 1920s. Few men could live on the sums offered unless they had other income: White, then a young bachelor schoolmaster, rejected the first approach to him because he was offered the puny sum of £350 a year (albeit in cash, and tax-free). It was pragmatic of Kell, after the European war, to recruit men who were in receipt of army, navy or Indian police pensions. They had not only shown their trustworthiness in public service, but could afford to accept low salaries, which did not divert too much of the budget into personnel. MI5 got the only officers that it could afford. The retired Indian police officers have been disparaged as ‘burnt out by the sun and the gin’, and their colleagues as ‘washed-up colonial administrators’ and officials in ‘the twilight of their careers’. Such denigration is partisan. No doubt they were conventional-minded and responsive to discipline, or persevering to a fault, but they took pride in trying to do a good job. There is little evidence for the reiterative assumption that they were obtuse or inflexibly prejudiced (which is perhaps to mistake them for Special Branch). On the contrary, MI5 looked for multiple meanings, burrowed beneath superficial statements, used intuition in their relentless paperwork and knew the place in counter-intelligence work of paradox. They were never lazy or corrupt. Kell assembled an efficient body of men who worked well together on meagre budgets. White, who became head of MI5 a dozen years after Kell’s retirement, was well placed to appraise him. ‘Kell’, he judged, ‘was a shrewd old bugger.’³²

The pre-eminent example of an MI5 officer bolstered by income from an Indian police pension, Oswald (‘Jasper’) Harker, was recruited by Kell in 1920. Born in 1886, Harker was the son of a professor at the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester, and had been invalided home from the deputy police commissionership in Bombay in 1919. He was a hard, astute, dutiful, prudent man, who headed B Branch (or Division), which ran investigations and inquiries with a staff of six officers and a three-man Observation section charged with shadowing suspects and pursuing inquiries. When the ailing Kell was dismissed in 1940, Harker, who was by then his deputy, had the sense to recognize that he was not the best man to succeed as Director, but took charge until a stronger leader was found. Harker’s appointment in 1920, like White’s in 1936, occurred years before security vetting of new staff was considered necessary. Vetting was not introduced until the 1940s: initially, there was negative vetting (background checks on potential new employees) and then, with reluctance, positive vetting. Checking the backgrounds, affiliations, personal habits and character of all civil servants with access to confidential material (which is what is meant by positive vetting) is a laborious, time-consuming, costly procedure, which diverted over-stretched personnel from their traditional priorities. There were neither security men vigilant at the entrances to MI5 offices nor security passes for its staff.

Intelligence officers in both Moscow and London understood the melodramatic stupidity of the officers of the Austrian General Staff after they proved in 1913 that Colonel Alfred Redl, the head of their Intelligence Bureau in Vienna, had been spying for tsarist Russia. They left him alone in a room with a pistol and waited for him to shoot himself. He took with him to his death any chance of identifying his accomplices, contacts, informants and tradecraft. Worst of all, the Austrians never learnt how many mobilization plans, armaments blueprints and transport schedules had been betrayed by him. Unlike these pre-war Vienna blunderers, MI5 practised patient watchfulness, psychological shrewdness and discreet understatement in preparing people to give them intelligence without exerting sanctions or threatening pain.

From 1925 onward MI5 preferred to identify traitors, establish understandings with them, draw information from them and amass knowledge of their procedures and contacts. It disliked the confrontation and finality, to say nothing of the uncontrollable public disclosures and reckless speculative half-truths in newspapers, which arose from criminal trials. This was not a matter of class loyalties and corrupt cover-ups, as has been suggested with the Cambridge spies, but a technique of accumulating, developing and sifting intelligence rather than introducing unnecessary crudity and spoiling sources. None of the Englishmen who spied in Britain for communist Russia was executed. In several trials – Glading in 1938, Nunn May in 1946, Marshall in 1952, Vassall in 1962 and doubtless others – prosecuting and defence counsel settled in advance what evidence was to be aired in court and how it was to be interpreted. The public disclosures in such trials often bore scant resemblance to the reality of what had happened.

In many cases public trials were avoided. The two Special Branch officers, Ginhoven and Jane, who were discovered in 1929 to be supplying secret material to Moscow were dismissed from the force after a disciplinary hearing in camera, but kept out of court. In consequence of this debacle, Special Branch responsibilities for monitoring and countering domestic communist subversion were transferred in 1931 to MI5, which was thereafter known as the Security Service. SIS reaffirmed in 1931 that it would not operate within 3 miles of British territory, and that all such territory across the globe came under the ambit of the Security Service. The new service was invested with enhanced status within Whitehall as an inter-departmental intelligence service providing advisory material to the Home, Foreign and Colonial offices, the Admiralty, the War Office, the Air Ministry, the Committee of Imperial Defence, the Attorney General, the Director of Public Prosecutions, chief constables in the United Kingdom and imperial police authorities.

In 1929 MI5 had only thirteen officers, including Kell, Holt-Wilson and Harker. Its operations were divided between A Branch (administration, personnel, records and protective security) and B Branch (investigations and inquiries). The transfer of the SS1 section from Special Branch into MI5 in 1931 brought two notable officers into MI5, Hugh Miller and Guy Liddell. Miller had been a pre-war lecturer at the universities of Grenoble, Dijon, the Sorbonne and Cairo, and had joined SS1 in 1920. When he died after a fall in 1934, his cryptic obituary in The Times called him ‘a man of high intellectual interests’ who had since the war ‘devoted himself to sociological research applied to the domain of politics’ – a striking euphemism for defeating subversion. ‘The services he rendered to his country, though anonymous, were of great value.’ Miller was admired by his colleagues as a connoisseur of Japanese prints rather as Liddell was respected by them as an accomplished cellist.³³

‘When I joined MI5 in 1936 it was Guy Liddell who persuaded me to do so,’ Dick White recalled over forty years later. ‘He was the only civilising influence in the place at that time & I think this was felt by all the able men & women who joined MI5 [after 1939] for their war service.’ Liddell had ‘infinite diplomatic skill’, his Security Service colleague John Masterman judged. ‘At first meeting one’s heart warmed to him, for he was a cultured man, primed with humour.’ His years in Special Branch had made Liddell contemptuous of policemen: the Metropolitan force, as he saw first hand, was saturated by corruption as well as bungling. Somerset Maugham lunched with him in 1940: ‘a plump man with grey hair and a grey moon face, in rather shabby grey clothes. He had an ingratiating way with him, a pleasant laugh and a soft voice.’ If one had found Liddell standing in a doorway, apparently sheltering from the weather, one would mistake him, said Maugham, for ‘a motor salesman perhaps, or a retired tea planter’.³⁴

All the European powers recognized that their safety required intelligence systems; but the traditions, assumptions and values of the ruling cadres in different capitals diverged. The variations between Bolshevik Russia, Weimar Germany, Nazi Germany and the Third Republic in France – to take obvious examples – affected every particle of the espionage and counter-espionage operations of those countries. William Phillips, the head of MI5’s A Branch, took over the files of Special Branch’s SS1 section in 1931. It seemed wrong to him that Scotland Yard had compiled files on atheists, Scottish nationalists, conscientious objectors and what he called ‘Hot Air Merchants’. The spying by the Bolshevik and Nazi regimes on their citizens, and the terrifying system of vengeful denunciations and violence, enormities that were emulated in parts of Vichy France, had more systematized ferocity than the crass incarceration and maltreatment of ‘enemy aliens’ in 1939–40 or the racist killings and colonial torture that were perpetrated by soldiers and officials in the British Empire.³⁵

Office cultures and manly trust

What was the political and bureaucratic environment in which Kell’s service operated? What were the institutional mentalities that prevailed in inter-war Whitehall and Westminster? How was national security evaluated and managed before the Cold War?

Political assessments were often crude during the 1920s. ‘Everyone who is not a Tory is either a German, a Sinn Féiner or a Bolshevist,’ declared Admiral Sir Reginald (‘Blinker’) Hall, wartime Director of Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty, and post-war Conservative MP for Eastbourne. Winston Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924–9, denied any ‘fundamental difference between the “moderate” Labour men and the Communists: the managers and leaders of the Trades Union movement are now nearly all of them Socialists and the “moderate” Socialists are aiming, in effect, at the same thing as the Communists: the only difference is their method of procedure’. Churchill’s supreme fear was of outward moderation, which ‘by so-called constitutional methods soothes public opinion while stealthily and by smooth words it proceeds step by step to revolution’. This assessment was not wholly unfair, for Lenin in a pamphlet of 1920 had recommended that communists should urge the British proletariat to vote Labour: in doing so communists would support Labour leaders ‘in the same way that a rope supports a hanged man’. Churchill’s absolute incapacity for irony or scepticism – his avidity for intense and dramatic beliefs – made his judgement too belligerent. His compulsion to treat weekly incidents as if they were historic events made him equally unsound in his use of intelligence reports. As one of Churchill’s Cabinet colleagues confided to the Viceroy of India in 1927: ‘I don’t believe Winston takes any interest in public affairs unless they involve the possibility of bloodshed. Preferably he likes to kill foreigners, but if that cannot be done he would be satisfied with a few native Communists.’³⁶

After 1929, although the British Empire had been made by conquest and was ruled by force, its leaders were committed to rule by democratic consent. Conservative politicians of the period, in the words of a Cabinet minister in 1929, wanted to trust an ‘electorate trained by the War and by education’ to work together without class antagonism. After 1929, British leaders began an experiment in the art of parliamentary rule. They attempted to solve, as the art historian and administrative panjandrum Kenneth Clark said in a different context, ‘one of the chief problems of democracy: how to combine a maximum of freedom with an ultimate direction’. Their purposes were at odds with communists such as J. D. Bernal, who wrote in Cambridge Left in 1933: ‘the betrayal and collapse of the General Strike combined with the pathetic impotence of the two Labour governments had already shown the hopelessness of political democracy’. Communists wanted to reduce liberty, limit parliamentary sovereignty and tighten party directives. The dictatorship of the proletariat was the aim. An MI5 summary of a bugged conversation at CPGB headquarters in 1951 reports James Klugmann, the party stalwart who animated Cambridge undergraduate communism, ‘holding forth about “The British Road” saying that … “we” could make Parliament – transforming or reforming it as “we” went – into an instrument to give legal sanction to the people, as they took the power into their own hands’.³⁷

Humour or lack of it was a leading point in appraising public servants. Thus Vansittart on ‘the Bull’, Lord Bertie of Thame, Ambassador in Paris: ‘Snobbish, sternly practical, resolutely prosaic, he knew no arabesques of humour or irony, but only hard straight lines’; Sir David Kelly, Ambassador in Moscow during the Cold War, on Vansittart: ‘his witty comments always imparted a cheerful and soothing note into our frenzied conveyor-belt of files boxes’; and the insider who wrote the enigmatic obituary in The Times of Hugh Miller of MI5: ‘Captain Miller’s marvellous knowledge of human nature … [and] his never-failing humour … established his undisputed authority in a select circle’. It was recognized that geniality might help in handling Stalinist officials. Alan Roger of MI5, recommending cooperation with the Russians in running a deception campaign from Tehran to Berlin in 1944, insisted that a measure of mutual trust could be won from Soviet officials ‘by persistent good humour, obvious frankness, personal contact and a readiness to be helpful in small things’. Jokes all but extenuated communist activism. Charles Moody was a dustman in Richmond, Surrey who was industrial organizer of the Thames Valley branch of the CPGB in the 1920s and took subversive literature to army barracks, went underground in the 1930s, and in the 1940s was used as an intermediary when the atomic scientist-spy Klaus Fuchs wished to make emergency contact with his Russian cut-out – a go-between who serves as an intermediary between the leader of a spy network and a source of material – or to defer a meeting. After 1950 he underwent several interviews with MI5’s prime interrogator without any incriminating admissions. ‘Mr MOODY continues to impress as being a very likeable man,’ declared an MI5 report of 1953, before praising his ‘quiet sense of humour’. It is hard to imagine US or Soviet counter-espionage investigators appreciating a suspect’s jokes.³⁸

Trust was an important civilizing notion in the 1920s and 1930s. Men subdued expression of their feelings if they could. ‘We possess one thing in common,’ Masterman had been told in adolescence, ‘the gorgeous … power of reticence, and it binds, if I may say so, tighter than speech.’ The initiators of personal conversations were distrusted by the English: the poet, painter and dandy Villiers David advised his godchildren in 1943, ‘Never speak first to anyone you really want to know.’ If men refrained from intimacies, they often talked without guard of impersonal matters. The inter-war years were a period of careless Cabinet talk. Speaking at a dinner of parliamentary correspondents in 1934, George Lansbury, then leader of the Labour party, ‘derided the superstition of Cabinet secrets – had, he felt sure, told many because he hadn’t realised that they were secrets’. Collin Brooks of the Sunday Dispatch described the Cabinet of 1935 as ‘a chatterbox Gvt’.³⁹

Senior ministers discussed at dinner parties confidential material which had been circulated to them, including Foreign Office telegrams and dispatches, without any glimmering that they were being culpably indiscreet. The position of Sir Eric Phipps as Ambassador in Hitler’s Berlin was weakened because Cabinet ministers were circulated with his dispatches about the Nazi leadership and recounted them for laughs at social gatherings. Above all there was Phipps’s famous ‘bison despatch’, in which he described a visit to Göring’s country estate:

The chief impression was that of the most pathetic naïveté of General Göring, who showed us his toys like a big, fat, spoilt child: his primeval woods, his bison and birds, his shooting-box and lake and bathing beach, his blond ‘private secretary’, his wife’s mausoleum and swans and sarsen stones, all mere toys to satisfy his varying moods … and then I remembered there were other toys, less innocent though winged, and these might some day be launched on their murderous mission in the same childlike spirit and with the same childlike glee.

After Phipps’s transfer to the Paris embassy, he was cautioned by Vansittart against candour about French politicians in telegrams that had a wide circulation among members of the government.⁴⁰

Embassies and legations, like the Office in London, were cooperative, hierarchical organizations in which mutual trust was indispensable. This was not a matter of class loyalty or old-school-tie fidelity, but an obvious point about raising the efficiency of its staff. Sir Owen O’Malley estimated that about one-third of his ambassadorial energy went into making his embassy work well. ‘It begins to lose power whenever one man gets discouraged or another too cocky or a third jealous … when wives quarrel it is hell.’ It was indispensable for an ambassador to be trusted by the government to which he was accredited. ‘One of the many illusions about diplomacy is that it consists in diddling the other fellow. Nothing could be further from the truth. It consists more than anything else in precision, honesty, and persuasion, which three things should hang together.’⁴¹

‘Democracy is not only a theory of government, but also a scale of moral values,’ the economic historian Sir Michael Postan insisted in a 1934 essay on Marx. As someone born in Bessarabia under tsarist despotism, who had escaped from the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1919, Postan valued parliamentary democracy as a flower of the European tradition of humanitarian individualism. ‘It accepts human personality and individual man as an end in themselves, the sole purpose and the only justification of a social system. It judges political actions by the good or evil they do to individuals, rather than by their effects on the collective super-individual entities of race, state, church and society.’ Postan countered the modish communists in his university who excused collective authoritarianism: ‘majority rule, representative institutions, government by consent and respect for opinions are merely broad applications of humanitarian ethics to problems of state government’. Social networks were central in Postan’s model society, where transactions were characterized by trust, reciprocity and the absence of avarice – but never led by the popular will. Maynard Keynes, Cambridge economist and Treasury official, thought on similar lines to Postan. ‘Civilisation’, he said during the looming European catastrophe of 1938, ‘was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and guilefully preserved.’⁴²

After the transformative crisis of 1914–18, and despite the widespread earlier qualms about Victorian imperialism, most of the administrative leaders who helped to govern inter-war Britain believed that they represented a civilizing force in the world: ‘all my life and all my strength’, as Eric Holt-Wilson declared with staunch sincerity of his work for MI5, ‘were given to the finest cause on this earth – the ennoblement of all mankind by the example of the British race’. There were self-seekers and time-servers, of course, but also efficient, modest men, who took pride in doing the best possible job that they could. Sir Alan Brooke, the most effective Chief of the Imperial General Staff in history and afterwards Lord Alanbrooke, wrote on New Year’s Day of 1944: ‘Heard on the 8 am wireless that I had been promoted to Field Marshal! It gave me a curious peaceful feeling that I had at last, and unexpectedly, succeeded in reaching the top rung of the ladder!! I certainly never set out to reach this position, nor did I ever hope to do so, even in my wildest moments. When I look back over my life no one could be more surprised than I am to find where I have got to!!’⁴³

Such men as Holt-Wilson and Brooke were convinced upholders of values which required the practice in their working lives of such personal virtues as pride in service, individual self-respect and group responsibility. Cynicism was thought a sign of mediocrity. It is easy to scoff that these beliefs covered hypocrisy, selfishness, bullying, prejudice and inefficiency; but many public servants upheld these beliefs, which were at the core of their self-identification and a vital motive in their work. They were rich in the social capital of group loyalty, and therefore rich in trust. Although the British Empire rested on force, and its diplomats exerted coercion, it was the pride of Whitehall that it worked by influence rather than power.

‘Power’, to quote Lord Beveridge, ‘means ability to give to other men orders enforced by sanctions, by punishment or by control of rewards; a man has power when he can mould events by an exercise of will; if power is to be used for the good, it must be guided by reason and accompanied by respect for other men.’ Beside the power of money, exerted by giving or withholding rewards, stood governmental power: ‘making of laws and enforcing them by sanctions, using the instrument of fear’. In contrast, Beveridge continued, ‘influence … means changing the actions of others by persuasion, means appeal to reason or to emotions other than fear or greed; the instruments of influence are words, spoken or written; if the influence is to be for good, it must rest on knowledge’. It was believed that the official integrity and impartiality of men of good influence would not be warped by personal preferences. When Burgess and Maclean disappeared from the Foreign Office in 1951, the former Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the Commons that all ministers trusted the neutrality of their officials, and felt sure ‘that the civil service has no part in political views’. His apparent implication was that it was irrelevant if the two missing diplomats – or any of their colleagues – were secret communists, because their partisanship outside the Office could not have tinged decision-making within the Office.⁴⁴

In 1940 the Home Defence (Security) Executive, newly constituted by Churchill’s War Cabinet to oversee the defence of the nation from fifth columnists and best known as the Security Executive (SE), recommended that a regulation be implemented making it an offence to subvert government authority. This was opposed by Sir Alexander Maxwell, the PUS at the Home Office, as ‘inconsistent with the historic notions of English liberty. Our tradition is that while orders issued by the duly constituted authority must be obeyed, every civilian is at liberty to show, if he can, that such orders are silly or mischievous and that the duly constituted authorities are composed of fools or rogues.’ Maxwell had a first-class degree in politics and ancient philosophy from Oxford, and was married to a Quaker physician: together they gave an annual party for the Home Office charwomen with their sons acting as waiters. He was humorous, gentle, unruffled and a model of upright neutrality who always remembered that Home Office decisions affected, not an undifferentiated mass of citizens, but individual lives, each of which had peculiar problems and potentialities. Maxwell respected, as few officials in his department have done since 1997, ‘historic notions of English liberty’. Activities which showed the authorities as contemptible were not necessarily subversive in Maxwell’s judgement. ‘They are only subversive if they are calculated to incite persons to disobey the law, or to change the government by unconstitutional means. This doctrine gives, of course, great and indeed dangerous liberty to persons who desire revolution … but the readiness to take this risk is the cardinal distinction between democracy and totalitarianism.’⁴⁵

A description of Algernon Hay, chief of the Foreign Office’s Communications Department during 1919–34, shows the Whitehall ideal personified. Hay mastered ‘the supreme art of making others obey him without knowing they were obedient’, recalled one of his subordinates. ‘He knew how to talk, not merely to those in his own station of life but to everyone, from a royal duke to a scullery maid. He never let anyone down or gave anyone away … true loyalty, such as his, needs qualities of the head as well as of the heart.’ Hay and his kind inculcated an esprit de corps that had admirable elements. What distinguished the Office in 1936, so Gladwyn Jebb recalled, ‘was an intellectual liveliness and complete liberty, inside the machine, to say what you thought and press your own point of view, provided that outside you were reasonably discreet about the official line’. No one questioned the motives – as opposed to the judgement – of colleagues in public service, or impugned their loyalty. Colleagues ‘regarded themselves as a band of brothers who trusted each other … the great thing was that all, however junior, would express an individual view which, if it was intelligently voiced and to the point, might come up to the Secretary of State himself’.⁴⁶

The fact that senior members of the Diplomatic Service were classically educated has been condemned by later generations, but it had advantages. ‘Latin is a thrifty language and demands a keen eye and ear for the single word which contains so much,’ as John Drury has written. Latinists were invaluable in finding and making sense of the key words embedded in the evasive rigmarole of diplomatic exchanges: trained too in detecting fallacies, making distinctions between major and minor propositions, and giving clarifications in eloquent, impartial prose. A tone of festive irony was not inimical to these exacting standards. Junior officials who were verbose, or offered fallacious reasoning, found that their seniors could be crushing. Ivone Kirkpatrick, who joined the Western Department of the Office in 1919, had his draft papers returned with cutting comments: ‘rejected with contumely’; ‘this seems to me the bloody limit of blatant imbecility’. On one occasion Kirkpatrick was telephoned by the PUS, Sir Eyre Crowe, about a draft memorandum. ‘Either you do not mean what you say, in which case you are wasting my time,’ Crowe snapped at him, ‘or you do mean it, in which case you are writing rot.’ With that, Crowe put down the receiver. He was anxious that his young staff would not be disillusioned by exposure to politicians. When Lloyd George asked that a junior official should attend meetings of a Cabinet committee, Crowe demurred: ‘if young men from the Foreign Office go to Cabinet committees, they will learn what Cabinet ministers are like’, Crowe warned.⁴⁷

These vivacious exchanges were enabled in the Office and other departments of state by an admirable tool of orderly, discriminating administration: the circulating file. All but ultra-secret dispatches, telegrams and incoming letters went first to the most junior official in the responsible department, who read the document, wrote a minute (that is, a comment or preliminary recommendation) and perhaps made annotations. Then the document would rise through the hierarchy, with each official adding comments, exploring alternatives, adding emphasis or making retractions, in order to improve the recommendation. Having started at the bottom, the file would finally reach the Secretary of State. Evidence and arguments were sieved, weighed, evaluated and refined like rare metals. In some ways the ministries resembled the court of a Renaissance humanist monarch in which learned experts proposed, replied, explained, objected, discoursed and resolved. This system of calm, self-contained reciprocity relied on trust. ‘In most foreign ministries,’ wrote Sir Owen O’Malley, ‘the presiding politician, less confident in the loyalty of officials or more apprehensive that his doings should be known outside his own personal entourage, often employed in confidential or shady transactions a small group of adherents who could be as dangerous to themselves as to him.’ Such shenanigans impaired the trust between ministers and officials, caused delays, confusion and duplicated labour, and devalued the objective advice of those excluded from the inner ring. (The circulating file is a grievous loss in the age of emails and ‘Reply all’ circulation lists.)⁴⁸

Condescension and chauvinism were ubiquitous. When the British Minister in Prague was asked if he had many friends among the Czechs, he was incredulous. ‘Friends!’ he exclaimed. ‘They eat in their kitchens!’ Sir Alexander Cadogan, lunching at the Ritz Hotel in 1940, was irritated by the proximity of ‘Dagos and Coons’. Assumptions of racial superiority were treated as a national virtue. ‘It looks as if the peak of white supremacy has been reached and that recession is now inevitable,’ lamented Sir Victor Wellesley, Deputy Under Secretary at the FO until 1936. ‘Of all the calamities which that gigantic struggle [in 1914–18] inflicted upon Europe, none in the end may prove to have been greater than the loss of prestige which the white race has suffered in the eyes of the coloured world.’ Even communist informants thought that the exceptionalism of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom was part of the natural order. ‘Nature has put Great Britain at the cross-roads of civilization,’ declared a Labour MP Wilfrid Vernon in 1948 (eleven years after he had been caught leaking aviation secrets to the Soviets). Duff Cooper, Ambassador in Paris during 1944–7, ‘has a tremendous feeling about the superiority of the British race and about our system of government’, Guy Liddell noted. ‘He thinks the old school tie is one of the finest institutions we have got, and that widespread education is a mistake.’⁴⁹

Racism was a majority pleasure. In 1940 the Duke of St Albans, after a day on guard at Admiralty Arch, went in battledress to dine at Brooks’s club. ‘I hate all Europeans, except Scandinavians,’ he growled to a fellow diner; ‘of course I loathe all dagoes.’ Dining at the Blue Train Grill, one Fleet Street editor endured ‘a cabaret which consisted of two niggers at a piano – one a full-blooded fellow and the other a chocolate-coloured coon. It was odd how my old Tory blood revolted at these self-satisfied niggers ogling our women, and at our women mooning over them.’ Foreigners were called Fuzzy-Wuzzies, Levantines, kaffirs, chinks and worse. They were identified with failure, contraceptives, trickery, idleness, perversion, cowardice, absenteeism and disease: Balkanization, Dutch caps, French letters, Greek gifts, Greek ease, Hunnish practices, Dutch courage, French leave, Spanish influenza, German measles, the French disease. ‘Egyptian PT’ (physical training) was afternoon sleep, and a ‘Portuguese parliament’ was where everyone talked but no one listened. Orientals were wily, Hindus were lazy, Hungarians were reckless, and Slavs were dreamy and lethargic. Treachery was sincerely thought to be unEnglish: it was the trait of subject breeds. ‘Don’t trust the natives: they’re treacherous,’ the war correspondent Philip Jordan was told when he visited Ceylon in the 1930s. ‘It’s only when you’ve been out here as long as I have’, said expatriates who thought themselves kind and good, ‘that you will realise how little you know about “our coloured brethren” as we must call them now.’⁵⁰

London was the capital of ‘the greatest democracy in the world’, the Cabinet minister Sir Samuel Hoare averred in 1936. ‘If British liberty and democracy collapse in a catastrophe, liberty and democracy will be exterminated in the world.’ Few people in England thought such Anglocentrism was absurdly overblown, or that Hoare was insular and foolish. After all, Germany and Italy were already autocracies, Austria and Spain were being overwhelmed by anti-democratic forces, and the Second Republic in Portugal and the Regency in Hungary were authoritarian regimes. King Alexander I had imposed personal dictatorship on Yugoslavia in 1929. There had been a military seizure of power in Bulgaria in 1934, although by 1936 King Boris III had engineered a semi-democratic counter-coup which prevailed until 1939. A fortnight after Hoare’s speech a military junta in Greece proclaimed the dawn of the Third Hellenic Civilization, which meant the abolition of the constitution, the dissolution of parliament and the suppression of political parties. King Carol II was preparing to suppress all democratic pretences in Romania. Britain, with its new constitutional settlement of 1927–9, was indeed one of the leading survivors among the diminishing number of free European democracies. It was to prevent resurgence of the dictatorial nationalism of the 1930s that the European nations coalesced economically, judicially and politically in the late twentieth century.⁵¹

There was justified pride in the intelligence, neutrality and inviolability from corruption of Whitehall. ‘The Greeks, like many other races, lack a competent civil service with established traditions of hard work and integrity,’ wrote Sir Daniel Lascelles from the Athens embassy in 1945. After years of Turkish domination, their political tradition was ‘to evade and thwart governmental authority’. It was said in their favour, continued Lascelles, that Greeks had ‘plenty of guts. So, I believe, have the Irish.’ There were a few exceptions to this patriotic unity: Goronwy Rees, who spied for Moscow in 1938–9, disparaged the land mass of England, Scotland and Wales as ‘Bird’s Custard Island’ because it was thick, tasteless and sickly. Millions of his compatriots however believed that British was best. Sometimes for sound reasons, but often with the benefit of self-assured inexperience, they presumed that the English language was the richest in the world, and that the nation’s policemen, beer, pageantry, countryside, sense of fair play, engineering, handshakes, comedians and parliament were unmatched. Nationalist pride permeated every social group: ‘the lags were as uncritically patriotic as book-makers or actors’, said Wilfred Macartney of his fellow inmates in Parkhurst prison, where he was detained in 1927–35 after trying to obtain RAF secrets for Moscow. ‘Everything English was best, from a Rolls-Royce to a cigarette.’⁵²

Such unreal assumptions vitiated national influence throughout the Cold War period. ‘The British have a great liability: so many of us still believe in the “effortless superiority” … of all British men and some women,’ wrote the sociologist Michael Young in 1960. ‘This terrifying attitude is not confined to Bournemouth. Many solid working-class people have it too, Labour voters as well as Tory.’ When, during the Suez crisis of 1956, Young conducted an opinion survey in the inner London suburb of Hornsey, he was ‘dismayed by the number of manual workers who backed Eden wholeheartedly, talked of Wogs, Dagoes and Gyppies as vituperatively as they did when they were “seeing the world” in the Army’.⁵³

Pretensions of English singularity, coupled with the delusion that public institutions could be made inviolate from continental influences, beset the cruder politicians, virulent editorial journalists and the more ignorant voters. Officers in Special Branch may have been hoodwinked by such ideas, but they made less headway in MI5, where most officials were well-travelled linguists rather than the blockheads imagined by the agency’s detractors. Diplomatists from Crowe, Vansittart and Cadogan downwards, though they were patriotic, saw the best hopes of peace lay in supra-nationalism, not nationalism. ‘The only sure guarantee against a renewal of fratricidal strife lies in the realisation, not only of the economic, but of the social solidarity of Europe,’ Don Gregory (the former Foreign Office expert on Soviet Russia) wrote in 1929. He warned against the special danger of Britain being lulled into complacency because ‘we are almost the only Europeans who have no traditional hatreds, who have no land frontiers to bother about, who need never be dragged into a war unless we wish to be’. European ideas and power had mastery over British destiny.⁵⁴

CHAPTER 4
The Vigilance Detectives

The first English network of communist espionage reporting to Moscow came into existence because of a commotion in a Pimlico side-street in 1909 some eight years before the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Wolverhampton, Chatham, Hornsey and Bristol – not Cambridge colleges – spawned the earliest Soviet spy ring. Renegade policemen worked for Moscow first. The covert activities of these policemen and their journalist associates, and the way that MI5 handled them, is fundamental to understanding secret service priorities and techniques in the seventy years before the dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The uprising of the Metropolitan Police

One night in the year of the foundation of the British secret services two patrolling constables detained two rowdy men who were ringing doorbells in Pimlico. The miscreants were taken to the local police station, where they were identified as neighbours who had been locked out by their irate wives after carousing too late at the pub. The Metropolitan Police inspector on duty that night at Pimlico, John Syme, sent the men home without charge. The rumpus ought to have ended there. Instead, it led to rebellion inside the Metropolitan Police, demonstrations, strikes and the first organized network of Englishmen spying for the Bolsheviks.

After Syme had rebuked the constables for being officious, they made counter-complaints against him. A tortuous disciplinary procedure ended with his demotion to the rank of sergeant. When he protested, he was suspended from duty for insubordination. In 1910 he was dismissed for declaring that he would take his grievances outside the force to his MP. Sir Edward Henry, the fingerprint pioneer who was Chief Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, threatened resignation in 1911 when Winston Churchill, as Home Secretary, seemed inclined to reinstate Syme. In June that year Syme was arrested after sending a letter to Churchill which threatened murder. He was put under police watch lest he offer violence to King George V. He and his wife Nellie were evicted from their police flat. He protested at the Palace of Westminster. There were terms of imprisonment. Twice he went on hunger-strike. He was sent to Broadmoor criminal lunatic asylum. Scotland Yard’s determination to crush a man who had, under stress, threatened violence is comprehensible: a barman shot and wounded Sir Edward Henry in 1912 after his application for a licence to drive a motor-bus had been rejected at Scotland Yard.

Jack Hayes, a Liverpool MP and former London policeman, using the language of racism and sportsmanship that connoted manliness to his generation, told the House of Commons in 1923: ‘Inspector Syme, one of the whitest men who ever wore a police uniform, a man who has undergone untold suffering, was really playing the game as an inspector of the Metropolitan Police.’ Three years after Syme’s death in 1945, his misfortunes were again debated in parliament. ‘I remember him away back in the years before the first world war – tall, fine, handsome he was, and … very clean in his character,’ said the communist MP Willie Gallacher. ‘Injustice wore down that strong body and practically destroyed the mind and soul of that fine man.’¹

Syme’s treatment was seen as a travesty by many London policemen, who projected a workplace association to resist victimization and favouritism. The authorities responded in 1913 by forbidding policemen from union membership, under penalty of dismissal. Money became a pressing issue, too. Although policemen considered themselves to be a class above the urban labouring poor, they were paid at similar levels. From the declaration of war in 1914 to the outbreak of the Russian revolution in 1917, the cost of living in London rose by 76 per cent but police pay by only 20 per cent. Policemen resented losing prestige to munitions workers earning three times as much. They fainted on duty from hunger.

These pressures led to the formation of the National Union of Police and Prison Officers (NUPPO), which declared a strike in August 1918. Almost all of the 12,000 Metropolitan Police withdrew from duty. So, too, did the 1,200 men of the City of London force guarding the capital’s financial institutions. These police ‘revolters’ were, thought Hensley Henson, the politically minded bishop, ‘a very ominous sign of social disintegration’. The wartime coalition government, which feared that police disaffection would spread to the army, sent a detachment of Guards to protect Scotland Yard from the mutineers. Lloyd George, as Prime Minister, conceded most of the strikers’ demands on pay, pensions and war bonuses, and was understood by negotiators to have given an oral promise of union recognition. Sir Edward Henry, who had underestimated NUPPO’s support, was replaced as Chief Commissioner by General Sir Nevil Macready. Hayes and other policemen were soon riled by Macready’s declared intention to raise the force’s discipline to the standard of a Guards regiment.²

Hayes left the Metropolitan Police on his election as general secretary of NUPPO in March 1919. Born in 1889, he was one of the seven children of a police inspector at Wolverhampton, and had been educated in the town. At the age of thirteen he became a clerk with the Wolverhampton Corrugated Iron Company. By attending evening classes he learnt shorthand, book-keeping, accountancy and French. In 1909 he joined the Metropolitan Police, in which he reached the rank of sergeant within four years. He was an imposing man whose elaborate waxed moustache suggested vanity. The success of the 1918 strike imbued him with over-confidence. On the Sunday nearest to May Day in 1919 NUPPO assembled the largest crowd seen in Trafalgar Square for years. In addition to thousands of Metropolitan policemen, who marched along Whitehall bearing banners with defiant slogans, they were supported by crowds of colonial soldiers and by some sailors. The most insistent protesters were policemen who had recently been demobilized from regiments on the Western Front and found reversion to military drilling to be an intolerable prospect. Hayes denounced Macready to the demonstrators: ‘being an army officer, the Chief Commissioner was introducing a system not of discipline, but of tyranny, brutality and Prussianism’.³

The Police Act of 1919, which came into force in August, granted higher wages, but made it illegal (with a penalty of up to two years’ imprisonment) for policemen to join a trade union concerned with pay, pensions and conditions of service. The government-subsidized Police Federation was formed. NUPPO responded by calling a national strike which flopped everywhere except Merseyside. There the strike endured for three weeks, during which troops made bayonet charges to quell looting in rough districts. When the Merseyside strike collapsed, every striking policeman there was dismissed with total loss of pension rights. Lloyd George said that ‘all England’ should feel indebted to Liverpool’s resilient municipal leadership. He saw Merseyside’s police strike ‘as perhaps the turning point in the Labour movement, deflecting it from Bolshevist and Direct Actionist courses to legitimate Trade Unionism. Had Liverpool been wrongly handled, and had the strikers scored a success, the whole country might very soon have been on fire.’⁴

All NUPPO activists in London were dismissed. Several of them, including its former general secretary James Marston, took jobs with the All Russian Co-operative Society (ARCOS), the Soviet government’s commercial agency which opened in London in 1920 and acted as a front for espionage and subversion. Historians of British communism imply that these men were Special Branch plants, and mock ‘the wave of Bolshevism coursing through Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police at this time’, as if the recent victimization, strikes, demonstrations and dismissals were not sufficient causes of radicalization. Special Branch did have two informants planted inside ARCOS, Karl Korbs and Peter Miller, while MI5 had its own double agent embedded there, Anatoli Timokhin. None of them had been Metropolitan policemen.⁵

After the collapse of NUPPO, Hayes started the Vigilance Detective Agency, which was based at Clapton Common, where he lived. A festering shared grievance is a powerful unifier of men. Vigilance was manned by a rump of NUPPO loyalists, notably Walter Dale and Arthur Lakey. Dale became Vigilance’s chief investigator. Lakey’s wife joined Marston in the ARCOS offices, where she worked under her maiden name of Kitty Reynolds. In Paris before 1914 the Okhrana’s surveillance of dissident émigrés had been delegated to a private detective agency, Bint et Sambain, in order to distance the Russian embassy in Paris from the watch. After 1920 the Cheka determined to use Vigilance in post-war London rather as the Okhrana had used Bint et Sambain in pre-war Paris. The agency’s detectives were soon recommended by Hayes to a young journalist named William Norman Ewer.

Norman Ewer of the Daily Herald

Norman Ewer had been born in 1885 in the middling London suburb of Hornsey. His father dealt in silk, and later moved to Muswell Hill. The family kept one live-in housemaid. Ewer rose up the rungs of the middle class by passing examinations. He attended Merchant Taylor’s School in Charterhouse Square in the City of London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he won first-class degrees in mathematics and history. From an early age, he was nicknamed ‘Trilby’ because, like the heroine of George du Maurier’s novel, he liked to be barefoot. After Cambridge he became private secretary to an exotic plutocrat known as Baron de Forest.

Born in 1879, de Forest was ostensibly the son of American circus performers who died of typhoid when their troupe visited Turkey. After a spell in an orphanage, he was adopted in 1887 by the fabulously rich Baroness Hirsch, who believed that he was the illegitimate child of her dead son. He inherited a castle and many millions in 1899, was created Baron de Forest by the Austrian Emperor and converted from Judaism to Catholicism. Subsequently he settled in England, where he held the land-speed record and was the victorious radical candidate at a parliamentary by-election in 1911. He forthwith spoiled his political prospects by suing his mother-in-law for slander. In 1912 de Forest contributed to the fund launched by the Labour MP George Lansbury to save the fiercely partisan Daily Herald from insolvency. Ewer was installed as de Forest’s nominee in the Daily Herald management: he soon became, together with the young Oxford graduates G. D. H. Cole, Gerald Gould and Harold Laski, one of ‘Lansbury’s lambs’ working as a journalist there. His idealism became the overworked centre of his existence.

After the outbreak of war in 1914 Ewer opposed conscription, registered as a conscientious objector, became an indentured agricultural worker in Waldorf Astor’s pigsties at Cliveden and published anti-war verses. He was aghast at the mayhem of the Western Front, was revolted by the militarism of the Austrian, British, German and Russian monarchies, and loathed the inequities of free-market capitalism. He saw the undoubtable humbug of the British claim to be fighting for liberal democracy when its main ally was tsarist Russia, which had sponsored the pogroms of 1903–6 and sent dissidents into captivity and internal exile. As Ewer wrote in 1924, Lenin emerged as the greatest historical leader of the epoch because he saw world revolution, not national victory in the European war, as the primary aim. German socialists collaborated with German capitalism, British socialists exerted themselves for national interests, and pacifists strove for peace. ‘Only the great voice of Lenin cried from Switzerland that all were wrong; that the job of Socialists was Socialism; neither to prosecute the Imperialist war nor to stop the Imperialist war, but to snatch a Socialist victory from the conflicts of Imperialism; to turn war into revolution.’ For Ewer, like Lenin, imperialism was the apotheosis of capitalism.⁶

When Ewer applied for a post-war passport to visit the Netherlands and Switzerland, Gerald Gould assured the Foreign Office that the ‘extreme’ socialism preached in the Daily Herald was a bulwark against Bolshevism. Counter-espionage officers assessed him differently. ‘EWER is pro-German principally on the grounds that other Governments are not less wicked than the German,’ reported Special Branch’s Hugh Miller. ‘He preaches peace with Germany, followed by “revolution through bloodshed”.’ In Miller’s estimate, Ewer was a risk to national security: not only ‘a clever writer and fluent speaker’ but ‘a dangerous and inflammatory agitator’.⁷

In 1919 Ewer was appointed foreign editor of the Daily Herald. He collaborated during that year with the pro-Bolshevik MP Cecil L’Estrange Malone and a director of the Daily Herald named Francis Meynell in formulating a programme for a Sailors’, Soldiers’ & Airmen’s Union which would certainly have been revolutionary in intent. Ewer became a founding member of the CPGB in 1920, and liaised between the newspaper, CPGB headquarters in King Street and Nikolai Klyshko, who was both secretary of the Soviet delegation that arrived in London in May 1920 to negotiate a trade agreement and the Cheka chief in London. Klyshko controlled Soviet espionage in Britain, and funded subversion, until his recall from London in 1923.

George Lansbury visited Moscow and met Lenin in 1920. ‘I shall always esteem it the greatest event in my life that I was privileged to see this fine, simple, wise man’, he wrote in besotted terms in his memoirs. Lenin was ‘a great man in every sense of the word’, who held supreme national power and yet remained ‘unaffected and without personal pride’. Lansbury, who became chairman of the Labour party in 1927 and its leader in 1932, told the party conference at Birmingham in 1928 that the Bolshevik revolution had been ‘the greatest and best thing that has ever happened in the history of the world’. Socialists should rejoice that the ‘fearful autocracy’, which ruled from the Baltic to the Black Sea and from the Volga to the Pacific, had been replaced by that magnificent venture in state socialism, the Soviet Union. ‘The peasants and workers of that great nation, encircled by implacable foes who ceaselessly intrigue, conspire and work to restore Czardom, need our sympathy and help, and we need theirs.’ It was the role of the Daily Herald, thought Lansbury and his lambs, to provide and receive sympathetic help.⁸

In August 1920 GC&CS intercepted and deciphered a signal from Lev Kamenev, the Bolshevik revolutionary leader and acting head of the Soviet trade delegation, reporting that he had given to the Daily Herald a subsidy of £40,000 raised by selling precious stones. In return, it was understood that the newspaper would be the mouthpiece of Moscow on Anglo-Russian relations and would support Bolshevik agitation and propaganda against the Lloyd George government. Meynell, the courier used to smuggle many of these jewels, made several visits to Copenhagen to meet Moscow’s star diplomat Maxim Litvinov. The surveillance of these meetings was comically blatant: a window-cleaner appeared on a ladder, and a banister-polisher on the landing, whenever Meynell entered Litvinov’s hotel suite. Once Meynell returned from Copenhagen with two strings of pearls secreted in a jar of butter. On another occasion he posted a box of chocolate creams, each containing a pearl or diamond, to his friend the philosopher Cyril Joad. All these shenanigans were known to Ewer, although it may have been kept from him that £10,000 of the jewels money was invested in the Anglo-Russian Three Ply and Veneer Company run by George Lansbury’s sons Edgar and William. Edgar Lansbury was a member of the CPGB, who in 1924 was elected communist mayor of Poplar. His mother-in-law, Hannah (‘Annie’) Glassman, was used to convert the jewels into cash.⁹

MI5 resorted to family connections and social contacts in order to handle Kamenev and the Daily Herald. Jasper Harker had recently married Margaret Russell Cooke at a Mayfair church. She was the sister of Sidney (‘Cookie’) Russell Cooke, an intellectual stockbroker and Liberal parliamentary candidate, who had inherited a fine house on the Isle of Wight called Bellecroft. Russell Cooke had been a lover of Maynard Keynes, whose lifelong friend and business associate he remained, and was the son-in-law of the captain of the Titanic. Virginia Woolf called him ‘a shoving young man, who wants to be smart, cultivated, go-ahead & all the rest of it’. Harker used his brother-in-law to compromise Kamenev. Russell Cooke invited Kamenev and the latter’s London girlfriend Clare Sheridan, who was a sculptor, Winston Churchill’s cousin and a ‘parlour bolshevik’, first to lunch at Claridge’s and then to stay at Bellecroft for an August weekend. Lounging on rugs by the tennis court, Kamenev spoke vividly for over an hour, ‘stumbling along in his bad French’, about the inner history of the revolution in 1917, recounting the ‘secret organizations’ of Lenin, Trotsky, Krasin and himself, and depicting the Cheka’s chief Felix Dzerzhinsky: ‘a man turned to stone through years of travaux forcés, an ascetic and fanatic, whom the Soviet selected as head of La Terreur’. Kamenev inscribed a poem in which he likened Sheridan to Venus on a £5 banknote. He signed Bellecroft’s visitors’ book with the slogan, ‘Workers of the World Unit [sic].’¹⁰

Next month, on the eve of Kamenev’s scheduled return to Moscow with Sheridan, Lloyd George upbraided him for his part in the contraband-jewels subsidy. In order to gain political advantage, Lloyd George’s entourage spread the notion that he had given Kamenev peremptory orders to leave the country. The Prime Minister also yielded to pressure to publish the intercepts in order to justify his confrontation with Kamenev, although this compromised future SIGINT by betraying the fact that GC&CS could read Moscow’s ciphered wireless traffic. Journalists duly raised uproar about the Daily Herald diamonds under such headlines as ‘Lenin’s “Jewel Box” a War Chest’.¹¹

When Kamenev and Sheridan left together for Moscow, Russell Cooke found an excuse to meet them at King’s Cross station, to accompany them on their train and to see them on to their ship. Sheridan’s handbag went missing on the journey, and was doubtless searched. At Newcastle it reappeared in the clutches of Russell Cooke, who claimed to have traced it to the lost luggage office. In Moscow Sheridan sculpted heads of Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Trotsky, Zinoviev and other Bolshevik leaders. Soon afterwards, the Cheka informed Kamenev that Sheridan had lured him into staying with the brother-in-law and informant of an MI5 officer, and she found herself shunned when she returned to Moscow in 1923.¹²

Meanwhile, on 28 February 1921 the Daily Herald published a photograph of an imitation of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda which was circulating in England. The identifying marks of printers in Luton proved this issue to be a forgery which, as the Home Secretary admitted in the Commons, had been prepared with the help of the Home Office’s Director of Intelligence, Sir Basil Thomson. This trickery was adduced by Ewer, when MI5 interviewed him in 1950, as his reason for starting his counter-intelligence operation. In fact the groundwork had been laid before the forged Pravda incident; but it is true that his network coalesced in 1921.¹³

Hayes was the talent-spotter who put Ewer in touch with dismissed NUPPO activists and disaffected Special Branch officers willing to undertake political inquiries. Ewer in turn exerted his jaunty charm to inspire his operatives with team spirit. They wanted to prove that they could do a good job for him, both individually and as a group. Their skills were a source of pride to them. Shadowing and watching in the streets of London was akin to a sport that needed brains as well as agility. Smarting from their dismissals by the Metropolitan Police, they were glad to join an organization that appreciated team-work. The Vigilance brigade of detectives believed in manly self-respect and masculine prowess.

Ewer’s security officer Arthur Lakey had been born at Chatham in 1885. His father came from Tresco in the Scilly Isles: his mother was an office cleaner and munitions worker from Deptford. He worked as a railway booking clerk and in a brewery office before enlisting in the Royal Navy in 1900 and serving on the torpedo training vessel HMS Vernon. He left the navy to join the Metropolitan Police in 1911, but was recalled for war service, and spent eight hours in the sea when his ship was torpedoed in 1916. After this ordeal, he kept to land and was employed as a sergeant in Special Branch. During the NUPPO struggles of 1918–19, Lakey entered General Macready’s office at Scotland Yard, rifled his desk, read confidential papers and reported their contents to NUPPO.

In 1921, while Lakey was in the Doncaster mining district raising relief funds for dismissed NUPPO activists, he was summoned by Hayes to meet Ewer in the Daily Herald offices. Ewer asked him to investigate the circumstances of the Pravda forgery, implying that the inquiry was on behalf of the Labour party. When Lakey tendered his report, Ewer told him that the work had been commissioned on behalf of the Russian government and established that he had no misgivings about undertaking further work for the same employer. He was put in contact with Nikolai Klyshko, who paid the rent of a flat at 55 Ridgmount Gardens, Bloomsbury, where Lakey lived and worked to Klyshko’s orders. Walter Dale and a policeman’s daughter named Rose Edwardes worked with Lakey in Ridgmount Gardens.

Hayes also introduced Ewer to Hubert van Ginhoven and Charles Jane, who held the ranks of inspector and sergeant in Special Branch, and were discreet NUPPO sympathizers. Ewer began paying them £20 a week to report on Special Branch registry cards on suspects, on names and addresses subject to Home Office mail intercept warrants, and on names on watch lists at major ports. They also furnished addresses of intelligence officers and personnel, and gave forewarnings of Special Branch operations. In addition Ginhoven and Jane supplied material enabling Ewer to deduce that communist organizations in foreign capitals were under SIS surveillance, which made it easier to identify SIS officers or agents abroad who were targeting these foreign organizations. Leaks were facilitated by the Special Branch practice of trusting officers with delicate political information. This guileless, unreflecting camaraderie had nothing to do with the old-school-tie outlook or class allegiances (Guy Liddell and Hugh Miller were rare within Special Branch in being privately educated). It was how men at work were expected to behave with one another.

Ginhoven, who worked under the alias of Fletcher within the Ewer–Hayes network, was a familiar visitor to the Special Branch registry, where he flirted with women clerks and snooped when they had gone home. Every week or ten days Ewer dictated an updated list supplied by Ginhoven of addresses for which Home Office warrants had been issued. These were typed in triplicate, with one copy going to Chesham House (the Soviet legation in Belgravia), another to Moscow via Chesham House and the third to the CPGB. It was found in 1929 that traces of Home Office warrants issued for Ewer’s associates, together with any intercepted letters, had vanished from the files at Scotland Yard. So, too, had compromising documents which had been seized during the police raid on CPGB headquarters in 1925.

The Vigilance detectives resembled tugs in the London docks, sturdy and work-worn, speeding hither and thither, but taken for granted and therefore unseen. The material collected by them served as tuition lessons for Soviet Russia in British tradecraft. By watching targeted individuals, Vigilance operatives identified SIS and MI5 headquarters. They shadowed employees from these offices to establish their home addresses. They tracked messengers, secretarial staff and official cars. In 1924 they realized that Kell was MI5’s chief by tracking him from his house at 67 Evelyn Gardens: surveillance was easy, because his address was in Who’s Who and the Post Office London Directory, and his chauffeur-driven car flew a distinctive blue pennant displaying the image of a tortoise with the motto ‘safe but sure’. They watched MI5 and Special Branch methods of monitoring Soviet and CPGB operations, and thus helped the Russians to study and improve the rules of the game. They checked that Ewer and his associates were not being shadowed by the British secret services. They observed embassies and legations in London, and tracked foreign diplomats. Possibly this surveillance led to the recruitment of informants, although no evidence survives of this. Vigilance men monitored employees of ARCOS, CPGB members and Russians living in England who were suspect in Moscow eyes. ‘If a Russian was caught out, invariably he was sent home and shot,’ boasted Ewer’s chief watcher in 1928.¹⁴

Ewer, under the codename HERMAN, was Moscow’s main source in London. He accompanied Nikolai Klyshko to Cheka headquarters in Moscow in 1922, and visited Józef Krasny, Russian rezident in Vienna. He returned to Moscow in 1923 in the company of Andrew Rothstein @ C. M. Roebuck, a fellow founder of the CPGB and London correspondent of the Soviet news agency ROSTA. He also became the lover of Rose Cohen. Born in Poland in 1894, the child of garment-makers, Cohen had been reared in extreme poverty in east London slums. After studying politics and economics, she joined the Labour Research Department, and was a founder member of the CPGB. Harry Pollitt, who became general secretary of the CPGB in 1929, was among the men who became infatuated with this ardent, clever and alluring beauty, whom Ivy Litvinov described as ‘a sort of jüdische rose’. Cohen criss-crossed Europe after 1922 as a London-based Comintern courier and money mule. Eventually she committed herself to a monstrously ugly charmer, Max Petrovsky @ David Lipetz @ Max Goldfarb, a Ukrainian who translated Lenin’s works into Yiddish and went to England, using the alias of Bennett, as Comintern’s liaison with the CPGB. Together Cohen and Petrovsky moved in 1927 to Moscow, where her manners were thought grandiose by other communist expatriates.¹⁵

Ewer returned from Moscow in 1923 with boosted self-esteem and instructions, or the implanted idea, to run his espionage activities under the cover of a news agency. Until then, it had been based in Lakey’s Bloomsbury flat, or later in premises at Leigh-on-Sea: Ewer had met Lakey and other operatives either in cafés or at the Daily Herald offices. Accordingly, in 1923, Ewer leased room 50 in an office building called Outer Temple at 222 The Strand, opposite the Royal Courts of Justice at the west end of Fleet Street. There he opened the London branch of the Federated Press Agency of America, a news service which had been founded in 1919 to report strikes, trade unionism, workers’ militancy and radical activism. The FPA issued twice-weekly bulletins of news, comment and data to its left-wing subscribers. It was based first in Chicago, shifted its offices to Detroit and then Washington, before settling in New York. The FPA had developed reciprocal relations with socialist, communist and trade union newspapers internationally and acted as an information clearing-house in the United States and Europe. It may have served broad Comintern interests, but was not a front organization for Moscow. According to Ewer, the only American in the FPA who knew that its London office operated as a cover for Russian spying was its managing editor, Carl Haessler, a pre-war Rhodes scholar at Oxford.

Moscow sometimes sent money to Haessler in New York, who remitted funds either to the communist bookshop-owner Eva Reckitt in London or to the Paris correspondent of the Daily Herald, George Slocombe. Usually dollars arrived in the diplomatic bag at Chesham House and were distributed to the FPA and the CPGB by Khristian Rakovsky, Soviet plenipotentiary in London from 1923 and Ambassador from 1925. An associate of Ewer’s named Walter Holmes (sometime Moscow correspondent of the Daily Herald) converted the dollars into sterling by exchanging small amounts at travel agencies and currency bureaux. These arrangements ended after the ARCOS raid in 1927.

For a time Ewer had a source in Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), who was dropped because the product was suspected of being phoney. Ewer had a sub-source in the Foreign Office, who reported confidential remarks made by two officials, Sir Arthur Willert of the Press Department and J. D. Gregory of the Northern Department; but his network never obtained original FO documents which could be sent to Moscow for verification. Probably the remitted material from the Foreign Office and India Office was limited to low-grade gossip. Don Gregory, the Office’s in-house Russian expert until 1928, enjoyed his half-hour briefings with Ewer, whose facetious anti-semitism amused him: ‘he is an admirable and loyal friend, though I have heard him described as a dangerous bolshevik’. The only diplomatic documents obtained by Ewer’s network came from his second prong in Paris, where his sub-agent was the Daily Herald correspondent George Slocombe.¹⁶

George Slocombe in Paris

Slocombe had been born in 1894, and grew up in the semi-industrial northern districts of Bristol called Horfield and Bishopston. He was baptized in a Wesleyan Methodist chapel. His father was a commercial traveller (who left an estate worth only £268 in 1929). He attended the Merchant Adventurers’ Technical College at Bristol, where his best friend was a lively peasant boy from Touraine on a government scholarship. In July 1909, aged fifteen, Slocombe was appointed as a boy clerk in the Post Office Savings Bank, behind London’s Olympia, which had recently been converted from a hippodrome into an exhibition centre for motor-cars and furnishings. According to the 1911 census, he lived nearby at 63 West Kensington Mansions, as a friend rather than a lodger, with Emma Karlinsky, who had come to England from the Crimea in 1909 with her two daughters, Fanny and Marie. Her husband Joseph was an attorney at Yalta and business adviser to a grand duke.

Young Slocombe arranged nearby accommodation for his French friend, who had meanwhile adopted the name of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. He was proud of being the sculptor’s most intimate English friend: when he started a Post Office Savings Bank internal magazine, a Gaudier-Brzeska drawing decorated its cover. Slocombe’s sonnet raging against tyrants and celebrating the assassination of the Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin in 1911 was published in the Marxist magazine Justice. ‘Nobody then foresaw’, Slocombe recalled a quarter of a century later, ‘the day when the theories contained in the badly printed, red-covered volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital would become the official religion of a hundred and sixty million people seated astride Europe and Asia.’¹⁷

As an impressionable youth, Slocombe was drawn by the anarchism of Kropotkin. He found a mentor in a stern, gloomy Scottish-Italian recluse, who lived, worked and slept in a book-lined cellar under a Hammersmith tailor’s shop. This underground cell, which daylight never reached, was the haunt of nihilistic young workmen, French, Russian and Spanish exiles, and the anarchist Errico Malatesta, who had escaped from an Italian prison-fortress and worked as an electrician in Soho. Slocombe’s youthful eagerness won him the trust of ‘men who lived in dread of informers, who distrusted strangers, who walked warily from bitter knowledge of the world’s prisons’. He learnt the mentality and methods of the plotters who created European despotism. ‘When, long afterwards, I met Mussolini for the first time, we met on common ground,’ he claimed. ‘We spoke the same secret language, the language of the men working blindly in cellars, in prisons, writing burning words to be printed on small and hidden presses, talking burning words at street corners, ardent, disdainful, self-righteous.’¹⁸

In 1912, aged eighteen, Slocombe married seventeen-year-old Marie Karlinsky, who was pregnant with their son Ralph. He joined the staff of the Daily Herald at about the same time, and the Royal Flying Corps as a second-class mechanic in 1916. He had a winter digging roads in Lincolnshire before deployment in France, where he spent eighteen months in intelligence translating German military wireless messages. When the first attempts were made to bug prison cells with microphones, Slocombe was told to eavesdrop, and felt relief that the stone paving of the prison cells caused such echoes that the indiscretions of captured German aviators were incomprehensible. He found headquarters life to be monotonous, and compared the staff officers to golfing stockbrokers.¹⁹

Slocombe wrote an empurpled ‘Letter to Lenin’, published in the Daily Herald of 24 August 1918. ‘Your first proclamation, after the Second Russian Revolution, was a deep blast upon the Bugle of the Army of the World’s Freedom,’ he apostrophized Lenin. ‘You are aiming, as I believe sincerely, at the liberation and the redemption of man. The hate you have been shown by the rich, the monopolists, the concession-hunters, the feudalists, the diplomatists and the Press of all countries – German and allied alike – is a sure sign of your earnestness in the cause.’ These ebullitions seemed suspicious to the security services in London, but Slocombe’s commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Harry Goldsmith defended him to Stewart Menzies of SIS: ‘he was a M.T. [motor-transport] driver, but having crashed a senior officer into a ditch, was taken off cars & put to clerking. He is an educated man & … writes verses, patriotic & not bad at that for the Tatler.’ Goldsmith, who was a future military ADC to King George V, continued with the tolerance that often characterized authority’s attitude to oddballs: ‘I don’t think he is a bad chap on the whole, & I am rather inclined, if you agree, to talk to him myself & tell him I know he wrote this article addressed to Lenin & ask him if he think [sic] it’s playing the game to butter up a fellow whose actions caused very heavy losses to the French & ourselves by setting free troops hitherto employed on the Russian front, who is now assisting the Germans to enslave the Poles & Ukrainians etc.’²⁰

After demobilization in 1919, Slocombe returned to the Daily Herald as news editor. ‘He was a timid and anxious man,’ recalled Francis Meynell, ‘until he grew a beard to hide his receding chin. The change was immediate and remarkable: he became master of his scene.’ In the spring of 1920 Slocombe went as the Daily Herald’s special correspondent in Paris, which he loved as the capital of rumour. His work took him roaming in Europe: everywhere he resisted standardization and vapidity. The suicide of millionaires and dethroning of monarchs enlivened him. He liked to meet currency smugglers, concession-hunters, bankers-condottieri, political grafters, stock-exchange tipsters, swagger beaux, faithless men with awkward principles, and idealists who uttered only flippancies. He savoured the furtive exiles found in every European capital, ‘nursing midnight dreams of liberty, power and martyrdom’ and conjuring vengeful conspiracies.²¹

A Home Office warrant was issued in 1921 to intercept letters to Slocombe’s house at Sutton in Surrey on the grounds that he was bringing Bolshevik literature into Britain and communicating with ‘leaders of the Red Trade Union International movement’. In 1922 a major international conference was held at Genoa to promote the economic stabilization and revival of central and eastern Europe, and to reconcile European capitalism with the Bolshevik economy. Shortly before the conference convened, Ewer sent Slocombe ‘hints about Genoa for your private ear’ which he intended to be passed to Soviet contacts. These hints comprised information from Edward Wise, a civil servant who was Lloyd George’s economic adviser during the Genoa deliberations and sympathetic to Bolshevism, that London hoped to use the Genoa meeting to parlay an agreement between the Soviet Union and the other European powers. The French embassy in London reported in 1923 that Slocombe had visited Lausanne under the alias of Nathan Grunberg. The French tied him to Clare Sheridan, who was reputed to have been his lover. His expulsion from France was contemplated in 1926 after he was seen in regular meetings with a Bolshevik agent.²²

Slocombe’s sister-in-law Fanny Karlinsky was the object of further suspicions. She won a scholarship to St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, and read modern languages at Somerville College, Oxford in 1913, but fell ill and spent much of 1914 in the French Pyrenees recuperating. During 1916–19 she worked as an Anglo–Russian translator and interpreter. In 1919 she became a telegraph coder and decipherer for ARCOS, and worked in its offices for twelve years. She was anonymously denounced to Special Branch in 1924 for her alleged association with Edith Lunn, wife of Andrew Rothstein. There were two separate code-rooms in ARCOS offices, one for purely commercial traffic and the other for political messages: Fanny Karlinsky claimed to have worked only in the first room. She was present during the police raid of 1927, was listed for possible expulsion to Russia by the authorities and had her application for British citizenship denied. She continued working for ARCOS until 1931, when she refused orders to return to Russia and was stripped of her Soviet passport. Guy Liddell, then still in Special Branch, noted in 1928: ‘although she is not a full member of the Party, she is in close touch with party circles and ready to assist in any way she can’. MI5 suspected her of being a sub-agent of Lenin’s State Political Directorate, the GPU. Later she ran a boarding-house, but in the 1950s needed an allowance from Slocombe in Paris to keep her from privation.²³

The Zinoviev letter and the ARCOS raid

The Ewer–Hayes network first attracted MI5’s interest in 1924 in the aftermath of the Zinoviev letter scare. The background was this. A Scottish communist named John Ross Campbell, acting editor of the Workers’ Weekly, was arrested on 5 August on the instructions of Sir Archibald Bodkin, the Director of Public Prosecutions. He was charged under the Incitement to Mutiny Act of 1797 with seducing members of the armed forces from their allegiance. He had done this, Bodkin alleged, by publishing ‘An Open Letter to the Fighting Forces’, expressed in terms similar to Cecil L’Estrange Malone’s speech of 1920 at the Hands Off Russia meeting. Campbell urged ‘soldiers, sailors and airmen, not merely to refuse to go to war, or to refuse to shoot strikers during industrial conflicts’, but also to join with urban proletariat and rural labourers ‘in a common attack upon the capitalists, and to smash capitalism forever, and institute the reign of the whole working class’. Bodkin’s motives were mixed, according to A. J. P. Taylor: ‘perhaps stupidity (and the director of public prosecutions is usually a stupid man); perhaps also to embarrass the government’. Certainly Campbell was arrested on the same day that Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government reached terms for an Anglo-Russian trade treaty, which communism’s adversaries were determined to thwart. When the government withdrew the prosecution on 13 August (on the pretext that Campbell was a decorated soldier, who had been crippled by war wounds), its opponents protested at political interference with the law. A general election was called when on 8 October MacDonald’s government opposed and lost a parliamentary motion calling for an independent tribunal to inquire into the handling of Campbell’s prosecution.²⁴

Amid the furore over the proposed Anglo-Russian treaty and the Campbell case, a message was supposedly sent from Moscow, dated 15 September 1924, from Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Comintern, to the CPGB’s general committee. The message conveyed Comintern orders to prepare for revolution by subverting the armed forces and by duping Labour party leaders. It was obtained by the SIS station in Riga, which sent it to SIS headquarters in London on 2 October. SIS circularized copies to the Foreign Office, Admiralty, War Office, Air Ministry, MI5 and Scotland Yard (which failed to pass it to Special Branch). The letter was spurious, probably concocted by White Russian forgers in Riga, and possibly planted by die-hard intelligence anti-Bolshevists, but it differed little from genuine Moscow messages to the CPGB. Lakey told MI5 that the CPGB gave Ewer a categorical denial that it had received any such letter. As both the army and MI5, even without the Campbell case, feared subversion of troops, MI5 on 21 October sent copies of the Riga letter to General Officers Commanding in Britain. A copy certainly went to Conservative Central Office (most probably by the hand of Sir Joseph Ball, head of MI5’s investigative branch); Desmond Morton of SIS may have meddled alongside Ball; and another copy of the letter was, according to Morton, given by Stewart Menzies of SIS to the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail, which doubtless received a confirmatory copy from Conservative Central Office, published the forgery four days before the general election on 29 October. Publication did not swing voters against socialism: the financial terms of the doomed Anglo-Russian treaty aroused more suspicion. Labour got 5.3 million votes, compared with 4.3 million in 1923; but the collapse of Liberal support since 1923 gave a majority of seats to the Conservatives, and created a bitter Labour feeling that they had been cheated out of power by the Daily Mail’s Zinoviev stunt.

In the final meeting of the Labour Cabinet after their defeat, Lord Parmoor, Sir Charles Trevelyan and Josiah Wedgwood voiced their suspicion that ‘Crowe and Gregory had stooped to a mean political trick in order to damage the Labour Party,’ reported the official taking the minutes, and ‘were quite prepared to blow up the F.O. if they could get rid of the spy system’. (During the 1930s Trevelyan was one of the most gullible of fellow-travellers to Bolshevist Russia, who described Stalinist penal colonies as a ‘grand method of human regeneration’, while Parmoor was an apologist for Stalinist slave labour and religious persecution.) In fact Gregory had opposed publication, and Crowe was so mortified by his mismanagement of the letter’s distribution that he broke down in tears as he apologized to MacDonald for contributing to the election defeat. ‘The Zinoviev letter killed Crowe,’ MacDonald said in 1928. ‘He never lifted up his head after that.’²⁵

Generations of Labour activists nurtured festering resentment of MI5 for plotting to install the Conservatives in power: the party’s antagonism towards the intelligence services continues to this day. But it was suspicions of the financial terms of the Anglo-Russian treaty, and MacDonald’s refusal to institute a tribunal of inquiry into the Campbell case, coupled with Liberal voters transferring to the Conservatives, that lost Labour power: not the Zinoviev stunt. On the other side, from 1925 onwards, SIS collected ample and reliable evidence that in response to the Riga forgery Moscow sought to discredit, mislead and confuse the British intelligence services by providing forgers with blank Soviet and Comintern writing-paper with which to concoct bogus material for the misdirection, humiliation and weakening of SIS and MI5.

A trades union delegation left for Moscow in mid-November 1924 to investigate the authenticity of the Zinoviev letter. On 21 November the Daily Herald carried a small advert placed by Ewer: ‘Labour Group carrying out investigation would be glad to receive information and details from anyone who has ever had any association with, or been brought into touch with, any Secret Service Department or operation.’ A box number at the Daily Herald was given for replies. Probably this small-ad was a clumsy attempt to investigate the machinations behind the forgery either in parallel or in association with the trades union inquiry in Moscow. MI5 set its agent D to reply. He received a message signed ‘Q.X.’ fixing a rendezvous outside St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner on 1 January 1925. D waited there for an hour in vain. He was kept under surveillance by an MI5 colleague, who spotted another man (later identified as Walter Dale) also keeping covert watch. Following a second approach, D met Q.X. in a wine bar. Q.X. was soon identified as Ewer. They had several meetings, during which Q.X. questioned D about intelligence, until Dale, who was tracking D after meetings, discovered his MI5 connection. Ewer dropped him and, if challenged, could have pretended that he was investigating a possible story for the Daily Herald.

Ewer and his network were put under surveillance. Ewer himself kept short hours at the Daily Herald office, punctuating his working day with visits to Fleet Street pubs, notably the Cheshire Cheese, lunches in the Falstaff restaurant in Fleet Street and tea-breaks in cafés. MI5 collected genealogical and financial data on the families of FPA operatives, checked addresses, obtained Home Office warrants on their correspondence, shadowed them, compiled physical descriptions and took photographic head-shots. The shadowing of Dale led to Rose Edwardes, who in turn led them to room 50 of Outer Temple, for which a Home Office warrant was issued in February 1925. Telephone intercepts revealed the FPA’s regular dealings with ARCOS, Chesham House and the Vigilance Detective Agency. On 11 February the FPA office received a package addressed to ‘Kenneth Milton, Esq.’ containing typed reports in French on Morocco, Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia.

It became evident that ‘Kenneth Milton’ frequently received packets from Paris. These enclosed copies of French ambassadorial dispatches from various capitals, confidential news on French politics and finance, unsigned typed letters accompanying English plain-language codes, and occasional letters from Indian revolutionaries to comrades living in England. The material justified Vansittart’s quip: ‘in France official secrets are everybody’s secret’. Codewords in the letters were often food-related. ‘Spaghetti’ indicated an agent inside the Quai d’Orsay, paid 5,000 francs a month, who supplied product on Italy. ‘Goulash’ was an agent supplying material on the Balkans. ‘Native grown cereals’ meant an informant from within French political circles. ‘Hospitality’ or ‘footmen’ indicated occasional informants. ‘Bristol’ was the codeword for Warsaw. ‘Glasgow’ indicated Moscow or Russia. ‘Leicester’ meant Paris. Halifax, Cheltenham, Nottingham, Exeter, Hereford and Gloucester were other towns with coded meanings.²⁶

Then, on 8 May 1925, Ewer’s inadvertence exposed his Paris sub-agent. He published an article on French Morocco in the Daily Herald, under George Slocombe’s byline, which was barely distinguishable from a note to ‘Milton’ intercepted two days earlier. The Home Office issued postal warrants for Slocombe’s private and business addresses. They found that Ewer sent him about £210 a month, of which one-third was spent on bribes to obtain copies of secret documents from the Quai d’Orsay or embassies in Paris. The trusting fealty between Ewer and Slocombe was helped by juvenile matiness. They disdained upper-case typing in their unsigned missives, in which the keynotes were bluff irreverence and Jew-baiting.

In November 1925 Slocombe became infuriated by the Bolshevik – whom he codenamed ‘flivverman’ – who had arrived in Paris to run him. ‘He’s a thin-lipped hebrew who despises politics of which d’ailleurs [anyway] he’s supremely ignorant and is interested only in originals of whatever value,’ Slocombe told Ewer. Flivverman had conveyed Moscow’s dissatisfaction that Ewer’s network seldom obtained original diplomatic documents. ‘He despises the London food service as too costly thinks you are all a lot of reckless spendthrifts is sceptical of your efficiency, and is generally jewish, but without the hebrew wit.’ Ewer replied on 20 November that he had seen ‘the chauffeur’ (his controller at Chesham House): ‘He’s damned angry with the yiddisher brat whom I think he does not love.’ Slocombe added a covering note with the batch sent on 26 November: ‘Yid improves slightly on acquaintance but … entirely preoccupied with first editions regardless of value. hope however to train him. our personal relations cordial enough. inferiority complex characteristic of his race responsible i think for his preliminary rudeness.’²⁷

Moscow sent almost £1.25 million to fund the miners’ strike of 1926, which developed into the General Strike. The consequent industrial disruption and civil strife, ample proof of Soviet-inspired subversion within the British Empire and Moscow’s support of Chinese communist revolutionaries against British control in Shanghai determined the Conservative government to break off diplomatic relations with Moscow. In January 1927 an ARCOS employee named Edward Langston informed Herbert (‘Bertie’) Maw of SIS that he had been instructed to photocopy a secret Signals Training manual obtained from Aldershot barracks. This information was passed to MI5, where Kell and Harker spent weeks checking its authenticity, interviewing the informant and consulting an ARCOS accountant who was a reliable SIS source in ARCOS. The Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, was an impulsive populist well described by his parliamentary colleague Cuthbert Headlam as ‘a miserable creature – a shop-walker attempting to pose as a strong man’. When the situation was explained to him (as the result of an intervention of the Secretary of State for War, Sir Laming Worthington-Evans), Joynson-Hicks initiated a raid on the ARCOS offices, with the intention of finding evidence for a prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.²⁸

Compton Mackenzie, who had worked for SIS in Greece during the war and wrote an insultingly farcical novel Water on the Brain (1933) about Sir Mansfield Cumming’s regime, commented on the ARCOS raid: ‘anti-Russian propaganda was being worked up solely with the object of persuading the country not to vote for the Labour Party at the next election; but the Russian government, less aware than ourselves of the unscrupulousness concealed by the pleasant masks of party politics in Great Britain, might be forgiven for supposing that the mind of the country was being prepared for a declaration of war against the U.S.S.R.’. Mackenzie exaggerated by using the word ‘solely’, but his phrases expressed a widespread and justified suspicion of the motives of Joynson-Hicks, Worthington-Evans and other ministers in Baldwin’s Cabinet.²⁹

Ginhoven and Jane were unable to warn the FPA of the impending raid, because Special Branch received misdirection, when they were deployed, that the target of the swoop was contraband in the London docks. The raid, on 12 May 1927, was hastily prepared and ill-executed. Desmond Morton was one of the SIS officers who participated in the descent on 49 Moorgate: his biographer Gill Bennett depicts uniformed City of London constables, Special Branch men and SIS officers hurtling around in strenuous, uncoordinated activity. One squirted ink on to a portrait of Lenin’s face hanging on the office wall. No one took charge; almost no one knew the extent of their legal powers to seize materials or detain individuals; few searchers knew what documents to seek. The seized items proved ‘inconclusive and confusing’, once they had been translated, Bennett reports. The stolen Signals Training manual, which it was the primary object of the raid to retrieve, was not found.³⁰

‘An immense quantity of police descended on the place, searched the inmates, impounded documents, and for 48 hours have been occupied in smashing up concrete walls in order to break open concealed safes,’ noted Lord Crawford. ‘Secret hiding-places existed all over the building – behind panelling, under floors, in thicknesses of walls; and the place has been throbbing with pneumatic road-breakers, and with expert safe-breakers working acetylene gases.’ The rupture of diplomatic relations with Russia, which was the sequel to the raid, made the ‘Clear out the Reds’ section of the Conservative party rejoice. ‘At last we have got rid of the Bolsheviks,’ a Cabinet minister Lord Birkenhead rejoiced. ‘We have got rid of the hypocrisy of pretending to have friendly relations with this Jewish gang of murderers, revolutionaries and thieves. I breathe quite differently now that we have purged our capital of these unclean and treacherous elements.’ Birkenhead’s cooler-headed colleague Neville Chamberlain considered the raid ‘farcical’.³¹

The raid was a blunder, which breached with disastrous results the intelligence principle of watch and learn. Having failed to find any clinching proof of espionage, subversion or schemes of sabotage, the government, which was set on severing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, had to justify its decision by producing, instead of the incriminating documents expected from the ARCOS raid, communications between the Soviet Mission at Chesham House and Moscow, which had been secretly intercepted by GC&CS. This proved to be a grievous error. As Gill Bennett has summarized the position, ‘The production in Parliament and publication of these documents for all to see in a Command Paper, revealed their source beyond question, leading to the immediate abandonment by the Soviet Foreign Ministry of its methods of encipherment in favour of unbreakable one-time pad systems for its communications; thereafter no high-grade Soviet diplomatic messages could be read by the British authorities.’

Admiral Sinclair, the head of both SIS and GC&CS, deplored this heedless political irresponsibility. ‘The publication of these telegrams automatically stops their source of supply,’ he wrote. ‘It was authorized only as a measure of desperation to bolster up a cause vital to Government, which had the facts been fully known at the time, needed no such costly support.’ Both SIS and MI5 had been watching and learning from ARCOS, which had been a promising source of intelligence for the British secret services. Sinclair characterized the ARCOS raid as an ‘irretrievable loss of an unprecedented opportunity’.³²

After the raid, Ewer sent James Marston, Hayes’s predecessor as general secretary of NUPPO, to visit the former ARCOS employee Edward Langston, who was rightly suspected of being the source of the leak and had just started a new life as a publican at the Dolphin in Uxbridge. When Marston began hanging around the Dolphin, disguised as a tramp, Langston sent a panicky telegram to Harker, addressed to the chambers in the Temple of Harker’s brother-in-law Sidney Russell Cooke, asking to be sent a revolver for self-defence. Rose Edwardes had meanwhile ceased deliveries of material from the FPA to Chesham House. Instead, secrets were written in invisible ink in a book which she or Walter Dale took as couriers to Paris. From thence it went underground to Warsaw and thence to Moscow. The expulsion of the Soviet delegation after the raid left Ewer’s network short of funds. The CPGB secretary Albert Inkpin began travelling to Berlin to collect dollars, which he then took to Paris. There Slocombe arranged for Rose Cohen, or other women couriers, to smuggle the dollars to London, where Holmes laundered their conversion into sterling. But this procedure was too complex, and despite obtaining £100 from Slocombe in Paris, the network had shrivelled by October 1927 for lack of funds.

MI5 investigates the Ewer–Hayes network

Lakey, who with his taste for disguise was by now established in the new identity of Albert Allen, was left in financial straits after the FPA’s diminuendo. Ewer provided £20 to finance his move to Bournemouth, where he managed Dean’s Restaurant at 261a Wimborne Road, Winton. Jane Sissmore suggested a Home Office warrant to monitor Allen’s decline into debt, and a carefully timed approach to debrief him when he needed financial extrication but would not be too expensive to rescue. After an approach by Kell to Sir William Tyrrell, PUS of the Foreign Office, MI5 was granted £250 for this purpose.

The first approach to Allen was made by John Ottaway, the chief of MI5’s observation section B6. Ottaway had been born in 1870 in a Midland Railway cottage at Hitchin in Hertfordshire, the son of a pointsman and signalman. In 1891 he became a constable in the City of London Police, lodging in a police boarding-house in Bishopsgate hugger-mugger with other young constables. He rose fast in the force, for ten years later he was already a police inspector, living in Leyton with a Scottish wife by whom he had at least five daughters. While City of London constables managed the formidable traffic congestion of the financial district, officers like Ottaway tracked forgers, swindlers and embezzlers. City of London detectives tended to be well-groomed men, suggesting the managing clerk of a solicitor’s office, rather than burly, heavy-footed plodders. In 1909 Ottaway was appointed detective superintendent – effective head – of the City of London Police, and his family were allotted apartments in Cloak Lane police station. In 1911 he participated in the search for the murderous anarchist Peter the Painter. During 1916 he joined a Freemasons lodge and received the freedom of the City of London. He was recruited to Kell’s department in 1920, and died in retirement at Bournemouth in 1954 leaving the notable sum of £12,000.³³

In 1942 Ottaway’s successor Harry Hunter described Section B6’s surveillance techniques to Anthony Blunt, who was then working for MI5. ‘His methods are very unscientific and depend above all on the experience and patience of his men,’ Blunt informed Moscow. ‘Recruiting is usually through a personal recommendation from some contact of Hunter’s, or by recommendation of Special Branch.’ The training for watchers was ‘primitive’. Hunter inducted new recruits with a few lectures, but relied on practice making perfect: ‘new men are sent out almost immediately on minor jobs accompanied by more experienced watchers, from whom they learn the methods in the actual process [of] following’.³⁴

Ottaway approached Allen in June 1928 offering to pay £75 for each interview that they had. In July Ottaway took Harker to meet Allen. As Harker reported to Kell, he and Ottaway motored to the Bournemouth suburb where Allen lived. He sat in his car in a small side-road, surrounded by half-built houses and wasteland, while Ottaway, who was masquerading as Mr Stewart of the Anti-Socialist Union, fetched Allen to the car. Harker then explained that he represented Kell, whose position in MI5 Allen knew. He decided that it might inhibit Allen, who talked for over an hour and a half, if he tried to take notes. He knew how often confession is a kind of pride. Interrogators can seem therapeutic: they encourage their subjects to talk about themselves and how they relate to other people; they discourage introspection; they do not lead the conversation by questioning or responses; they try to maintain an appreciative impassivity, never looking too keen, as their targets reminisce, boast, grumble, explain, retell rumours and produce telling anecdotes about other people. ‘I very quickly found’, Harker reported, ‘that we were on quite good terms, and, by treating him rather as my opposite number, found that he was quite ready to talk up to a point. He is, I think, a man who is extraordinarily pleased with himself, and considers that the work which he did for some eight years for the Underground Organisation known as the F.P.A. was admirably carried out, and has not received quite the recognition from its paymasters that Allen considers it deserves.’ Harker recognized Allen’s relief at talking ‘openly about his past life to someone who is not only a sympathetic listener, but also appreciates the technical side, and can thus see what an admirable Intelligence Officer Allen has been’. Harker was careful not to prompt or steer Allen, because ‘entirely spontaneous remarks’ were more useful than answers to questions. ‘Before we got down to talking generally, I explained to Allen that I understood from Mr Stewart that there were names that he did not wish to give away, and that this naturally would considerably impair the value of his information, if it was to be made with reservations.’ Allen reflected for a moment before replying, ‘I do not want to give away my late boss, because personally, I was very fond of him.’ Harker responded, ‘Perhaps I could tell you the name of your late boss, in which case you would not be placed in such an awkward position,’ then wrote the initials ‘W.N.E.’ on a piece of paper, and showed them to Allen asking, ‘That was your late boss, wasn’t he?’ Allen said: ‘Yes, Trilby. Trilby is a good fellow and damned smart!’³⁵

After further corroborative investigation Dale, Jane and Ginhoven were arrested on 11 April 1929; but Scotland Yard was determined to obscure as far as possible the infiltration of its Special Branch. After the three men’s detention Harker went straight to Bournemouth, where he asked Allen to tell all that he knew about the leakages from Scotland Yard, and the names of those responsible. ‘I explained to him that this information was of interest to me if given at once, but that if not given at once I was not prepared to pursue the matter further. I also stated that if ALLEN told the story in a manner which appeared to me to be correct, I would hand over to him the sum of £50, and that if the story which he told me was found to be of use to the authorities, I would consider giving him a further £50, but that, in any case, until I had heard his story, I was prepared to give him nothing.’ Allen accepted Harker’s terms. Before Allen began to tell his story, Harker asked him to note the time (5.10 p.m.) and that he was writing on a blank piece of paper. Harker then wrote, out of Allen’s sight, the names of Ginhoven and Jane together with the time. As Harker reported, ‘I then asked ALLEN to tell me his story straight away without any questions on my part and to preface it by giving me the names of the individuals in Scotland Yard who were known to have been passing on information to the F.P.A. organisation in the past. ALLEN at once gave me the names of GINHOVEN and JANE, whereupon I handed him the paper on which I had written these same names. ALLEN expressed considerable surprise and then continued with his story.’

The watch on Rose Edwardes had meanwhile revealed that she was running a new front for Ewer’s group, the Featherstone Typewriting Bureau in Holborn, which had been started soon after Ewer’s closure of the FPA. Ewer, Holmes, Dale and Edwardes often conferred in Holborn; Dale, under cover of a Shoreditch Borough Council investigator, acted as Ewer’s intermediary with the Special Branch informants. When Allen had ended his account, Harker revealed that the other FPA personnel had continued working together at the typewriting bureau. ‘In all my previous dealings with him, he has always been calm and collected and rather humorous … but on receipt of the information that the show had practically been going on minus himself, his self-control broke down,’ Harker reported. ‘He stamped round the room, swore and expressed the opinion that he, ALLEN, had been double-crossed, even going so far as to say he would give evidence against the — — — who had let him down in this scandalous manner.’ Harker doubted if there was much risk of this. ‘ALLEN is not a fool and he realises that, were he to come into the open with his full story, it would be quite impossible for him to lead subsequently a quiet life in this country, and in order to induce him to come into the open, it would be necessary … to arrange for him to retire to some other country where he could start life again under a new name.’ When Harker paid the £50, Allen ‘went out of his way to express his gratitude to [sic] my generosity in coming down and giving him the chance of telling a story which I had found out already for myself’.³⁶

After his arrest Ginhoven contacted Hayes, who defended him in an article in the Police Review and used him as an intermediary to contact Ewer. Harker became convinced that Moscow had ‘some hold’ over Hayes – perhaps evidence that Hayes had always understood the nature of his men’s work for Ewer although, in Harker’s words, ‘as he began to get on more in the world, HAYES ceased to interest himself in the [undercover] organisation, and latterly apparently had little if anything to do with it’.³⁷

Hayes had made a success of politics in the previous six years. It will be recalled that NUPPO’s strike of 1919 had taken hold only in Merseyside. Hayes, who had worked in youth at a corrugated-iron business at Ellesmere Port, stood unsuccessfully in the Liverpool municipal elections of 1919 as a NUPPO-sponsored Labour candidate and again unsuccessfully for the Liverpool parliamentary constituency of Edge Hill at the next general election. In 1923, when a by-election was called in Edge Hill, he was elected as Liverpool’s first Labour MP. Arriving in London by train to take his seat in the House of Commons, he was hoisted shoulder high and carried across the station concourse by 200 cheering NUPPO members blowing bugles.³⁸

In parliament Hayes was counted as a moderate socialist. Appointed as an opposition whip in the Commons in 1925 and elected to the party’s national executive in 1926, he became a reliable, sapless party hack. As the government’s third most senior whip after Labour’s victory at the general election of 1929, his duties included the compilation of a daily summary for King George V of Commons debates. The Tory MP Sir Henry Betterton, afterwards Lord Rushcliffe, had a story of seeing two Labour whips on a visit to Palestine. ‘Jack Hayes (the Liverpool policeman), now Treasurer of the Household, was very drunk and staggering about on the platform. As a train drew in, his pal urged him to pull himself together and said, “the Treasurer of Palestine is on this train.” Hayes clicked his heels and stood at attention with his hand at the salute and said “Treasurer be b—d. I am His Majesty’s Treasurer”, and added fervently, “Gawd bless ’im”.’³⁹

The general election of May 1929 was approached with heavy apprehension by many Conservatives because it was the first contest with the enlarged franchise of the so-called Flapper Vote. ‘Votes for women at 21 is alarming people up here and there is no doubt that we are taking a big leap in the dark,’ judged Cuthbert Headlam, a Tory whose constituency lay in a northern mining county. He expected ‘a big increase in the Socialist vote. In our pit villages the women are far wilder than the men – they are hopeless to argue with – they listen to the sob stuff with open ears.’⁴⁰

The involvement of a popular Labour whip in a spying scandal during election year would have aroused suspicions that the arrests were a pre-election stunt by intelligence mavericks similar to those behind the Pravda and Zinoviev forgeries. The government was to prove chary in 1934 when the CPGB member Edgar Lansbury, late of the Anglo-Russian Three Ply and Veneer Company, was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act: as the Solicitor General, Somervell, noted, ‘The Cabinet are very apt to be afraid that a quasi-political prosecution will lead to a row.’ Similar squeamishness was one reason for the decision not to prosecute Ginhoven and Jane who, after hearings by a disciplinary board, were dismissed from the police on 2 May (the general election was to be held on 30 May). Another good reason for disciplinary proceedings rather than a criminal trial was to avoid discomfiting public revelations in court. It would have harmed future MI5 investigations if the extent to which Allen had been turned by MI5 and had informed on his former employers, both English and Russian, had been publicized. MI5’s improving tradecraft was saved from public exposure. The agency was enabled to continue watching and learning from its adversaries.⁴¹

Ginhoven and Jane expected demotion to the ranks of sergeant and constable, and were indignant at their dismissal from Special Branch. Harker was disquieted to find that ‘both inside the Special Branch and outside, there is a good deal of sympathy with the two men, who – by the majority ignorant of all … the true facts – are considered to have been punished with unjustifiable severity’. This reaction resulted from ‘the Scotland Yard policy of concealing all the true facts as far as possible. One begins to wonder how far the very clumsy investigation may not have been inspired by a desire to produce such a state of mind with the Disciplinary Board itself!’ Another puzzle is the fate of Sidney Russell Cooke. In July 1930 he was found in the dining-room of his chambers in the Temple dead of an oddly angled gunshot wound to the abdomen. It was unlikely that the wound was accidental; hard to believe that ‘Cookie’ had killed himself; but the possibility that he died as the result of his association with Harker has never been aired.⁴²

Labour’s electoral victory encouraged Ewer, who in the weeks afterwards seemed to the incoming junior FO minister Hugh Dalton to be ‘a tiresome busybody’, lobbying for the restoration of diplomatic relations with Moscow, which had been severed after the ARCOS raid. Disillusion with Marxist orthodoxy came soon. In August Ewer took a reflective holiday in Warsaw and the Carpathian resort of Zakopane. After returning in September, he wrote an article for the communist Labour Monthly in which he argued that Anglo-Russian tensions were not simply an ideological clash of capitalism and communism, but also derived from their nineteenth-century rivalry as Asiatic powers. The piece was denounced as counter-revolutionary and Ewer was expelled from party membership. In a letter to Rajani Palme Dutt, the Stalinist doctrinaire in the CPGB, possibly written in the knowledge that his words would be intercepted and read by MI5, Ewer declared his apostasy. Communists ‘have come to talk only in an idiom, which, once a powerful instrument of thought, has become so worn and so debased that – like the analogous idiom of the Christian Churches – it no longer serves for thinking, but only as a substitute for thinking’. In all disputes ‘they rely upon the repetition of phrases which have come to be as mechanical – and yet, to them, as magically authoritative – as the formulae of the Athanasian creed’. He rejected the authoritarianism which enforces doctrinal conformity, ‘condemns all “deviation” as a moral offence’ and imposes obedience by the ‘apparatus … of confession, of absolution, of excommunication’.⁴³

Slocombe’s success in conducting ‘secret work unmolested for such a long period is proof of the high standard of his efficiency as an espionage agent’, MI5 concluded in 1930. ‘His high standard and reputation as a journalist give to him, as to EWER, most excellent cover for his treasonable activities and unrivalled opportunities for the collection of valuable confidential information.’ In August that year Harker cautioned Sir Arthur Willert (the Foreign Office’s press officer) about Ewer: ‘I considered him by far the most dangerous individual from a S.S. point of view that the Russians had in this country, and that Sir Arthur Willert might rest assured that anything he told Ewer, would go straight to the Soviet Embassy.’ Willert responded by asking unprompted if Harker knew Slocombe. Harker replied that Slocombe was Ewer’s deputy, and ‘very nearly as dangerous’. Willert thought the pair were ‘the ablest and most entertaining journalists he had ever met’, and offered to introduce Harker to them. ‘Though nothing would please me more personally, I did not think it wise at this juncture,’ Harker said.⁴⁴

Around this time Lord Southwood’s profit-driven printing combine Odhams Press bought control of the Daily Herald. Ewer continued as the paper’s foreign editor, in an editorial office in which communist affiliations were less acceptable and commercial considerations had higher ranking. Slocombe, however, left the Daily Herald: he was later foreign editor at the Sunday Express and a Daily Mail special correspondent. Ewer was summoned to a disciplinary meeting with Pollitt and Willie Gallacher in the Lyons tea-shop next to Leicester Square tube station in September 1931. ‘They parted on very bad terms,’ MI5 understood. ‘Ewer stated that from now on he was going to be bitterly anti-Communist.’ Pollitt subsequently described Ewer as ‘a posturing renegade who never loses a single opportunity of getting his poison over’, while the Daily Worker was to denounce him as ‘pro-Nazi’.⁴⁵

During the purges of 1937 Rose Cohen, the former lover of both Ewer and Pollitt, was arrested – apparently to stop her from meeting Pollitt in Moscow and reporting that her husband Max Petrovsky had been arrested as a Trotskyite ‘wrecker’ and was awaiting execution. The Daily Herald made a weasel defence of Soviet maltreatment of her. British officials were disinclined to help this ‘“Bloomsbury Bolshevik” or “parlour pink”’, as they called her: one of them asked, as a marginal joke in her file, ‘I wonder whether Miss Cohen is now solid or liquid?’ Ewer convinced himself that she had been sent to a Siberian camp (in reality she was shot after months of abysmal terror), and felt haunting distress about her fate. He did not know that Pollitt had made strenuous private appeals on her behalf, and therefore found it unforgivable that CPGB leaders knew how hard she had worked for ‘the Cause’ but, as he told MI5, never intervened on her behalf.⁴⁶

In the late 1940s Ewer worked with the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department in countering communist propaganda and apologetics. He broadcast for the BBC and wrote commentaries expressing the bitterness of a betrayed and disillusioned idealist. Younger diplomatic correspondents, who consulted their amiable doyen ‘Trilby’ for interpretations of official opacities, never guessed that this urbane man had once been an inflammatory communist zealot. It was suggested in September 1949 by Ann Glass and Jane Archer that given the leakages attributed by Soviet defectors to highly placed government circles, Ewer and Slocombe should be questioned in the hope of establishing whether some of their sources in 1919–29 had since reached senior positions. The task was allotted to Maxwell Knight, a former naval midshipman, preparatory school teacher and journalist, who during the 1930s had become MI5’s pre-eminent agent-runner. Knight invited Ewer to lunch at the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair in January 1950.

For the first hour they exchanged ‘trivialities about the war and the comparative efficiency of the German and Russian Intelligence Services’. When lunch was over, Ewer said jokily, ‘Well now, disclose the great mystery.’ Finally, some quarter of a century after MI5 had first rumbled his network, one of its officers confronted him. ‘He had no inkling of the real purpose of the interview,’ Knight reported.

As he is a very highly strung person, in spite of his experience and undoubted intelligence, I thought it might be a good idea to deal him a rapid blow at the outset. I therefore said to him that what I really wanted to talk to him about was the Federated Press of America. This certainly took him by surprise, and it was on the tip of his tongue to pretend some difficulty in remembering what this was; but as he hesitated, I took out from my dispatch case a rather formidable bundle of typescript, whereupon, with a slightly self-conscious smile he changed his tone and said, ‘Oh yes, of course, I can remember the Federated Press of America very well.’

Knight made clear to Ewer that ‘there were “no strings” at all attached to this interview … and that if he felt he did not wish to discuss the matter with me, he had only to put on his hat and go home, and there would be no hard feelings on my side. I explained that, on the other hand, if he would be kind enough to discuss the case with me, I felt it might be extremely helpful.’

Knight explained that MI5 ‘made a habit of going over what might be termed “classic cases” in the light of new information or the general trend of international politics, as by doing so we not only frequently re-educated ourselves, but also obtained new information and clearer interpretations of matters which were originally obscure’. Ewer listened attentively, and nodded his agreement. Knight said that two or three recent cases indicated that there might be persons in high government positions who were giving information to the Russians. Ewer agreed to help, with the reservation that he felt hesitant about naming individuals. ‘I passed lightly over this, saying that I quite understood,’ Knight recorded. Ewer talked slowly and quietly, as if weighing every word. He seemed to Knight evasive, forgetful, ‘obstinately vague’ and sometimes ‘unconvincing’. He claimed that, with the exception of Slocombe’s activities in Paris, his group did not touch espionage, but only undertook counter-espionage. The limit of their interest was the actions and plans of the British intelligence services against Soviet and CPGB activities in Britain. This was hard to disprove (certainly in a criminal trial), but sophistical.⁴⁷

There was no official discrediting of Ewer. His fifty years of diplomatic journalism was marked in 1959 by his investiture as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Colleagues hailed him as a fearless anti-communist who had once quenched Andrei Vyshinsky’s verbal outpourings at a Moscow press conference. Thirty years after the arrest of Dale, Ginhoven and Jane, their spymaster was honoured with a special pass to the Foreign Office which was valid for the rest of his life.

Years later Brian Stewart, the SIS officer who nearly succeeded Maurice Oldfield as Chief in 1978, declared that objectivity was the first necessity for successful intelligence work. ‘Report nothing but the unvarnished truth and, as far as possible, the whole truth. Understand, but do not pander to, the prejudices and preconceptions of the customer.’ Stewart was equally emphatic about the assessment of intelligence material: ‘beware of intellectual laziness, mirror imaging, prejudice, racial or professional arrogance, bias, groupthink, and the sin of assuming that the future will develop, broadly speaking, along the same lines as the past’. These commandments were the result of a century’s experience by the intelligence services, including MI5’s treatment of the Ewer–Hayes network. MI5 officers showed themselves as shrewd, efficient and decent in their questioning and turning of informants. Contrary to the caricature, they did not behave like clumsy oafish schoolboys playing rough sport. Effective counter-espionage needs tact and patience. Mistakes occur when time is short, or opponents are demonized. Although MI5 has often been depicted as blimpish, rigid, reactionary and thick, in reality its ductile liberalism ought to impress. There was a culture of respecting individuals. Secret policing was not oppressive. The security services were usually more considerate than Fleet Street reporters in minding people’s feelings.⁴⁸

CHAPTER 5
The Cipher Spies

The Soviet Union’s earliest spies inside the Foreign Office are the subject of this chapter, which is avowedly revisionist. The security failings of the Office and of the intelligence services have been treated in the terminology of class for over sixty years. Public schoolboys supposedly protected one another in obtuse, complacent and snobbish collusion. The secrets of Whitehall were lost on the playing-fields of Eton, so the caricature runs. This, however, is an unreal presentation. The first Foreign Office men to spy for Moscow – in the years immediately after the disintegration of the Ewer–Hayes network – were members of its Communications Department. That department was an amalgam of Etonians, cousins of earls, half-pay officers, the sons of clergymen and of administrators in government agencies, youths from Lower Edmonton and Finchley, lower-middle-class men with a knack for foreign languages. Their common ingredient was masculinity. The predominant influence on the institutional character of the department, its management and group loyalty, its fortitude and vulnerability, all derived from its maleness. As in the Foreign Office generally, it was not class bias but gender exclusivity that created the enabling conditions for espionage. The Communications Department spies Ernest Oldham and John King, and the later spy-diplomatists Burgess, Cairncross and Maclean, had colleagues and chiefs who trusted and protected them, because that was how – under the parliamentary democracy that was settled in 1929 – public servants in a department of state prided themselves on behaving to their fellow men.

The Communications Department

Reader Bullard reflected while Consul General in Leningrad in 1934: ‘Schools are not meant to give boys a good time, but to teach them to be happy together even when they are not having a good time.’ The office culture of the Communications Department was an extension of school: the staff there tried to be cheery in a hard place, valued camaraderie and professed individual self-respect as their creed; its vulnerabilities were easy for Oldham and King to exploit. Their male colleagues swapped banter and chaff, forgave and covered each other’s mistakes. They aspired to be tolerant, unflappable and conscientious. The departmental spirit precluded grudges and doubts among colleagues. They were not social equals, but they found their common ground as men. As a nationality, the English had too high and yet too juvenile a reckoning of themselves. ‘The strength of the British lies in never quite growing up,’ Vansittart, PUS of the Foreign Office, said with satisfaction: ‘the cause of our mercifully arrested development is that we have not been liable to introspection.’¹

Boyish ideas about good sports were ubiquitous. The deputy governor of Parkhurst prison during the detention there of the spy Wilfred Macartney was nicknamed ‘Jumbo’ and was popular with most inmates. In 1930, on Jumbo’s last Sunday at Parkhurst, after his promotion to be governor elsewhere, the prisoners held a farewell concert to honour him. ‘I’ve found you fellows a jolly fine set of sports in playing the game,’ he told them after the concert in his pronounced Oxford accent. ‘Cheer up, and don’t forget that the game is not over till the stumps are drawn or the final whistle blown.’ Although these virile sentiments may seem laughable in the twenty-first century, in the early 1930s they meant the world for many men: Jumbo was cheered for a full five minutes by the Parkhurst prisoners.²

The office culture of the Communications Department is richly evoked in the memoirs of George Antrobus. ‘Bozo’ Antrobus was born in 1892, the only child of an official in the Crown Agents for the Colonies. He was educated at Westminster School before reading history at Oxford. He lived as a bachelor with his parents a short walk from Leamington Spa station, and commuted daily by train. He appeared punctually at the Foreign Office in suits shiny with age, with a tattered umbrella and greasy bowler hat. He liked musty smells: wet straw, tar, coal-dust, oil, dead rats, fried fish, sweat and spilt beer are all praised in his memoirs. He was an obsessive compiler of railway statistics whose tabular reports on the punctuality of trains are still used by train-spotters today.

Antrobus joined the Foreign Office in 1915 as a temporary clerk in the Parliamentary Department. This designation was a classic of misdirection, because the department had sole charge of the urgent, heavy wartime traffic in ciphered messages. He soon learnt the skills necessary for decoding or encrypting messages at top speed. By 1917 he had some forty temporary wartime colleagues, including ‘gentlemen of leisure’, the filmstar Athole Stewart and the portrait-painter John Collier. Antrobus was one of the minority who stayed in government service when, in 1919, a new Communications Department to handle coded messages was organized. He was at the same time appointed a King’s Messenger.

King’s Messengers were the men – often ex-officers – who carried confidential material to and fro between the Foreign Office and its embassies and legations in Europe. They travelled by train and steamer, bearing a red passport marked courier du Roi, transporting versions of Post Office bags, which were known as ‘crossed bags’ because their labels bore a conspicuous black cross. Under the 1919 arrangement of the Communications Department, these couriers spent the intervals between their European journeys working on encoding and deciphering in the Office. This was craft work, for which they were adequately but not lavishly paid. Members of the department were ranked with diplomatic staff, but unlike other officials they were not pensionable, and received on retirement lump sums computed on the length of their service. Their status in the building was ambiguous, their financial position felt precarious and these anomalies intensified their esprit de corps.

Outgoing Office telegrams were enciphered and incoming messages were deciphered in Room 22. It was a gaunt and lofty space lit by two vast, rattling windows looking northwards. The furniture was hard and plain: half a dozen tables, a dozen chairs, two ranges of cupboards 9 feet high. All was fuggy and frenetic. The clerks were ‘a hard-bitten lot’, recalled Patrick Reilly. They chain-smoked pipes and cigarettes, working in pairs, one calling aloud from the codebook and the other transcribing the message, at a speed of thirty codewords per minute when encoding and fifty words per minute when decoding – all this hour after hour. The pressure left them, said Antrobus, ‘sweating like pigs, with hair awry and shirt-sleeves rolled up, cheeks aflame and collars pulp’. Their finished work was taken to a cacophonous adjoining room, where it was typed on noisy machines using wax stencils rather than paper to enable mass duplication. A careworn official checked every document for its sense: ‘Take this back to Room 22, and ask them what the hell they mean by this tripe,’ he would shout when he found errors, shouting because behind him dispatch boxes were being slammed shut, before being taken by special messenger to the King, to every Cabinet minister, to departmental heads.³

Because of the incoming and outgoing coded messages, Room 22 had as clear a sense of international events as any other section in the Foreign Office. The latest news of treaty negotiations, conference adjournments, troop movements, armaments contracts, political chicanery, financial hanky-panky, sudden deaths, reprisal raids, incendiary speeches and ultimatums was decoded in that austere, noisy department.

Before the European war the Office had resembled ‘a small family party’, recalled Don Gregory, who joined the Diplomatic Service in 1902 and resigned in 1928. But the European war and subsequent worldwide dislocation required huge expansion of Office responsibilities, activities and personnel. ‘Nowadays,’ Gregory lamented in 1929, ‘with its multifarious new activities, its ramifications, divisions and sub-divisions, its clerks and short-hand typists running here, there and everywhere, its constant meetings and interdepartmental conferences, its innumerable visitors, it is tending to resemble a large insurance office or, in times of stress, a central railway station on a bank holiday.’ With the exception of Lord Curzon, foreign secretaries and junior ministers in the Office were notably honeyed in their dealings with officials before 1929. Increasingly thereafter, complained Vansittart, diplomats encountered political chiefs ‘seemingly fresh from elevenses of vinegar’.⁴

In reaction to this hectic and unmanageable environment, some officials tried to rehabilitate the pace and temper of Edwardian England in the Office. ‘Its keynote was Harmony rather than Hustle,’ said Antrobus. Efforts to revive pre-war poise were personified by the Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain, whom Lord Crawford described in 1927 as ‘urbane, a little more mysterious and stand-offish than most Foreign Secretaries, and moreover getting into the bad habit of making French gestures with very English-shaped hands’. George Slocombe, who met Chamberlain in Geneva and Locarno, likened him to Talleyrand striving to restore ‘the old douceur de vivre’ to a continent rent by war and revolution: ‘from his early readings in European history, Austen Chamberlain had formed, entirely in the tradition of Talleyrand, his own highly personal conception of diplomacy as the guardian of the necessary amenities of life, the custodian of the gracious conventions, the urbanities’.⁵

The chief of the Communications Department from 1925 until 1940 was Harold Eastwood, a product of Eton and Trinity, Cambridge, and brother of a Conservative MP. Eastwood believed that his staff would work best if he trusted them to do their jobs without his fretful interference: ‘Everyone was treated as a man of honour; he had his work to do, and if he did it well and quickly, it mattered not the least how he did it or, within limits, when he did it.’ There was less change of staff in Communications than in any other Foreign Office department: they knew every speck of one another’s capacity and temperament.⁶

Eastwood’s deputy Ralph Cotesworth was the son of an Anglican chaplain in Switzerland. His health had collapsed in 1915 while he was a commander in the Royal Navy, and when, after twenty years of encroaching illness, he died in 1937 aged forty-nine, his lungs were found to be rotted away. Cotesworth became a King’s Messenger in 1920, grew expert in the use of ciphers, and was in 1925 chosen as Eastwood’s deputy. Antrobus noted his ‘naval ideas of discipline and duty, large heart and quick sympathy’. Another colleague said with an affectionate tease that Cotesworth’s conscientiousness was ‘appalling’: ‘his quasi-boyish gaiety and his shrewdly humorous outlook’ contributed to the mood of Room 22.⁷

Algernon Hay, head of the cipher-room from 1919 until 1934, believed in ‘the tonic effect of crusted jokes’. He tried to unify his socially variegated staff by managing them in a ‘gentlemanly’ way. His successor as cipher-room chief was Antrobus, who averred: ‘Clever men, strong men, brave men, even good men, are all more readily come by than your man of the world with a conscience.’ This was all of a piece with a phrase of T. E. Lawrence’s to describe the British Empire: ‘the Power which had thrown a girdle of humour and strong dealing around the world’.⁸

Men found different ways to slacken the tension of a strenuous day in the Office. Curzon, as Foreign Secretary, prepared for his working day by going to Christie’s auction house and appraising the exhibited artworks that were going under the hammer. Vansittart spent the hour after work every evening playing fierce bridge at the St James’s Club. In the Underground railway carriage taking him home, Sir Owen O’Malley sat knitting woollen socks with purled ribs and basket-stitched heels. Sir Archie Clark Kerr liked talking and thinking about sex. Sir Maurice Peterson never stopped puffing his pipe, and enjoyed living in a converted pub in Belgravia called the Triumphal Chariot. (Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1941–5, liked to start his long days with an action-packed Daily Mirror strip cartoon about a private investigator, Buck Ryan.) The encryption and decryption clerks, who worked long hours without break, unwound by chain-smoking and hard drinking. They resorted to the Mine, a drinking-hole in the basement of the Foreign Office run by the head office-keeper and his wife. The bar resembled a shabby French estaminet with just a pair of broad planks resting on upturned barrels. The tolerance of alcoholism in the Office went to the top: it was said in 1929 that Tyrrell, recently retired as PUS, ‘has not done a stroke of work for years, and has sometimes been so drunk that J. D. Gregory had to smuggle him out of the office’.⁹

Ernest Oldham

One of the leading figures in Room 22 and the Mine was Ernest Oldham. Born in 1894 in Lower Edmonton, he was the son of schoolteachers. Most of his education was at Tottenham County School, although he spent some months at an obscure sixth-form boarding school near Staines in Middlesex. In 1914, aged nineteen, he joined the Chief Clerk’s Department at the Foreign Office. As a junior officer on the Western Front in 1917–18 he endured bombardment and poison-gas attacks amid the trenches, dug-outs, shell-holes and mine-craters. He was never one of those Englishmen who were reconciled to the carnage of the Western Front by leaving wreaths of Haig poppies at the base of war memorials.

In his determination to rise from the ranks, Oldham made himself into a proficient French-speaker. His bilingualism resulted in his appointment in 1919 as a clerk at the Paris Peace Conference. During his six months in the French capital he mastered its streets and by-ways, which was to prove helpful when years later he needed to escape surveillance. After returning from Paris, Oldham applied for admission into the Consular Service. There seemed a chance of his appointment as Third Consul at Rio de Janeiro, for in addition to good French he had reasonable knowledge of Spanish, Italian and German. After some hesitation, he was rejected by the promotion board in 1920, but offered a post in the Communications Department. This was insufficient salve, for Oldham aspired to the social cachet of the Consular Service.

Like other men in the department, Oldham doubled as a King’s Messenger. He visited Constantinople and other Balkan capitals as well as closer destinations. In May 1922 he was sent by air – travelling in a fragile single-engine biplane – to deliver a document intended for King George V, who was visiting war cemeteries in Belgium. These travels made him adept at buying and selling foreign currencies at good rates. The offices of every embassy or legation in a foreign capital were alike, with similar stationery, filing cabinets, pencils, punches and calendars and the same red copies of the Foreign Office List and Who’s Who, as Owen O’Malley recounted. ‘In the residential part of the house too, though the servants may be white or black or yellow, there will be the same kindly discipline, the same Lux [soap], Ronuk [floor-polish], chintz, pot-plants, water-colours, large bath towels and Bromo [a patent cure for hangovers and upset stomachs], which the Englishman carries round the world like a snail its shell: which form indeed the temple and fortress of his soul.’ To these familiar surroundings King’s Messengers brought office talk from Whitehall and from other European capitals, and exchanged it for local gossip. All the staff, from the Ambassador downwards, pumped Oldham about diplomatic trends, promotions, political currents and whatever was afoot in London.¹⁰

Oldham was given charge of managing the routes for King’s Messengers across Europe. The location of the League of Nations in Geneva required his frequent visits to Switzerland, either as a courier of documents or as an encrypter and decrypter. For ten years meetings of the League there were held in the Hôtel Victoria. ‘By day the hotel was a babel of strange sounds,’ as Slocombe remembered: ‘conversations in many languages, the machine-gun rattle of typewriters, the shrilling of telephone bells, and the whine of the mimeograph machines multiplying copies of speeches just made in the drab hall beyond the faded plush of those Victorian sitting-rooms’. At night there was heavy drinking and poker. It was into this mêlée that the boy from Tottenham County School was pitched.¹¹

A change in Oldham’s circumstances came in 1927 when, falsely describing his father as a gentleman and giving the Foreign Office as his home address, he married a prosperous Australian widow twelve years his senior. With his wife’s money, they bought 31 Pembroke Gardens (near Kensington High Street) and employed two housemaids and a chauffeur for their Sunbeam coupé. Oldham filled his wardrobe with monogrammed clothes, and could afford to drink spirits more deeply than ever. ‘He arrayed himself, if not in purple, at least in fine linen, and fared sumptuously,’ said Antrobus. ‘So sumptuously … that he contracted delirium tremens.’ As an auspicious sequel to this marriage, Oldham was promoted to be Staff Officer of the Communications Department in 1928.¹²

In October 1929 Gregori Bessedovsky, the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires in Paris, who had been ordered back to Moscow for punishment after being denounced for criticizing Stalin’s maltreatment of the peasantry, fled over the embassy wall and was granted asylum by the French government. Maurice Oldfield, a future head of SIS, used to say that ‘defectors are like grapes; the first pressings are always the best’. Wilfred (‘Biffy’) Dunderdale, SIS’s station head in Paris, who had spent his boyhood in Odessa and spoke Russian fluently, interviewed Bessedovsky three days after his defection, but did not press him well. Dunderdale discounted Bessedovsky’s material because he found him sharp, ‘but neither frank nor principled’. Although Dunderdale had a reputation for shrewdness, he was prone to SIS’s cultural contempt for foreigners. ‘British intelligence’, recalled Elizabeth Poretsky, ‘appeared to consider the Soviets mere rabble.’¹³

Early reports of Bessedovsky’s revelations were garbled, but indicated that some months earlier an Englishman had called at the Russian embassy offering secret cipher books of the British government. The ‘walk-in’, as such unheralded visitors were called, was seen by the OGPU Director Vladimir Ianovich (born Wilenski), a coarse man who had previously been a dock-worker. Ianovich’s wife managed OGPU finances in Paris (she received large dollar bills in the diplomatic mail, and exchanged them for francs). Her impersonations of a Hungarian countess in Berlin, of a Persian diplomat’s wife in Vienna and of a diamond merchant’s widow in Prague were admired by the illegals, although her husband was not. Ianovich took away the codebooks, saying that he had to show them to the Ambassador, but gave them instead to his wife, who had a brightly lit room for taking photographs and a well-equipped darkroom for developing them. After she had copied the codebooks, Ianovich – either suspecting an agent provocateur’s trap or wishing to save OGPU money – threw them back at the walk-in Englishman and ejected him from the embassy in an insulting fashion.

SIS continued to assess Bessedovsky as shifty, talkative and imprudent. This was not far wrong: years later he tried to make money by forging the journals of Maxim Litvinov, the former Foreign Affairs Commissar of the Soviet Union. Accordingly, in 1929, Special Branch did not investigate his tale of purloined codebooks. Norman Ewer’s Daily Herald on 29 October pooh-poohed Bessedovsky’s information in a manner that suited Russian interests: it depicted the fugitive diplomat as an opportunist whose stories were derided in Whitehall. If leakages had occurred, the Communications Department was a likely source, and its Staff Officer, Oldham, should have led an investigation. He was however both the walk-in with the codebooks and absent undergoing treatment for alcoholism from mid-October until March 1930. It can be surmised that his collapse began with a panicky binge after Bessedovsky’s story appeared in London newspapers.

Bessedovsky’s warning was duplicated in 1930 by Georges Agabekov, then the most senior OGPU officer to have defected. The English parents of his young girlfriend complained to the French authorities that he was a seducer who had alienated her loyalty to them: he was deported to Belgium (more on grounds of public morality than national security) in July 1930. After his deportation, Jasper Harker, head of MI5’s B Division (investigations and inquiries), Guy Liddell of Special Branch and Jane Sissmore, who was MI5’s specialist in Russian community activity, agreed that Agabekov and his correspondence should be put under surveillance. Liddell was sent to interview him in Brussels, and maintained telephonic contact with Sissmore while in the Belgian capital. Agabekov was pressed about the Soviet agent who was obtaining Foreign Office secrets (now known to be the Rome embassy servant, Francesco Constantini). He described OGPU’s network of agents and their operations to Liddell. He also reported that Moscow received copies of the secret exchanges between the Foreign Office and the High Commissioner in Egypt, Lord Lloyd. This renewed confirmation of a breach in coded traffic was reported to the Foreign Office. It is known that the Communications Department led an internal investigation, but the identity and report of the investigators are unknown. Agabekov made similar revelations in newspaper articles and in two essays which were published together in a garbled, facetious English edition in 1931.

The truth behind the tales of Bessedovsky and Agabekov was that in July 1929 Oldham had gone to the Russian embassy in Paris with two books bound in red buckram containing Foreign Office, Colonial Office and Dominions Office ciphers (in some accounts the codebooks were those of the FO and of the India Office). He presented himself as a typesetter called ‘Charlie Scott’, disguising his status by speaking bad French, and demanding first £50,000 and then £10,000 for his material. ‘Charlie Scott’ was paid $11,000 in two instalments, and thereafter $1,000 a month. Oldham averted insolvency, and maintained his pretensions in Kensington, by making renewed visits to Paris in order to deliver secret material, which the Russians found patchy and low-grade. They did not trust him enough to risk giving him a handler in London who might be trapped. Oldham protected his true identity from his Paris handler, Dimitri Bystrolyotov.

After the ARCOS raid in 1927 London had severed official relations with Moscow, and ordered all diplomats and trade representatives to leave the country within ten days. OGPU thereupon ordained that only illegals could be used in Britain, but that there was to be no illegal residency there. All activities had to be run from the European mainland, usually from Amsterdam or Paris, but under the control of the Berlin rezidentura. Although Anglo-Soviet diplomatic relations were restored by the incoming Labour government in 1929, Moscow remained doubtful about sending permanent illegals to London, and continued running operations there from other European capitals.

Bystrolyotov was born in Crimea in 1901, the son of a village schoolmistress: he knew nothing of his paternity. In 1919 he smuggled himself into Turkey in the coal-hole of a ship, worked as a stoker, and got some education at the American College for Christian Youth. He had a nervous breakdown after witnessing massacres of Armenians, worked for the Red Cross in Prague and then as a cemetery worker. Around 1925 he was recruited to OGPU with the cover of a post in the Soviet trade mission in Prague and the task of collecting secret material on armaments production at the Franco-Czech Škoda factory in Pilsen. He was a clever linguist and perceptive student of character: his black eyes and dashing masculinity brought him success as a vorón (a ‘raven’, or male seducer of women with access to confidential material). In 1930 he was transferred to the illegal rezidentura in Berlin headed by Basil Bazarov (born Shpak), whose OGPU codename was KIN. The Greek Consul in Danzig, an Odessa-born swindler and drugs-smuggler, provided Bystrolyotov with a Greek passport and the false identity of a Salonika businessman, Alexander Gallas.

Bystrolyotov was instructed to elicit the identity of ‘Charlie Scott’, who was being run under the codename of ARNO. To this end, he adopted the alias of a Hungarian count, Lajos József Perelly, and went to Budapest to learn his part. He introduced himself to ‘Scott’ in a Paris restaurant as a nobleman who had been ruined by the war and who performed services for OGPU in return for an income that enabled him to keep caste. He felt that he was more acceptable to ‘Scott’ posing as a Hungarian hireling than he would have been as a Russian or Ukrainian communist. After months of patience, ‘Perelly’ discovered that ‘Scott’ was staying in a particular Paris hotel, where his luggage was stamped with the monogram ‘EHO’.

The scene shifted from Paris to Geneva. When Slocombe depicted Geneva as Europe’s ‘most secretive city’, he was indulging in an old spy’s misdirection. It was hard to keep secrets there. The lifeless official verbiage and stiff protocol surrounding League of Nations sessions there encouraged men to unbend with confidential admissions and gossipy indiscretions when they went off duty in bars and brasseries. ‘A vast concourse of politicians … is bound to bring all the ragtag and bobtail of the earth sniffing at their heels,’ as Antrobus recorded. ‘All the paraphernalia of leakage on a grand scale there assembled … the place swarmed with spies and secret agents who, I imagine, got what they wanted handed to them on a plate.’¹⁴

Bystrolyotov @ Gallas @ Perelly arrived in Geneva for a League meeting in, it seems, July 1931. He deduced that ‘EHO’ would attend the League sessions, found that a man with those initials was staying at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage, spotted ‘Scott’ in the hotel bar and sat next to him there in silence. ‘Scott’ looked aghast on catching sight of ‘Perelly’ and realized that OGPU had broken his anonymity. Bystrolyotov intended to consolidate his advantage by visiting Oldham at home and asserting OGPU control over him, but when he called at Pembroke Gardens in September with false credentials identifying him as a Dresden banker, Lucy Oldham, looking tense, explained that her husband was away from home. The courteous foreigner invited her for lunch at the Ritz. Amid the restaurant’s gilt and mirrors she revealed that Oldham was undergoing an expensive cure for alcoholism in a sanatorium in Suffolk called Rendlesham Hall.

She besought ‘Count Perelly’ to visit Oldham at Rendlesham, and insisted that he take the spare bedroom in Pembroke Gardens. On the night before Oldham’s return home in October, Lucy Oldham rolled up the hem of her dress, spread her legs and begged the Count not to waste time. He obliged, and reported his performance to Moscow, where the codename of MADAM was bestowed on her. Bystrolyotov came to suspect that she had instigated her husband’s approach to the Russian embassy in Paris in 1929, and that she had encouraged the subsequent espionage as a way of perpetuating their Kensington prosperity.

OGPU in Moscow and the rezidentura in Berlin continued to assess Oldham as too dicey to risk agents receiving material direct from him in London. Instead, he was required to travel to Bonn, Ostend, Paris, Calais, Trouville, Madrid, Amsterdam and Switzerland for handovers of purloined documents. Throughout he insisted that he was only an intermediary, acting on behalf of the material’s true source. Oldham became such a valued source that Bystrolyotov was joined in London in 1932 by two well-tried agents. Joseph Leppin @ PEEP @ PEPIKA, a young Prague journalist who was then working under Boris Bazarov in the Berlin rezidentura, was fluent in French, English and German, had intellectual and artistic interests and was used by Bystrolyotov as the courier carrying Oldham’s product out of England on its journey to Moscow. Leppin was married for ‘operational purposes’ to a fellow Czech agent, Erica Weinstein (ERIKA), who collaborated with him on operations for Bystrolyotov. Bazarov (presenting himself as an Italian communist called da Vinci) and Theodore Maly also came to London to help in running Oldham.¹⁵

Theodore Stephanovich Maly @ Theodore Mally @ Tivadar Mály @ Willy Broschart @ Paul Hardt @ Peters @ der Lange @ Mann is the most famous of the illegals. Born in 1894, the son of a provincial official in the Hungarian Ministry of Finance, he trained for priesthood in a seminary before his military mobilization at the age of twenty-one. He was an ensign-cadet by the time of his capture by tsarist forces in 1916. After gruelling train journeys, he was held in a prisoner-of-war camp at Astrakhan by the Caspian Sea, and later was transferred to the frontier town of Orenburg at the southern end of the Ural Mountains. ‘I lost my faith in God,’ he later said of his incarceration, ‘and when the revolution broke out I joined the Bolsheviks. I broke with my past completely. I was no longer a Hungarian, a priest, a Christian, even anyone’s son … I became a communist.’ Maly was a Chekist for ten years before joining INO in about 1931. He could pass as Austrian, Hungarian, German or Swiss. As described by his biographer William Duff, a special agent of the FBI who specialized in Soviet bloc espionage, Maly had ‘a tanned and strangely aesthetic face highlighted by deep-set but sad, almost childlike eyes’. For Elizabeth Poretsky, ‘“Teddy” … combined extreme sweetness with a great deal of determination, so that one felt at ease and protected in his company.’ OGPU admired Maly’s abilities, but felt perturbed by his outbursts of drunken and indiscreet remorse. They forced him to marry a woman whom he disliked because she kept him under watchful guard and kept him from binge-drinking.¹⁶

During the Lausanne Conference of June–July 1932, at which the British, French and German governments discussed the suspension of German reparation payments, Oldham provided Bystrolyotov with coded messages, dispatches and even a British passport bearing the invented name of ‘Sir Robert Grenville’. The strain of duplicity drove Oldham into dipsomania. His department began investigating the disappearance of a codebook from a basement safe, in a part of the building where Oldham had been seen when he was on sick-leave. He was reported for using the Office’s ambassadorial side-entrance so as to avoid the doorkeepers who maintained security at the main doors. Other reports had him in a drunken stupor. On 30 September 1932 he was summoned to a disciplinary meeting, confronted with a list of transgressions, including unexplained visits to the cipher-room and losing confidential material which he claimed to have taken home. He was asked to resign without any gratuity. Like other members of his department, he had no pension rights.

Oldham did not admit to the illegals that he had been sacked. On 18 October, avid for more OGPU money, he flew with his wife from Croydon aerodrome to Berlin for a rendezvous with ‘Perelly’. During their meeting he was so helplessly drunk that he could hardly move or speak, and vomited. MADAM subsequently revealed to her partner in adultery, ‘Perelly’, that Oldham had been fired from his job. She added that she was leaving him, would sell the house and go to work in a French resort either as a lady companion or, if that failed, as a prostitute. Just before Christmas 1932 Oldham tried to strangle her when she refused to give him brandy. He was sent for another cure at Rendlesham.

After drying out, Oldham revisited his old department to jaw with friends there, notably Thomas Kemp, who was in charge of the King’s Messengers’ itineraries, and a clerk named Raymond Oake. He had a further excuse for visits, because he had been allowed, incomprehensibly to modern thinking, to keep a safety-deposit box in the building after his dismissal. He used the pretext of examining personal papers in the box as the justification for two or three further visits. One evening in May 1933, he arrived at 6 p.m., loitered around Room 22, his speech slurred with drink, waiting for other clerks to go home. He asked for the combination number of the safe where keys were kept at night and briefly got custody of the keys to the cupboards known as ‘presses’ containing confidential material. Those ex-colleagues who saw him felt a mixture of pity, embarrassment, annoyance and suspicion at his conduct, but the blokey ‘good form’ of the department meant that his manoeuvres were watched but not challenged. During one of these forays he obtained documents which he sold in Paris to the Soviets in May 1933. He and his wife commuted by air between London and Paris during May and June to see Bystrolyotov. OGPU became so alarmed by the likelihood of Oldham’s exposure that all illegal operatives, including Bazarov and Maly, were withdrawn from England.

On 13 July 1933, desperate for OGPU money and under incitement from Bystrolyotov, Oldham returned to the Office in an attempt to lay hands on the cipher codes for the following year. He arrived just before 6 p.m., ostensibly to see Kemp who had already gone home, got hold of a set of keys left momentarily in the door, rushed to the lavatory and there took wax impressions of them. When he reappeared with the keys, he was sweating and his hands shook. Wax was found on the wards of the keys. Eastwood reported the incident next day to Sir Vernon Kell of MI5, who set Harker on the case. Oldham’s correspondence was intercepted, his telephone was tapped and he was put under John Ottaway’s surveillance. Bystrolyotov met Oldham on a bench in Hyde Park, and urged him to try again to get into the safes to obtain up-to-date codes. At lunchtime on Sunday 16 July Oldham was refused admittance when he called again at the Office.

Some days later he was heard in a bugged telephone call to say that he was going to Vienna. He evaded his watchers by instead flying from Croydon to Geneva. From there he hastened to Interlaken, where he met Bystrolyotov calling himself ‘Perelly’ and Bazarov calling himself ‘da Vinci’. After returning from Basel to Croydon on 4 August, Oldham was traced by Ottaway to the Jules Hotel at 85–86 Jermyn Street, St James’s, and tracked to a nearby pub, the Chequers, off a narrow alley joining Duke Street, St James’s to Mason’s Yard. At the poky bar in the Chequers, two MI5 operatives, Herbert (‘Con’) Boddington, a bookie’s son who had been Chief of Dublin Special Branch targeting the IRA in the early 1920s, and Thomas (‘Tar’) Robertson, set to work on Oldham. Robertson (born in Sumatra in 1909) had only recently joined MI5 after working in the City, and was known to his new colleagues as ‘Passion Pants’ because he wore Seaforth tartan trews at headquarters. ‘Con’ and ‘Passion Pants’ got Oldham hopelessly drunk in the Chequers, put him to bed in the Jules Hotel and searched his belongings while he was comatose.¹⁷

Oldham was not questioned or detained, although it was obvious to his watchers that he was falling apart. MI5 wished to learn from watching his activities and contacts. Probably the Foreign Office shrank from discovering the extent to which diplomatic secrets had been broached. Still striving to earn OGPU money, dosing himself with paraldehyde (a foul-smelling, addictive sedative taken by alcoholics and insomniacs), Oldham finally broke. He went to his former marital home at 31 Pembroke Gardens, now vacant and unfurnished, and gassed himself in the kitchen. The suspicions of some of his Room 22 colleagues and Russian handlers that he had been killed by MI5 seem unwarranted. In retrospect Antrobus despised his department’s first traitor. ‘A clever little upstart,’ he called him, ‘with a face like a rat and a conscience utterly devoid of scruples.’¹⁸

Until Oldham’s attempted break-in, members of the Foreign Office were often visited at work by friends. After 1933, however, visitors were filtered by policemen and doorkeepers: once admitted, they were escorted everywhere by hardy factotums. The locks and keys of the ‘presses’ were changed. Algernon Hay was retired from overseeing Room 22 in 1934. His replacement Antrobus thought of his staff as a ‘little brotherhood’ of ‘learned friends’. He explained: ‘everybody gave of his best, although (very properly) he got no credit for it beyond his own satisfaction’. He believed that ‘in all classes of life and among all sorts and conditions of men’, especially ‘in teams, regiments, and ships’, the best-performing organizations had consciously developed ‘the Spirit of the Old School Tie’. This Spirit motivated and unified men without appealing to class bias: public schools did not hold ‘a monopoly of true fellowship and devotion to an ideal’, insisted Antrobus. A minority of his staff had attended public schools.¹⁹

The Foreign Office conducted an internal, amateurish and self-protective investigation of the Oldham case without MI5 or Special Branch assistance. There was little investigation of Oldham’s overseas air journeys, or of his ultimate destinations and contacts, which might have given leads to Bystrolyotov and Bazarov. In gathering clues from outsiders, such as Oldham’s solicitor, it was represented that he was suspected of drugs-smuggling. No hint was permissible that he had been betraying official secrets to a hostile power. There were few leads, as ‘Count Perelly’ and ‘da Vinci’ had vanished and reverted to their true identities as Bystrolyotov and Bazarov. ‘I could have ended up in the Tower, but only if Vansittart had been willing to wash his dirty linen in public,’ Bystrolyotov judged; but the Foreign Office saw no benefit in publicizing the lax security. As to Moscow, OGPU had been exasperated by Oldham’s alcoholic volatility. At times the risks for his handlers seemed nightmarish. His low status in the Office hierarchy had moreover limited his access to secret material. OGPU’s frustrations with him perhaps contributed to the strategy of placing more reliable penetration agents in the Diplomatic Service through the device of recruiting young Cambridge high-fliers.²⁰

Hans Pieck and John King

Oldham had supplied personal assessments of his colleagues. One of these was Raymond Oake, born in 1894 in Finchley and the son of a railway clerk. After wartime naval service, Oake joined the Communications Department as a clerk in 1920. He was used as an occasional King’s Messenger without being promoted above the level of clerk, amassed debts and borrowed money from colleagues. His bank manager told MI5, when it was investigating Oake’s finances in 1939, that his customer was ‘a weak, foolish man, whose vanity leads him to live above his income, which is about £600 per annum. On one occasion when he was warned as to his account, he created a wild scene and ended by bursting into tears.’²¹

Bystrolyotov delegated the task of cultivating Oake to Hans Pieck, a Dutchman codenamed COOPER. Pieck, who was the son of a naval officer, had joined his country’s communist party in 1920 under the alias of Donat. He had visited Moscow on party business in 1929. He spoke German, English, French, Danish and perhaps Italian. He was a man of culture and charm, well reputed as a decorative artist, architectural designer and cartoonist, who lived with his wife in The Hague in style (subsidized by OGPU money). ‘He is a good actor who plays his role naturally, sometimes masterfully, finds his bearings quickly in conversation, manoeuvres well and is already ready for initiative,’ Bystrolyotov declared. Pieck was not a staid communist: rather he was ‘Bohemian, disorderly, untidy, inaccurate, incoherent and undisciplined’. Although effective as a talent-spotter and recruiter, he was too fastidious to coerce targets, to kidnap them, to apply blackmail or to threaten lives. Bystrolyotov attributed to Pieck ‘Love for intelligence work bordering on a passion, a romantic attitude to his role close to that of an actor’s enjoyment’.²²

Pieck installed himself at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in Geneva, befriended Communications Department men and consular officials in bars and brasseries, spent a fortune on hospitality and gave handsome presents. In the summary of Valentine Vivian of SIS, Pieck ‘allayed suspicion by posing as the prince of good fellows, habitué of the International Club, always “good” for a drink, a motor expedition, or a free meal – a histrionic effort worthy of a better cause’. Pieck moved deftly towards his target of Oake, who was given the codename SHELLEY. On Christmas Day of 1933 Pieck visited him in Room 22. They had festive drinks together in a nearby pub, where Pieck learnt that Oake had already spent his December wages and loaned him money to cover some cheques. Six years later, under interrogation by MI5, Oake described Pieck as ‘absolutely a white man’, whose lavish generosity had sometimes embarrassed him. Pieck posed as the representative of a Dutch bank interested in collecting economic and political intelligence, but although Oake agreed to supply him with material, it was always meagre pickings. Security had been tightened after Oldham’s disgrace. Sitting at a table in Room 22 with four other men, Oake found no opportunities for clandestine work. He was so chary of being caught that he was dropped by OGPU in December 1934.²³

Three months earlier, in Geneva, Oake had however introduced Pieck to another clerk in the Communications Department, John King. King had joined the Rhineland High Commission, a supra-national body based in Coblenz and supervising the Anglo-French occupation of the Rhineland, as a cipher officer in 1923. He was promoted to be personal clerk to the High Commissioner, the Earl of Erroll, in 1925. After Erroll’s death in 1928, he had a posting in China. ‘He is about fifty years of age, an Irishman who lived in Germany for about ten years and speaks German perfectly,’ reported Bystrolyotov. ‘A lively and inquisitive person … he draws a sharp distinction between himself with his cultured ways and the “pompous fools” of Englishmen.’ He was keen on the theatre and liked magic tricks. His salary was too small for his needs, he cadged drinks and tried to touch people for loans.²⁴

After dropping Oake, Pieck approached King to provide political information and weekly summaries for use by a Dutch bank. King agreed, and a secret bank account was opened for his remuneration. He received the codename MAG. King’s first delivery of secret material included an account of Hitler’s conversations with the Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, in March 1935. ‘His conviction that he is destined to bring about the moral rehabilitation of the German people after being crushed and humiliated by the treaty of Versailles’, Simon noted,

is very dangerous to peace in Europe, and it is all the more dangerous for being very sincere. And he is adored by those who follow him as no German Emperor has ever been adored. Hitler made it perfectly plain that he would never agree to enter into a pact of ‘mutual assistance’ with Russia. Communism, he declared, is the plague: unlike National Socialism, which he claims seeks only to embrace Germans, it is a contagious infection which might spread over all Europe and all Asia. He has stamped it out of Germany, and Germany is the barrier to prevent the pestilence coming westward.²⁵

King, like Oake, found it hard to obtain the Foreign Office daily bulletins which Oldham had been able to supply. Files, registers, the flimsy papers on which decrypts were scrawled – all were now guarded by the men who had responsibility for them. Any official found in a part of the department where he had no business was challenged. In order to justify his frequent visits to London, Pieck started a flimsy cover business called the Universal Barter Company. He then devised a better front after Oake had introduced him to Conrad Parlanti, with whom Oake often commuted by train from Herne Bay to Victoria station. Pieck suggested that he and Parlanti should go into business together as shopfitters. Among other commissions, Pieck and Parlanti revamped the shop-window displays at Marshall & Snelgrove’s department store in Oxford Street. At Pieck’s insistence Parlanti rented offices at 34a Buckingham Gate, close to Victoria station but also a few minutes’ stroll across St James’s Park from the Foreign Office. Parlanti was puzzled by Pieck’s insistence on leasing these offices, which were a secret amenity for spying rather than for the shop-window design business. Pieck kept a floor there for his own use, with one room which was always locked. King could walk over from Room 22, let himself in with a key and draw the curtains to indicate that he had left papers to be photographed in the locked room. Buckingham Gate was only a small deviation from King’s homeward route to Flat 9, St Leonard’s Mansions, Smith Street, Chelsea. Copies or originals of the documents were collected from Buckingham Gate by Brian Goold-Verschoyle, a communist electrical engineer and Comintern courier. The more important material was telegraphed to Moscow from the Soviet embassy.

Parlanti eventually picked the door lock when Pieck was away. Inside the mystery room he found a Leica camera fixed to photograph articles on a table. When he confronted Pieck, he was told that the Leica was for photographing ‘dirty pictures’. On another occasion Parlanti saw Pieck receive documents typed in red from a man in the lounge of the Victoria Hotel in Northumberland Avenue, off Whitehall. Pieck invited him to visit The Hague, but then made a show of being suddenly called to Germany. As Parlanti told MI5 in September 1939, ‘Mrs Pieck began very soon to make love to him, in order, as he is now convinced, to get him to entangle himself. He resisted her wiles, and finally lost patience with her.’ Mrs Pieck then wept, and told him that she and her husband were engaged in financial manipulations, ‘with big people and for big money’, and received official secrets from a man in the Foreign Office’s code section.²⁶

At a party in London in January 1936 Pieck was approached by William John (‘Jack’) Hooper, a British-Dutch dual national whom he believed to be the British Commercial Attaché at The Hague but who in fact worked for SIS there. In a quiet corner at the party Hooper referred to Pieck’s Comintern activities in the 1920s: ‘We know about your past and keep a constant watch on you. I want to know if you are still in the same business.’ Pieck insisted that he had abandoned his youthful political enthusiasms, but was sufficiently rattled to stop using the Buckingham Gate office as King’s drop-off because Hooper knew of its existence. Possibly Hooper was exploring Pieck’s availability to inform on his old communist friends without knowing that Pieck was an important communist agent.²⁷

In September 1936 Hooper was dismissed by SIS after the head of station in The Hague, Major Ernest Dalton, shot himself. As Passport Control Officer, Dalton had been selling visas to Jewish fugitives from Hitler who wanted to reach Palestine. When Hooper had spotted the racket, he was given a cut by Dalton, whose corruption was discovered during a routine audit. After being discarded by SIS, Hooper enlisted as an NKVD agent and went to work in Pieck’s Dutch office, where he watched his employer, asked questions and amassed material which he gave piecemeal to SIS as a way of vindicating himself after the Dalton scandal and regaining official British employment. SIS ignored his information and did not rehire him, because of his complicity with Dalton. The NKVD decided that Hooper was untrustworthy or compromised, and dropped him later in 1937. Rejected by both London and Moscow, Hooper turned to Berlin. In 1938–9 he worked for the Abwehr, to which he divulged that the Soviets had a source in the Communications Department.

For two years, as the head of SIS’s counter-espionage section Valentine Vivian noted in a retrospective of the King case, SIS had known Hooper’s information about Pieck’s clandestine activities in London, which ‘could have been acted upon then had it been credited. It was, however, treated with coldness and even derision, largely as a result of the prejudice against X [Hooper] himself.’ Vivian was impressed that Pieck had ‘included in his confidences one conscious and artistic lie – for the purpose undoubtedly of discrediting “X’s” story in the unlikely event of his passing it to the British authorities – i.e. he gave the name of his “inside agent” in the Foreign Office as Sir Robert Vansittart’. Pieck embroidered this critical misdirection with other absurdities, including an imaginary mistress of Vansittart’s who acted as a cut-out in transmitting betrayed secrets.²⁸

Hooper’s activities resulted in Pieck being withdrawn from handling King. The Dutchman was next sent by Moscow to Athens, where he tried to induce the Minister of War to order forty fighter planes, ostensibly for the Greek government, which were to be shipped to Republican forces in Spain with the Minister’s connivance. This intrigue failed, and Pieck had to leave Athens in a hurry, according to an SIS source; but he proceeded to Paris, where he found a South American legation ready to help.

The eminent illegal Walter Krivitsky, codenamed GROLL, was briefly charged with delivering the photographic film for use on King’s material in London. Theodore Maly, who succeeded Krivitsky in London, reported to Moscow Centre that King wished to ‘rid the world of poverty, hunger, war and prison’, but was not left-wing. Socialism meant ‘the terrors of Bolshevism, it is chaos, the power of the mob, Jews and endless bloodshed’, he told Maly. ‘I am against Fascism but if here, in this country, I had to choose between Sir Oswald Mosley and British Labourites, I would choose the former, for the latter logically lead to Bolshevism.’ He assessed Hitler as ‘a maniac but an honest person’ who had saved Germany from the Reds. The English aristocracy was ‘good for nothing, in the first place because it was English, and in the second because it is mixed with Jews and other lower classes’. The Irish and Scottish nobility was however ‘clear of foreign taint, and it has preserved its race’. King, like Oldham, was a mercenary who needed money, and had no interest in communism. He was conceited like Oldham too, but had stronger nerves: he enjoyed the sense of superior but secret privileges that accompanied his hidden life; he did not get rattled by the dangers of discovery and launch himself into panicky binges.²⁹

King’s influence may have been world-changing. Donald Cameron Watt believed that the material supplied by King in July and August 1939 to his Soviet controller, reporting on the Anglo-French tripartite negotiations with Russia for a pact against Germany, was leaked by Moscow in a selective fashion to Berlin. The intelligence gobbets given to Germany were among the enticements that led Berlin into the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact of August 1939.³⁰

Walter Krivitsky

Krivitsky was the link joining Oldham and King to Maclean and Philby. His original name was Samuel Ginsburg. He was Jewish and Russian-born, with a Polish father, a Slav mother and a Latvian wife who was a dedicated Bolshevik. In youth he was an active Vienna socialist while training as an engineer. After the launch of the illegal system in 1925, he became illegal rezident in The Hague, under the alias of Martin Lessner, an Austrian dealer in art and rare books. His house was furnished with stark minimalist modernity as visible support for his cover. He had enough culture to sustain the mask of connoisseurship. From the Netherlands Krivitsky directed much of the espionage in Britain. He became convinced of the insanity of Nikolai Yezhov, whom Stalin appointed chief of the NKVD in 1936 with the remit to purge the party. In 1937 Ignace Reiss @ Poretsky, the Paris-based illegal who was Krivitsky’s boon comrade, protested against the Great Terror and denounced Stalin. As a test of Krivitsky’s fealty, Moscow ordered him to liquidate Reiss. He refused, was summoned to Moscow for retribution and fled for his life to the USA.

It was at this time that a Cambridge luminary, the novelist E. M. Forster, wrote a credo that has been lampooned, truncated in quotation and traduced by subsequent writers. His remarks in their entirety carry a message of individualism, conscientious judgement and anti-totalitarianism that might have been a text for Whitehall values in the 1930s. ‘One must be fond of people,’ said Forster, ‘and trust them if one is not to make a mess of one’s life, and it is therefore essential that they should not let one down. They often do.’ Writing in 1939, when totalitarian nationalism was rampant, Forster continued: ‘Personal relations are despised today. They are regarded as bourgeois luxuries, as products of a time of fair weather which is now past, and we are urged to get rid of them, and to dedicate ourselves to some movement or cause instead. I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ Krivitsky had the guts.³¹

The Americans were more obtuse about Krivitsky’s defection even than Dunderdale had been with Bessedovsky’s. He reached New York with his wife and children on the liner Normandie on 10 November 1938 (travelling under his real name of Ginsburg). Immigration officials rejected the family’s entry on grounds of insufficient funds. He was eventually released on bail provided by his future writing collaborator Isaac Don Levine, who had been born in Belarus, finished high school in Missouri and worked as a radical journalist but had become hostile to communist chicanery. Krivitsky funded his American life by producing articles and an autobiography which were ghosted by Levine and sold by Paul Wohl, a German-Jewish refugee who had worked for the League of Nations and was trying to scratch a living as a New York literary agent and book reviewer. In an article of February 1939 Krivitsky predicted the Nazi–Soviet pact seven months before it was agreed.

Roosevelt’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull had relinquished his department’s responsibility for monitoring communists and fascists to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1936: ‘go ahead and investigate the hell out of those cocksuckers’, he had told its chief J. Edgar Hoover. This decision left the FBI with the incompatible tasks of policing crimes that had already been committed and of amassing secret intelligence about future intentions and possible risks to come. In practice, the Bureau concentrated on law enforcement and criminal investigation rather than intelligence-gathering and analysis. This bias and Hoover’s insularity meant that there was more interest in pursuing Krivitsky for passport fraud than in extracting intelligence from him.³²

After a nine-month delay, on 27 July 1939 a special agent of the FBI questioned Krivitsky for the first time in Levine’s office in downtown New York. Their exchanges were too crude to be called a debriefing. The debriefing of defectors is slow-moving at the start: character must be assessed, trust must be gained, affinities must be recognized and motivations must be plumbed. Only then, when the participants are speaking rationally and with the semblance of mutual respect, can reliability be gauged and evasions be addressed. Perception, patience and tact are needed to overcome psychological resistance and to elicit information that can be acted on. But the FBI agent did not engage in preliminary civilities to reach some affinity with his subject. Instead he fired narrowly focused questions about Moishe Stern @ Emile Kléber @ Mark Zilbert, who was believed to have run a spy ring in the USA. Krivitsky was diverted from volunteering information on other matters. When his replies contradicted the conclusions drawn in previous FBI investigations, or expressed his certainty that Stern had been purged, the special agent concluded that he was ill-informed, wrong-headed and obstinate. The FBI agent did not listen with an open mind; he would not revise his own presuppositions. Hoover dismissed Krivitsky as a liar.

Krivitsky’s memoirs In Stalin’s Secret Service had an ungrateful reception from reviewers: ‘his words are those of a renegade and his mentality that of a master-spy’, Foreign Affairs warned in response to his indictment of Stalinism. Communist sympathizers were especially hostile: Malcolm Cowley in New Republic decried the fugitive from Stalin’s hit-squad as ‘a coward … a gangster and a traitor’ to his friends, and elsewhere labelled him ‘a rat’. Edmund Wilson called Cowley’s review ‘Stalinist character assassination’; and certainly such tendentious pieces harmed Krivitsky’s credibility. The book was nevertheless read by Whittaker Chambers, a former courier for a communist spy ring in Washington who had turned against the Stalinist system of deceit, paranoia and executions, and had gone into hiding after being summoned to Moscow for purging. Later he was to write his own memoir, Witness, in which he presented the object of a secret agent’s life as humdrum duplicity. ‘Thrills mean that something has gone wrong,’ he wrote. ‘I have never known a good conspirator who enjoyed conspiracy.’ Chambers contacted Levine, who introduced him to Krivitsky. After the shock of the non-aggression pact signed by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia on 23 August, Levine asked Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle to meet Chambers and hear his information.³³

War in Europe began on 1 September: next day Chambers visited Berle and named eighteen New Deal officials as communists, including a Far Eastern expert at the State Department, Alger Hiss @ LAWYER @ALES, and Laurence Duggan @ 19 @ FRANK @ PRINCE, chief of the American Republics Division of the State Department. It is likely, but not certain, that the senior Treasury official Harry Dexter White was another of the communists denounced by Chambers. Berle reported the denunciation to President Roosevelt, who took no action, and waited seven months before alerting the FBI, which also took little action. In consequence of Berle’s inattention and the FBI’s laxity, Russian communist spies riddled the Roosevelt administration until the Cold War, damaged US interests and contributed to the post-war paranoia about communist penetration agents. Washington officials had an antithetical group mentality from their counterparts in Whitehall: most were political appointees; many were career lawyers; they lacked the procedures, continuities and group loyalties that were the pride of English civil servants; they had no administrative tradition of minuting inter-departmental meetings, and often avoided recording decisions on paper. Although more diverse in their backgrounds and less hidebound in their management, in handling Russian communist penetration of central government Washington’s oversights were as grievous as London’s.

The day after Chambers met Berle, on 3 September, Victor Mallet, Counsellor at the Washington embassy, wrote to Gladwyn Jebb, who was then private secretary to Sir Alexander Cadogan (Vansittart’s successor as PUS at the Foreign Office). Mallet noted that Krivitsky had foretold the Russo-German pact: ‘he is clearly not bogus as many people tried to make out’. Mallet reported Levine’s information that Krivitsky knew of two Soviet agents working in Whitehall: one was King in the Office cipher-room, who ‘has for several years been passing on everything to Moscow for mercenary motives’; the other man was said to be in the ‘Political Committee Cabinet Office’. (Levine was to recall in 1956 that when he told the British Ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, about two Foreign Office spies, Lothian smiled in superior disbelief.) Mallet warned Jebb, ‘Levine is of course a Jew and his previous history does not predispose one in his favour, as he was [newspaper owner William Randolph] Hearst’s bear-leader to a ridiculous mission of Senators to Palestine in 1936 and a violent critic of our policy. But … he seems quite genuine in his desire to see us lick Hitler.’³⁴

Cadogan asked Harker of MI5 and Vivian of SIS to investigate the Communications Department. Vivian, with SIS’s patriotic mistrust of foreigners, thought Krivitsky sounded ‘at the best a person of very doubtful genuineness’. King stymied his questioners during his first interrogation on 25 September, without convincing Vivian, who ended by telling him, in the rational bromide style of such interviews, ‘We had hoped that you might be able to clear up what looks like a very unfortunate affair, and if you can at this eleventh hour tell us anything, it will, I think, be to everybody’s advantage. I don’t think you will find us unreasonable, but it is depressing to find that you have been unable to tell us anything, except the specific things we have asked you about.’ They detained King overnight in ‘jug’, to use the slang word of Cadogan, who noted on 26 September: ‘I have no doubt he is guilty – curse him – but there is absolutely no proof.’³⁵

Spurred by the emphasis on national security that had followed the declaration of war on 3 September, and independently of the information received in Whitehall from Krivitsky, Parlanti approached the authorities of his own volition and volunteered his strange story of the Herne Bay train and the Buckingham Gate lease. Hooper’s denunciation of Pieck was resuscitated from a moribund SIS file. Decisively ‘Tar’ Robertson got King drunk in the Bunch of Grapes pub at 80 Jermyn Street, rather as he had done six years earlier with Oldham at the Chequers pub a few yards away. Robertson got temporary possession of King’s key-ring, which enabled MI5 colleagues to visit King’s flat in Chelsea and find incriminating material. King was arrested next day. On 28 September, under what Cadogan called ‘Third Degree’ questioning in Wandsworth prison, he gave a full confession. MI5 witnesses at his secret trial in October were driven to the Old Bailey in cars with curtained windows to hide their identity. There were no press reports of the trial, which was kept secret for twenty years. King was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.³⁶

Harker and Vivian suspected several of King’s colleagues, but had no evidence for prosecutions. The ‘awful revelations of leakage’ appalled Cadogan and his Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax: in December 1939 they swept all the existing staff out of the Communications Department, although most remained as King’s Messengers, and installed a clean new team. Dorothy Denny and other women were appointed to the department to dilute its masculinity, and thus to moderate its office culture, although the top departmental jobs remained in male hands.

Then on 26 January 1940 SIS informed Cadogan that there had been leakages from the FO’s Central Department to Germany during the preceding July and August. On 8 February Cadogan persuaded William Codrington (chairman of Nyasaland Railways and of the London-registered company that held the Buenos Aires gas supply monopoly) to accept appointment as Chief Security Officer at the Foreign Office, with the rank of Acting Assistant Under Secretary of State and direct access to the PUS. One of Will Codrington’s brothers travelled across Europe for Claude Dansey’s Z Organization under cover of being a film company executive.³⁷

Codrington was unpaid. He had no staff until in 1944 he enlisted Sir John Dashwood, Assistant Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps, ‘the most good-natured, jolly man imaginable’ in James Lees-Milne’s description. Dashwood handled the security crisis at the embassy in Ankara, where the Ambassador’s Albanian valet Elyesa Bazna, codenamed CICERO, filched secrets and passed them to the German High Command. Codrington retired in August 1945, resumed his City directorships and accepted the congenial responsibilities of Lord Lieutenant of the tiny county of Rutland. It is hard to imagine that he and Dashwood scared anyone who mattered.³⁸

Meanwhile Krivitsky had been summoned by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), then better known as the Dies Committee (named after its chairman, the Texan congressman Martin Dies). When he testified on 11 October 1939, naive and rude questions were pelted at him. One senator decried him as ‘a phony’, who ought to be deported. Krivitsky afterwards called HUAC ‘ignorant cowboys’ and Dies a ‘shithead’.³⁹

There was a different assessment of Krivitsky in London. The star among Harker’s officers was MI5’s first woman officer Jane Sissmore: she had taken the surname of Archer after her recent marriage and was so precious to the Service that she had been kept in her job at a time when women civil servants were required to resign if they married so that they neither neglected their husbands nor continued to take a man’s place and salary. In November 1939 Archer convinced Harker that Krivitsky should be invited to London for debriefing. Krivitsky reached Southampton in January 1940, and was installed at the Langham Hotel in Portland Place under the alias ‘Mr Thomas’. Krivitsky’s four weeks of debriefing was MI5’s first experience of interrogating a former Soviet illegal about tradecraft, networks and names. As Brian Quinlan explains in Secret War, ‘The seamless nature of the debriefing’s planning and execution, the expertise and diligence of the officers who conducted it, and the quality and quantity of the information it produced have led some MI5 insiders to regard this case as the moment when MI5 came of age.’⁴⁰

Krivitsky’s trans-Atlantic journey and accommodation in the Langham Hotel were tightly managed by his English hosts, who knew that a controlled but not oppressive environment improves the prospects of counter-intelligence interrogations. The FBI had waited nine months before interviewing Krivitsky and gave little forethought to the meeting. MI5 and SIS made meticulous preparations for his arrival at the Langham Hotel. They compiled preliminary character assessments of a kind that has since evolved and become standard operating procedure for defectors, foreign agents and foreign leaders. They exerted themselves to help Krivitsky’s wife and children, who were living in Canada while US immigration issues were resolved. Archer and her colleagues sought to impress Krivitsky with their understanding, competence and judgement. As Quinlan recounts, ‘their motivation was not simply pride; they understood that Krivitsky was a professional, and they hoped to gain his respect and cooperation by showing their own professionalism’.⁴¹

The debriefing was conducted by Archer, who was well informed about Stalin’s Russia and about Soviet espionage and approached Krivitsky from an international perspective. Her first task, which took several interviews, was to reassure him that he would not be arrested if he made admissions about spying on the British Empire. She then won his respect by her expertise in his field, and encouraged his explanatory candour by listening appreciatively to his account of all that he knew or had done. During debriefing, Krivitsky described the organization, tradecraft, tactics and personalities of the Fourth Department, the NKVD and the system of legal and illegal residents in the European capitals. He spoke of forged passports, secret inks, agent-training, penetration, counter-espionage and subversion in the British Empire. He predicted that in the event of an Anglo-Russian war the CPGB would mobilize a fifth column of saboteurs. Krivitsky made clear that the Stalinist aim was to support and fund colonial liberation movements, which would bring revolutionary change in territories under imperial rule and thus accelerate revolution in the west. He expressed ‘passionate hatred of Stalin’, Archer reported. It was his ‘burning conviction that if any freedom is to continue to exist in Europe, and the Russian people freed from endless tyranny, Stalin must be overthrown’.⁴²

Krivitsky supplied new material on Oldham, Bystrolyotov, King, Pieck, Goold-Verschoyle and others. There were clues to the activities of both Maclean and Philby in his account. Krivitsky felt sure that the source of Foreign Office leaks was ‘a young man, probably under thirty, an agent of Theodore MALY @ Paul HARDT, that he was recruited as a Soviet agent purely on ideological grounds, and that he took no money for the information he obtained. He was almost certainly educated at Eton and Oxford. KRIVITSKY cannot get it out of his head that the source is a “young aristocrat”, but agrees that he may have arrived at this conclusion because he thought it was only young men of the nobility who were educated at Eton.’ Krivitsky imagined that since the announcement of the Nazi–Soviet pact in August 1939, ‘the young man will have tried “to stop work” for he was an idealist and recruited on the basis that the only man who would fight Hitler was Stalin: that his feelings had been worked on to such an extent that he believed that in helping Russia he would be helping this country and the cause of democracy generally. Whether if he has wanted to “stop work” he is a type with sufficient moral courage to withstand the inevitable OGPU blackmail and threats of exposure KRIVITSKY cannot say.’ No one connected the supposed Eton and Oxford aristocrat to Maclean, the non-Etonian, non-Oxford politician’s son.⁴³

Krivitsky repeatedly alluded to a young ‘University man’ of ‘titled family’, with ‘plenty of money’, whose surname began with P. He was ‘pretty certain’ that this individual was in the same milieu as the Foreign Office source. In Archer’s summary of Krivitsky’s remarks, Yezhov had ordered Maly to ask this young Englishman – ‘a journalist of good family, an idealist and a fanatical anti-Nazi’ – to murder Franco in Spain. No one had the time to connect this information to Philby, who met many of the criteria but had no titles or fortunes in his background. It is usually forgotten that at the time of the Krivitsky interrogations Philby was working as a war correspondent in France and six months away from his recruitment to SIS.⁴⁴

Doubtless at Vivian’s request, Archer omitted from her summary of Krivitsky’s debriefing all reference to Hooper, who had been rewarded for informing on Pieck by being re-engaged in October 1939 by SIS. Both Vivian and his SIS colleague Felix Cowgill trusted Hooper, and did not want him incriminated. Vivian insisted that Hooper was ‘a loyal Britisher’. Cowgill concurred that he was ‘above everything … absolutely loyal’. In fact Hooper was the only man in history to work for SIS, MI5, the Abwehr and the NKVD. He was sacked from SIS in September 1945, after post-war interrogations of Abwehr officers revealed that he had worked for them until the autumn of 1939.⁴⁵

The earliest MI5 material supplied by Blunt to Moscow in January 1941 included a full copy of Archer’s account of debriefing Krivitsky. A month later Krivitsky was found dead, with his right temple shot away and a revolver beside him, in a hotel bedroom in Washington, where he was due to testify to a congressional committee. Moscow’s desire for revenge must have intensified after reading all that he had said in his debriefing, but suicide is equally probable. MI5 felt a moral responsibility to give financial help to his widow. Ignace Reiss had already been ambushed near Lausanne and raked with machine-gun fire in 1937. Joseph Leppin, Bystrolyotov’s courier for Oldham’s material, disappeared in Switzerland in the same year. The courier Brian Goold-Verschoyle was summoned to Moscow from the Spanish civil war and never seen again. Liddell’s informant Georges Agabekov vanished in 1938 – perhaps stabbed in Paris and his corpse put in a trunk that was dumped at sea, perhaps executed after interrogation in Barcelona, perhaps butchered in the Pyrenees with his remains thrown in a ravine. Theodore Maly, with his hands tied behind his back, dressed in white underclothes, kneeling on a tarpaulin, was shot in the back of the neck in a cellar at the Lubianka in 1938. Bazarov, who had been transferred from Berlin to serve as OGPU’s illegal rezident in the USA, was recalled in the purge of 1937 and shot in 1939. Bystrolyotov was luckier than these colleagues: recalled in 1937, he was tortured and survived twenty years’ hard labour in the camps (although his destitute wife and mother killed themselves). After Krivitsky’s death his refugee literary agent Paul Wohl told Malcolm Cowley: ‘We are broken men; the best of our generation are dead. Nous sommes des survivants.’⁴⁶

George Antrobus was at home with his parents in Leamington Spa, celebrating his father’s eightieth birthday on 14 November 1940, when a bomb fell on their house – dropped by a German aircraft during the night of the great aerial blitz on Coventry. Antrobus and his father were killed. In the same week Jane Archer was sacked from MI5 for insubordination. Earlier that year, at MI5’s instigation, Vernon Bartlett, a diplomatic correspondent who had been elected as a Popular Front MP, tried without avail to inveigle Pieck into visiting London, where he would have been interrogated. Instead, in May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands, Pieck was taken into Nazi captivity and incarcerated in Buchenwald. Somehow he survived the barbarities of camp life, and resumed his design business in peacetime. In April 1950 he was induced to visit London for interview by MI5 about King. His clarifications may have contributed to a final death.

Armed with Pieck’s information, MI5 reinterviewed Oldham’s ex-colleague Thomas Kemp. Kemp, whose account of his contacts with Pieck was disingenuous, had been Lucy Oldham’s confidant and may have kept in touch with her. She had sunk towards destitution in the 1930s and spent the war years in the grime of Belfast, but in 1950 (aged sixty-seven) was living in a drab Ealing lodging-house. Perhaps because she was in desperate straits for money, perhaps after a tip-off from Kemp that MI5 were reinvestigating her complicity in the old treason, probably because both converging crises were intolerable, she drowned herself in the River Thames at Richmond in June 1950 before MI5 resumed contact.

Despite the determination of Antrobus, Cotesworth, Eastwood and Hay to coast through life with jokes, there was no laughter at the end.

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