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
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
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
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