The new century saw Melville at the prime of life and the peak of his career. At 16 Lydon Road, Clapham, the two eldest children, Kate and William, then aged eighteen and seventeen respectively, were clerks in an insurance office.1 James, at fifteen, was a pupil at Westminster City School, only half a mile from Scotland Yard. A young woman born in London but bearing the reassuringly Irish name of Bridget Joyce lived in and helped Amelia.2 There was also a live-in maidservant called Beatrice. Melville’s youngest brother George was living in the Ladbroke Grove area of London, married to an Irish girl. They had two children and George was a constable in the CID.
Melville was well known and respected as the royal bodyguard: ‘the King’s detective’. In the autumn of 1903, he had run Special Branch for a decade and had spent the few weeks preceding his annual leave escorting King Edward to Lisbon, Rome, Paris and Vienna.
So the announcement in November that he would retire at the end of the month came as a great surprise.
Ill-informed but knowing types probably allowed suspicion to cross their minds. In the spring, Melville had been put in sole charge of considerable Special Branch funds for secret out-of-pocket payments. Was it possible that some irregularity had come to light?3 This retirement was so entirely unexpected. Patrick Quinn, hastily appointed Melville’s successor, was not yet qualified by examination for the rank of Superintendent. Surely something was going on.
What had been going on, and was now over, was the Boer War. The British Government’s struggle to retain control of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State had succeeded, but it had revealed an army intelligence service flawed in both war and peace. Like senior policemen years earlier, many military men were inappropriately fastidious when it came to spying. As late as 1895, Colonel G.A. Furse found it necessary to point out, in Intelligence in War:
In war, spies are indispensable auxiliaries and we must discard all question of morality. We must overcome such feelings of repugnance for such an unchivalrous measure because it is imposed on us by sheer necessity.4
This had been understood at the highest level during the Boer War, and a large amount of money and up to 132 specialist officers put at the disposal of military intelligence, pro tem. But money and men were not enough: the military culture was all wrong. Very few of these new appointees knew Afrikaans or any African language and they tended to be inappropriately complacent about their own cleverness.5 And the old amateurism persisted in men like the young Robert Baden-Powell who ‘treated spying rather like cricket, as a game for the gentleman amateur’.6
Another major problem was lack of co-ordination. Threats to British interests all over the world were perceived and dealt with by a variety of agencies who might employ anyone, from envoys in the palaces of Constantinople to officers braving bullets on the veldt and plain-clothes men lurking at British ports.
Despite the belief that vast imperial interests were at stake there was no attempt to form a unitary intelligence service nor, more importantly, to establish a permanent relationship between intelligence and operations, or intelligence and policy. The Foreign Office, the army on the ground, the War Office in London, the Indian Government, the India Office and various Empire political services all operated more or less independently…7
Military intelligence in London around the turn of the century was focussed to an old-fashioned degree on a perceived threat from the Franco-Russian alliance. Sir John Ardagh of the Military Intelligence Department believed the French were grooming Irish elements to support an uprising which would take place should the French confront the British in war. In fact a complex web of treaties and alliances had been forming, breaking apart and re-forming for years, and only the British remained in ‘splendid isolation’. Every country ostensibly at peace was busy developing industrial strength and tactical resources in case of war. The Russians (who had concluded a treaty with the Austrians that preserved them from trouble in the Balkans) looked more covetously than ever on Persia and India and were stringing the Trans-Siberian railway right across Asia. The Germans were building a railway from Mesopotamia to Turkey. The American, Japanese and German navies were getting bigger and better, the Germans had implemented the Schlieffen Plan which would preserve them from attack in the west if they decided to make a move on Russia, and most of these newly industrialised nations were jostling for power and territory. The others were catching up. Britain’s position at the top of the heap was not half so impregnable as it had been fifty years before.
When great wads of War Office money were sunk into a scheme to set up a coal supply network as the means of gaining intelligence about the French navy, somebody on high decided to pull the plug and there ensued a reorganisation.8
It was one of many reshuffles and renamings which took place in the twelve years between the end of the Boer War and the start of the Great War. The Committee for Imperial Defence, led by A.J. Balfour, sat from 1903 with the aim of co-ordinating policy and practice between the Admiralty, the War Office and the Foreign Office. At the War Office, the first changes were dictated by a committee led by Lord Esher.
A new Directorate of Military Operations was instituted, and two of its divisions, MO2 (operations abroad) and MO3 (counter-insurgency) were specifically entrusted with intelligence gathering. During the South African conflict Colonel James Trotter had run Section 13, which included a three-man team devoted entirely to ‘watching shipments of ammunition and messages from the continent [to the Boers] and for carrying out enquiries referred from South Africa’.9 Trotter strongly believed in maintaining a peacetime intelligence system (which insofar as it existed had traditionally been paid for by the Foreign Office).10 So now that MO2 and MO3 were in place, Trotter and his brother officers would do the analysis – but they needed at least one excellent field operative; somebody who could respond to the demands of counter-espionage in England while acting as case officer for agents abroad. He must have a solid background in this kind of work and be prepared to commit himself for a long time, for in Trotter’s recent experience
Before the war money had been wasted on persons who made sham offers of information, and in other ways, owing to want of… a record of [their] previous history; if the section was made permanent such occurrences would be avoided in future.11
Should spies be discovered at home, they might have to be arrested and tried. As only the police could make arrests, the man concerned must also carry the authority and credibility to get swift action from the very top at Scotland Yard. ‘I think Superintendent Melville would be a good man, and that I had better write to Henry about him’, noted Sir Thomas Sanderson after a meeting with Trotter in September. Lord Lansdowne asked him first to consult Sir Edward Bradford, the former Commissioner, ‘whose opinion was favourable’.12 Sanderson’s letter to Sir Edward Henry was duly sent, and Henry (who had received a memo about a man for this new post from Trotter as early as 19 May) wrote back
I hope to be back on 12th October and will then arrange about Melville. He is shrewd and resourceful and altho’ he has a tendency towards adventuring he can keep this in check when it suits his interests to do so.
For the purpose for which he is needed, to be an intermediary, no better person could be secured – probably no one nearly so good for the money. The Intelligence Department will make it clear to him that he must work to orders and must abstain from taking a line of his own.
We must arrange that he sever his connection with Scotland Yard as quickly as possible. His utility to the WO would be much lessened if it became known that he had taken service with them.13
In the course of his holiday in October, Melville received a mysterious communication from Colonel Trotter, whom he visited at once upon his return to London; and Colonel Trotter offered him the job.
Melville was in no rush to leave the Metropolitan force, but he had nothing left to prove and already qualified for the full retirement pension. More importantly, in the course of his work he had outgrown the view that a few anarchists were the greatest present threat to British imperial power. He had spent time with people at court and in the higher echelons of Government and understood that matters of international business and politics were subject to forces far more subtle and opaque than, as a policeman, he was used to handling. Here was a new challenge that would allow him to investigate complex and far-reaching events.
His cautious response was that ‘if I got a suitable offer, I would consider it’.14 Reading between the lines, he could hardly wait to get started. Terms were quickly settled: he would receive £400, which with the £280 police pension would add up to a good living. But nobody must know that his retirement was prompted by anything other than a desire to spend more time in his Clapham garden.
At this time bright officers were returning from active service in the Empire and sharpening the focus of War Office intelligence. Vernon Kell, a young man recently back from China after serving as ADC to a Chinese General during the Boxer Rebellion, was among those making his mark. He had been brought up speaking Polish and English. He spoke German, French, Russian and colloquial Chinese to interpreter standard and could read Italian.15 He would concentrate on information from Germany about war preparations there.
Staff Captain Francis Davies had been a Commissioner of Police in South Africa during the Boer War and was now at MO3. Ex-Superintendent Melville would report directly to him. Among his first tasks would be the hiring of a reliable man to work in Europe. The modus operandi of this person, Henry Dale Long, is revealed in a letter from Melville to Captain Davies of 8 April 1904:
I beg to inform you that Long left for Hamburg on 30th ult. But he had first to proceed to Brussels re obtaining some introductions if possible.
I gave him full instructions how to act and of course many suggestions. Everything is to be done in a commercial way. To this end he will present attached card which explains itself. I received a telegram from him yesterday from Hamburg stating that his address is Hotel Glaesner, Neuer Jungfernstieg.
He will do all possible to get in with some employés in the firms of Busch & Co and Gottlieb Goerner, both mentioned in précis of reports.
This was accompanied by the business card of W. Morgan, General Agent, of Victoria Street London SW, inscribed ‘presented by H.D. Long’.
Melville’s next preoccupation would be with events which were already unfolding in France, in which he foresaw a role for an old friend.
Mr and Mrs Reilly had spent an interesting few years abroad. In the summer of 1900 Sidney left Margaret behind in St Petersburg and travelled to the Caspian, where he pursued business opportunities between Baku and Petrovsk in Kazakhstan.16 At this time the British Consul in Baku employed a useful agent who is likely to have been Reilly. Petrovsk, linked by railway to Baku, was also an important entrepôt along the trans-continental route now opening up between Moscow and Vladivostok. Reilly became aware of possibilities in the Far East.
In September 1900, the couple crossed the Mediterranean from Constantinople, sailed down the Suez Canal and on via Colombo, Penang, Singapore and Hong Kong to Shanghai. Shanghai, at the time an exotic forcing-house of rumour, commercial opportunity and international crime, must have been the sort of place where Sidney Reilly felt at home; but after a few months he and Margaret moved on. There was money to be made in Port Arthur (today Lüshun). The city commands the entrance to the Gulf of Zhili, from which Beijing lies only a hundred miles inland. Port Arthur can be approached across the Yellow Sea. Korea lies roughly east of the Yellow Sea, the Chinese mainland to the west.
The Chinese had leased Port Arthur to the Russians, but the Japanese, lying in wait beyond Korea, were determined to take it for themselves. Port Arthur, and the peninsula on which it stands, would give them access to Beijing and Manchuria. By 1901 the Foreign Office recognised that ‘unless Japan could find an ally against Russia, she might be driven to make a bargain with her instead’.17 The British were negotiating with the Germans but there were strong reservations on both sides. Talks collapsed and immediately afterwards, in January 1902, the Anglo-Japanese treaty came into force. They agreed strict neutrality should either go to war with another country, and assistance if the other party went to war with more than one.18
The Japanese needed intelligence about Russian defences and Sidney Reilly needed money. It seems that a deal was struck that satisfied both parties. Reilly also made a good living working for, and with, a wealthy and astute entrepreneur by the name of Moisei Ginsburg, who had been based in Japan for many years and was now represented in all the important ports of the Far East.
Sidney Reilly saw the Russo-Japanese War coming before most people, and in September 1903, Margaret was sent away, no doubt persuaded that this was for her own protection. Off she sailed towards America; and she did not reappear in Reilly’s life until the winter of 1904.
Left alone in Port Arthur as the Japanese prepared plans to attack, Sidney Reilly devoted himself to an affair with the Russian wife of an Englishman, Horace Collins, who happened to be Russia’s chief intelligence agent in the town. Intelligence was being supplied to all the major powers, particularly the Japanese, who had no difficulty in getting their own citizens into construction gangs working on the harbour defences. The Russians couldn’t tell the difference and the Chinese weren’t telling, and one result was that the standard of workmanship was not of the highest.
One person who knew about these Japanese masquerading as Chinese was a German spy calling himself Dr Franz von Cannitz, who resurfaced over a decade later as an acquaintance of Melville’s and a future British intelligence agent. He was Dr Armgaard Karl Graves.19 His account of life in Port Arthur at the time is worth quoting.
Never in any place – and I know all the gayest and fastest places on earth – have I seen, comparatively speaking, such an enormous amount of wine in stock, or such a number of demi-mondaines assembled. Most of the officers had private harems. I often sat in the Casino and watched the officers of the First Tomsk Regiment, the 25th and 26th Siberian Rifles, practising with their newly supplied Mauser pistols on tables loaded with bottles containing the most costly vintage wines and cognacs. At such times the place literally [sic] ran ankle-deep in wine. There were over sixty gambling houses and dancing halls supporting more than a thousand filles de joie.
This colourful account, exaggerated or even untrue as it certainly is, nonetheless indicates the mood of a wild east in which few secrets were retained. Von Cannitz, or Graves, was recalled to Berlin ‘exactly seven days before Togo’s first night attack’.20
It is significant that in the Intelligence Department at Berlin they knew an attack was imminent, although they did not know it at Port Arthur. Furthermore, Russian securities dropped 18 points on the New York Stock Exchange before the official knowledge of the attack came through. This information leaked out through the German Embassy in Washington.21
It all sounds convincing but we have only Graves’s word for it that he was ever in Port Arthur at all. Graves was a great self-mytholo-giser and the notion that the Germans were best-informed was flattering to him. British intelligence was thoroughly certain, on the other hand, that Sidney Reilly was spying for the Japanese.22 In February 1904, with the Japanese beginning a long siege of Port Arthur, Sidney Reilly too would leave – for Europe, and an opportunity to assist Mr Melville.
On 1 December 1903, Melville began undercover work as W. Morgan, General Agent, of 25 Victoria Street. His two-roomed office was located just across Parliament Square from Scotland Yard, in a building whose public entrance was bedecked with business names while the second entrance was hidden around the corner. With amazement he found that although
few men at this time were better known in London than I was… during the five years I was there I never met any person going in or coming out who knew me. This could only obtain in London.
Detective work, actually being there and asking the questions, meeting the people and seeing the places where things happened and using the intuition born of long experience, was what he did best, and MO3 would exploit his skills to the full.
My duties were rather vague, but were generally to enquire into suspicious cases which might be given to me; to report all cases of suspicious Germans which might come to my notice; the same as to Frenchmen and foreigners generally; to obtain suitable men to go abroad to obtain information; to be in touch with competent operators [and] to keep observation on suspected persons when necessary.
Melville’s role included not only defensive counter-espionage but espionage itself, should he be able to ‘obtain suitable men to go abroad to obtain information’.
The ‘vague’ duties resolved themselves at the start into a mission on which would depend the future of British naval defences and (had anyone suspected it at the time) the foundation of one of the world’s biggest companies. The background to the affair is succinctly set out in a letter of reminiscence dated 30 April 1919 from E.G. Pretyman MP to Sir Charles Greenway, the chairman of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, in which he recounts his own involvement some fifteen years earlier, as Civil Lord of the Admiralty, in securing the Persian oil concession for Britain; ‘In 1904 it became obvious to the Board of the Admiralty that petroleum would largely supersede coal as the source of fuel supply to the Navy. It was also clear to us that that this would place the British Navy at a great disadvantage, because, whereas we possessed, within the British Isles, the best supply of coal in the world, a very small fraction of the known oil fields of the world lay within the British Dominions’.
The Americans, Germans, Japanese and Russians had already acquired access to guaranteed supplies of oil. If Britain was to develop oil-powered ships she must have a large and guaranteed supply of her own.
In the months preceding Melville’s appointment a wealthy Englishman, William Knox D’Arcy, had approached the Admiralty. Knox D’Arcy, having made his first fortune developing a gold mine in Australia, had bought the rights to exploit Persia’s oil reserves and was negotiating with the Turkish Government for similar rights in Mesopotamia (now Iraq). He was convinced that reserves existed, although so far no oil had been found. Petroleum already powered engines in the most advanced factories, agricultural equipment, ships and motor vehicles, and even fuelled the aircraft which the Wright Brothers had just – in this very year of 1903 – flown for the first time in America. Control of oil supplies would surely be important in time of war. But with every month that passed Knox D’Arcy was pouring more money into a hole in the ground. He required massive backing to finance further exploration and told the Admiralty that he would be prepared to sell an interest in the Persian concession.
It all made sense but the Admiralty was unconvinced by Knox D’Arcy’s claim that oil would be found in Persia. They did not close the door on negotiations, but waited and did nothing. Quite how they discovered, in December of 1903, that Knox D’Arcy had turned to Lord Rothschild is uncertain, but it may have been learned through ‘shadowing’, surveillance and secret (illicit) interception of mail or telephone calls, and Melville was their only specialist in this regard.
Knox D’Arcy’s proposition impressed Lord Rothschild, whose affairs were much too entangled with those of the British Government to allow him to assist. He therefore decided at the end of the month to write to his cousin in Paris. So it came about that, in February, Baron Alphonse de Rothschild and his team met Knox D’Arcy and a colleague of his, John Fletcher Moulton, in Cannes. Other guests at the Grand Hotel included a London couple, Mr and Mrs William Melville.
It is astonishing that anyone with confidential matters to discuss should pick an hotel to do it in. Unlike personal domestic servants, hotel staff are notoriously willing to trade information for money – indeed excusably so; theirs is a service culture reliant on gratuities. Waste-paper bins, overheard conversations, phone calls intercepted at the hotel exchange, private letters consigned to the post and opened – an hotel is to security as a colander to water, and every leak would have been accessible to a man like Melville. How he obtained this particular intelligence is unknown, but Melville’s reports of the progress of these negotiations between Knox D’Arcy and an incipient French syndicate were sufficiently alarming to make Mr E.G. Pretyman, an MP and Civil Lord of the Admiralty, take up his pen:
I… wrote to Mr D’Arcy explaining to him the Admiralty’s interest in petroleum development and asking him, before parting with the concession to any foreign interests, to give the Admiralty an opportunity of endeavouring to arrange for its acquisition by a British syndicate.23
On receipt of this letter Mr Knox D’Arcy returned to London to hear what the Admiralty had to say. They promised to approach Burmah Oil with a view to setting up a syndicate. He was perfectly in accord with this but in a hurry; Lloyds Bank, already committed to the tune of about £150,000, was demanding that he put up his Persian concession as security against further funding. He maintained an adamant refusal, but could not wait indefinitely for commitment from the Admiralty.
Melville kept an eye on developments.
In the middle of May 1904, at City Hall Westminster, he was presented with an illuminated address thanking him for his thirty-one years of police service, and a cheque for well over £2,000. Subscribers to the cheque included the embassies of America, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, Japan, China, Mexico, Rumania and Peru. In his speech of thanks he said he was ‘terribly embarrassed at having to reply to this outburst of recognition for his services. During his career he had been in many tight places, but this was the tightest, especially as he had to thank not only the English subscribers but those of other nations. The honour had been bestowed on him, but it was due to the brave and gallant set of officers under his control.’
Shortly after that happy day he learned that Knox D’Arcy could wait no longer. In late June there would be a meeting between Knox D’Arcy’s agent, John Fletcher Moulton, and Baron de Rothschild.
Melville could hardly turn up by chance in the south of France a second time. Fletcher Moulton probably knew him at the very least by sight, or possibly as the bearer of the letter from Mr Pretyman summoning Knox D’Arcy to London. And Baron de Rothschild’s negotiations were a concern of the French Government, whose agents also knew Melville well from his visits to the Riviera with the King.
Fortunately he had run into an old friend. He arranged a meeting with Sidney Reilly in Paris on 6 June. Here was the very person to take his place. Between them they came up with a somewhat dishonourable idea that Melville was quite happy to pay for.
One of the most effective ways of scuttling the negotiations would have been to sow doubts in de Rothschild’s mind concerning the odds of oil being found in the area D’Arcy was drilling. Reilly was a creative fellow. If he saw a desired outcome he would manipulate events in order to achieve it.24 This particular little scheme could have drawn on his skills as a forger, although it is more likely that he exploited his network of contacts. Because by the time the de Rothschild-Moulton meeting took place later in the month, information from an ‘unfavourable outside interest’ had cast doubt on Knox D’Arcy’s ability to find oil. Fletcher Moulton was offered terms less generous than before and believed that Baron de Rothschild had cooled off the idea following sight of some unknown ‘report’.
Thirty kilometres away at the Continental Hotel, St Raphael, Sidney Reilly was writing with satisfaction about a ‘most useful report’ that had helped him ‘turn the tide’. Melville would have been startled, though, had he seen that the Mrs Reilly twirling her parasol in the sunshine of St Raphael was no longer Margaret, but a quite different young woman. This Mrs Reilly is more than likely his first bigamous wife Anna, with whom he fled Port Arthur in early 1904, having sent Margaret packing back to England.
Fletcher Moulton returned to England downcast, but in London he found Knox D’Arcy unexpectedly cheerful. It seemed Burmah Oil and the Admiralty were definitely setting up a syndicate that would continue exploration in Persia. In May of 1905, the deal was signed; Knox-D’Arcy got his backing and Burmah managed the exploration. The first field in the Middle East was discovered at Majid-i-Suleiman in 1908, and the following year the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was founded as a consequence. The British Navy was assured of oil during the First World War, and Anglo-Persian went on to become BP, today the world’s fifth-largest company.
Despite their defeat, Boer groups were still plotting under the leadership of a Dr Leyds, who was based in Holland, and it was Melville’s business to find out the plans of ‘an incessant stream of South African suspects arriving at that time in this country’. Boers were hard to watch as they expected to have Scotland Yard men keeping an eye on them, but his memoir relates how he was once able to obtain a complete run-down of the intended movements of a party led by one Ledebour, ‘a very suspicious character’, as discussed while they had their boots polished outside Liverpool Street on arrival. Evidently they had spoken English to one another, for the shoeblack was able to oblige Melville with an account of everything they said.
Thus ended one of the exciting episodes Melville saw fit to recall. In fact, he was also intermittently engaged in 1904 and 1905 in assessing the strength of Russian exile movements; but to go into detail, even in a confidential memoir intended for War Office eyes only, at the end of 1917 with the new Bolshevik Government in Russia, would perhaps have been incautious. As Melville dictated his memoir in 1917 some of the people he had pursued over the years were already in positions of power. Burtsev was, of all things, Chief of Police in Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg). As for Lenin, Melville was keeping quiet, but Herbert Fitch, then a detective constable attached to Special Branch, later related a tale concerning the Bolshevik’s visit to London in April/May 1905 to attend the 3rd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
Fitch, who had joined Special Branch when Melville was at its head, worked on numerous cases where Special Branch and the Secret Service had a joint involvement. He seems to have been particularly useful in situations where his multilingualism enabled him to observe and report on the activities of foreign nationals. Although prone to embellishment, Fitch’s account of this episode is actually corroborated in its essential details by a number of other sources.25 According to Fitch, he was detailed to shadow Lenin and other delegates, who held covert meetings in a number of public houses in Islington and Great Portland Street.26 Although Fitch does not refer to Melville by name, he makes it clear that the man he was writing about had left the Yard, yet is still in a position to call on Special Branch men when he needs them. The public houses he refers to are not specifically named, although the description of one in particular fits that of what was, at the time, the Duke of Sussex in Islington. In fact, a typed list of addresses compiled by Melville in April 1905 includes, ‘The Duke of Sussex, 106 Islington High Street; The Cock Tavern, 27 Great Portland Street and The White Lion, 25 Islington High Street’.27
In his own memoir, Melville’s lips remained sealed – except for a brief reference to how the Russo-Japanese War had caused ‘severe political tension’ between Britain and Russia, resulting in a decision, ‘to get in touch with Poles, nihilist and other discontented Russian elements’ in Britain. As a consequence, Melville had written to an anarchist leader, a Pole called Karskii, claiming to be ‘an American of Polish sympathies’, requesting a meeting at the Charing Cross Hotel. To his dismay, Karskii insisted on the Nihilist Club, where everyone knew Melville by sight and knew who he was. He turned up anyway, deeply suspicious and full of trepidation. Melville found Karskii, ‘awaiting me at the entrance… when he opened the door off the entrance hall, the odour of garlic and pickled herrings smothered everything’.28 Karskii, who was ‘a born conspirator, taciturn and mysterious even to his immediate colleagues’ spoke to him alone for some time before ushering him out, unseen, by the back door. The interview was rather too successful, for it was followed up by others in less compromising surroundings and quite soon Melville found himself discussing plans to land men on the Polish coast and start a revolution. At this point, unsurprisingly
Our people were getting cold on the subject, and finally I was told to drop the matter… [I] sent him a letter from the SS St Louis at Southampton, enclosing £10 for his propaganda fund, and informing him I was sailing for New York the following morning… I duly received the newspaper of the Party, showing a subscription of £10 from an American sympathiser. Thus the door was left open to recommence pourparlers for starting an insurrection in Poland, should it become necessary.
Why Karskii? Why would Melville pretend to be an American? Given that a century has passed, this is not easy to do. It is possible that he had heard about Karskii’s gun-running ambitions from Sidney Reilly who had heard it from Japanese intelligence or from his old friend Nikolai Chaikovskii; it is equally possible that he had picked it up from an Okhrana contact such as D.S. Thorpe. Nikolai Chaikovskii was a veteran Socialist Revolutionary and leading light of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom in London in the latter part of the 1890s.29 Through the Society he knew Rosenblum/Sidney Reilly who spied for the Japanese in Port Arthur prior to the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. The following year Chaikovskii was close to, and a conduit of funds from, the Japanese Colonel Akashi, who, from his base in Stockholm, tried to undermine the Tsarist Government during that conflict. Socialist Revolutionaries were among many dissident groups, including the Polish Socialists and some of the Letts, who accepted Japanese gold from Akashi to promote a Russian revolution. (On the other hand, Chaikovskii [according to the report by Okhrana agent Rataev, which places Chaikovskii and Rosenblum/Reilly together in London] was believed by London’s Polish émigrés to be an Okhrana agent. He had been seen meeting Mitzakis.)
In the summer of 1905 Akashi financed the purchase of ‘16,000 rifles and three million bullets to be sent to the Baltic regions and 8,500 rifles and 1.2 million bullets to be sent to the Black Sea’.
…It was decided that if the Socialist Revolutionaries took a leading role, the other parties would follow… They therefore set about buying arms… I decided to give the Poles money in advance and a free hand, but the other parties received money only after they had found arms for sale… Parties composed mainly of workers, such as the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Polish Socialists, did not like rifles. In contrast the Finns and Caucasians, who were mainly peasants, preferred rifles.30
Akashi also bought, through an English wine merchant called Dickenson, a 700-ton cargo vessel called the John Grafton. The arms were transported by train from Switzerland and loaded into it. The ship’s nominal owner was an American, Morton, who was believed by Akashi to be an anarchist and somehow connected to Mrs Vernon Hull, an American woman who owned two gun-running steamers, the Cysne and the Cecil.31
The John Grafton had offloaded only some of the arms at Baltic ports when everything went horribly quiet. The only person who could tell Akashi anything about what had happened was Konni Zilliacus, the multilingual Finn who was his go-between all over Europe.
Probably on 25th or 26th August Zilliacus came to Stockholm with a passport in the name of Long from England and said ‘I am really puzzled by the John Grafton business. She unloaded arms for the Lettish party to the north of Windau on 18th August. But no boat was waiting for her at the arrival point to the south of Viborg on the 19th. The crew were so apprehensive that they sailed her back to Denmark and begged me to give her new orders…’
He did so. The ship then ran aground amid uncharted sandbanks, and within days its cargo became international news, with photographs of the wreckage in the newspapers. As an afterthought Akashi adds
Prior to this, three machine guns and 15,000 bullets which the Cysne had on board were discovered by the English authorities, just before the ship left London. Morton from the United States, the nominal owner of these arms, was arrested and fined.
The identity of Morton raises many interesting questions. It has been speculated, by Dr Nicholas Hiley, that in light of Melville’s account of his encounter with Karskii at the time of the Russo-Japanese War (in the guise of an American anarchist), Morton could well be a Japanese transliteration of Morgan, Melville’s chief alias at this time.
No record as to whether Morton was in fact fined, and if so where, has so far been located. In light of Melville’s own testimony, the theory that Morton and Morgan were one and the same is therefore a plausible one.
As early as 1901, Melville had begun to suspect that spies were interested in English coastal defences. A commercial traveller with the French name of Allain, who sold wines along the South Coast, ‘frequented soldiers a great deal’, presumably on the pretext that they would purchase wines for the mess. He asked questions about the armaments of the forts around Portsmouth and then turned up in Dover doing much the same kind of thing. Some papers of his were found on a cross-Channel ferry and proved to contain, among other incriminating material, a questionnaire about Dover Castle: ‘calibre of guns, strength of garrison, the best approaches thereto, &c.’32 It was believed that at least three NCOs had taken money in exchange for information. Although they had not been able to supply much of value, it was a worrying case.
At the time, this kind of thing fell into a gap between military security and Special Branch. Later Allain, who was an American citizen, turned up in Cherbourg asking much the same questions, and from this
…it was evident he was in the pay of Germany. But no person thought of such a thing at the time. In fact Allain came in for little attention from the police although he was under notice from November 1901 to November 1903.33
The German Nachrichten Intelligence Service, had been run from Berlin by a Major Dame until 1900 and Major Dame had been perfectly happy to co-operate with Colonel Edmonds of the War Office in figuring out what the Russians and French were up to. But there was change shortly before Queen Victoria’s death. Dame was out, and a Major Brose was in, and he
…was known for his anti-English views. Shortly after this Colonel Edmonds learned from several sources that a third branch of the German Secret Service had been formed to deal with England.
In 1904, despite the ‘special duties’ MO3 being set up, possible spies still received no ‘attention from the police’ in England and Melville, who was now on the qui vive at all times, was frustrated by the sheer innocence of the policemen he met up and down the country. He was working for a War Office conscious that Russia would very much like to invade India, that Germany would take on the British Navy if it thought it could, and that the French were quietly preparing for conflict against the Germans. All these nations needed information about British naval and military strength and must get it by spying. But the average policeman had no idea of this. Germans in particular were accepted without question wherever they went.
I had to travel to all parts of the country to make enquiries re suspected persons. In these duties I found the police, whether in London or the provinces, absolutely useless. Their invariable estimate of a suspect was his apparent respectability and position. Just as though only blackguards would be chosen for espionage. But the fact was the police could not understand these matters. The idea was foreign to them.34
He was aware that railway lines into London were a prime target for destruction by Germany in the event of war. At Merstham in Surrey there is a particularly long tunnel, and information reached him that a German photographer had taken up residence in the village. Off went Melville to find out more; the German had vanished. The house where he lived was directly opposite one occupied by a police constable. The constable was naturally surprised and impressed when called upon by ex-Superintendent Melville. He knew the photographer of course – very nice chap, took landscapes, not portraits, and splendid they were, too. Melville (one imagines him hunched over the teacups in the front parlour) now approached a delicate topic with a meaningful air.
It must be remembered that in those days I was absolutely forbidden to mention the word ‘spy.’ All sorts of pretexts had therefore to be resorted to, even with the police… I then spoke to the officer for some time on the fact that the times were strange, and that we all should take stock of those foreigners and have our suspicions of them, &c., &c. ‘Yes, Sir’, he said, ‘I am sure you are right; I believe these fellows are the authors of nearly all the burglaries we have around the country.’
Thus my eloquence was absolutely thrown away.35
The German had made a comprehensive photographic survey of the entire district. His landlord, at the house where he lodged, worked at Merstham Railway Station. Among his duties he had to inspect the tunnel at least twice a week, and Melville would soon learn that the photographer had accompanied him quite frequently ‘out of mere curiosity’.
Public awareness of the need for vigilance had not yet trickled down from readers of Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands, which had appeared the previous year and was the first sensational spy novel. The War Office had no permission at this time to intercept private mail. Melville had built up relationships with people in the GPO over the years but outside central London it was a different matter. While up and down the country foreign waiters and farmers, salesmen and language teachers, shopkeepers and ‘persons of independent means’ explored the countryside and sent and received letters from abroad, among the locals ‘not to one in a thousand did the idea occur that Germans might be here on espionage’.
And it takes one to know one. Melville had no difficulty in turning his attention to Germans who might be spies. He was firmly on King Edward’s side in this. He was all for an Entente and, by association, civilised tolerance of the Russians, but again like King Edward, was rather lukewarm about Germans and ready to believe they were up to no good. It was a prejudice he had.
His failure to encounter much suspicion in the populace at large was probably partly because the German of popular imagination, the stiff-necked, pompous, conceited, humourless Prussian, was not yet the butt of popular dislike that he later became. The caricature of a Frenchman, on the other hand, the duplicitous garlic-munching ladies’ man, had been despised since the Napoleonic Wars. National and racial stereotypes prevailed in contemporary discourse at all levels of society and generally went unchallenged. Melville knew France, and the French, so he would not fall for that one; but the Germans were an unknown quantity and their intelligence service was certainly efficient. It was thanks to this that Paris had fallen in 1871.
Nonetheless, Melville must occasionally examine the French way of doing things, and sometimes in the context of a little spying of his own.
In 1904 we were very anxious to get the French bullet ‘D’ for the Lebel rifle. I sent several agents (Frenchmen) to France. They visited the various manufacturing centres but owing to supervision, chiefly in connection with the activities of German and Italian agents, they were unsuccessful.36
In December 1904 his Brussels agent, Hely Claeys, was supposed to set up a meeting with a disaffected soldier from the supplies division of the French war office who seemed ready to hand over samples of the new Lebel cartridges. On Christmas Eve it became evident that arrangements had been bungled, and Melville had to leave London for Brussels at once, thereby missing his traditional annual Christmas party at home. Thanks to him the Brussels meeting did take place, but not until New Year’s Day. As it happened the cartridges were of the old kind, although the new kind could probably be got so the meeting was not entirely fruitless. In the end they were obtained in London ‘and at a very low price’.
But Melville was disappointed at missing an annual family party that was so emotionally important and so unrepeatable. Perhaps this is what made him think he might be putting rather too much effort into this job than was merited by the reward.
He had only one yardstick to measure his salary by: Long, the other MO3 employee who generally worked abroad. But early in January while L was back in England Melville learned that the younger man was to take on an important undercover role in south-east Africa at a rate of pay twenty per cent higher than his own and with generous expenses.37 Melville considered this; and he thought about former colleagues who seemed well off since they left the police; and he asked Davies for a rise in pay to £500 p.a.
It is thanks to this request that we have an estimate of his true value according to his superiors. Colonel Davies consulted Sir Edward Henry, the police commissioner, who wrote confidentially on 21 January:
As you find him really useful might very reasonably recommend him for a rise from £400 to £500 by increments of £25 a year. I think it unlikely that for the same money you could get anyone equally serviceable, trustworthy and experienced. Littlechild no doubt makes a good living – but it has taken him many years to get together his clientèle and he started private business when he was comparatively young. I should doubt Sweeney making anything like the income stated. Whatever he may have made will be swallowed up by law expenses and damages, the outcome of his amazing indiscretion in publishing memoirs.38
The advantage of spreading the rise over a few years is that during that period he cannot well press for further concessions – L’appétit vient en mangeant.39
Davies considered this and wrote to Sir Thomas Sanderson at the Foreign Office, whose department was ultimately responsible for paying the bill.
M has raised the question of his salary, and asks for an increase. He says that old subordinates of his, who have also left the force, are earning better incomes than he is. He quotes ex-Inspector Littlechild whom he states to be earning £1,500, ex-Inspector Sweeney, who only left two years ago and who he says is making £850, and ex-Sergeant Thorpe, who gets £450 from the Russian Government for reporting the movements of anarchists, and lastly he points out that Long gets £500, that is £100 more than he, M, does. This last is an unfortunate circumstance and one which I always hoped he would not discover, to which end I have always paid Long direct. I pointed out to Melville that he must remember that L can be at any time called upon to undertake duty which may lead him into a foreign prison, and that considering the risks he has often run, and will shortly run again, his salary is not so high as it seems. M admitted that L had to run risks, but it evidently rankled that a subordinate of comparatively little experience should get more than he does. He is also anxious about the security of his tenure, and fears that a change of Government might lead to his dismissal, as he has got it into his head that a Liberal minister might disapprove of anyone being employed on such work as he is doing.
His application is that his salary be raised to £500 a year, and that he is to be appointed for five years conditional of course on good behaviour.
I am glad to be able to say that in my opinion M has worked very satisfactorily, and I doubt very much if we could get anyone else for the money who would do as well. He is very resourceful, and has a great capacity for picking up suitable persons to act as agents. Further he has a really good working knowledge of French, which is uncommon in men of his class and is most useful, in fact almost indispensable. His accent would certainly appal you, but he is quite fluent and fully capable of transacting business in French; moreover he can write quite a decent business letter in French.40
Sanderson sent this on to Lord Lansdowne. His covering note remarks
This is an application from ex-Superintendent Melville (who acts as intermediary for communications with the agents employed by the Intelligence Dept.) for increase of salary.
I never supposed that he would remain content with £400 a year. He is a useful man, and I should be disposed to advance him to £450 with a promise of £500 after another year’s service, and a year’s salary in case his employment should at any time be terminated without any fault on his part.41
By the end of the month, Melville had exactly this, and had written ‘a nice letter’ to Colonel Davies expressing his pleasure at the outcome.
Davies himself was having trouble with a Prussian – another disaffected foreign war ministry employee, this time from Munich – whose demands were outrageous. His price seems to have oscillated between £150 (‘I sent him £10 in a moment of weakness’, admitted Davies) and the enormous sum of £7,500, which Davies saw fit to follow with two exclamation marks. ‘I strongly suspect he is a fraud, and we shall lose our £10.’42 Finding trustworthy agents abroad was extremely difficult; Melville, since meeting the man in Brussels, was learning that all the French ex-soldiers who volunteered to impart secrets told the same story. He grew sceptical.
I found them generally very logical, but brimming over with suggestion. They offered their services to us in consequence of bad treatment while in the army. In fact, it became a matter of revenge. It was noticeable, too, that many of them told the same sort of yarns. It looked to me as though they had been coached in this direction. Above all, I found their great desire was to learn what we wished to know. In the result, after due consideration, none of these volunteers were employed.43
Nonetheless, agents must be found. Davies’s letter, in a mysterious postscript to the German story, mentions contacting the Japanese military attaché. The Foreign Office wrestled with questions about whom could they trust, and indeed where they most needed agents. In the autumn two memoranda were drawn up within the intelligence division. One was about ‘Secret Service in the event of a European war’ and the other ‘Secret Service arrangements in the event of a war with Germany’. It seemed that in the latter case, ‘the present is not a good moment for taking any active steps towards the organisation of a service – there is too much suspicion of our intentions’.44
It was mutual. Several times in his first few years of intelligence service Melville brought up the matter of German spies in England. Early in 1905, with a new Aliens Bill in the offing, the Home Office asked the Government to add a clause intended to put spies off. The Prime Minister was not convinced since, as Sir George Clarke wrote to Mr Chalmers at the Home Office in February
…he doubts whether this could act as an effective deterrent. He thinks that it is desirable that these people should be watched by the local police as much as possible. Could you take steps to carry this out?45
Like Melville, Mr Chalmers had no faith in provincial police. Unlike Melville, he could see no possible way to sharpen their perceptions. He foresaw little in any attempt to involve them except bureaucratic time-wasting, inter-departmental squabbles over who would pay the bill, and smart Germans running rings round a bunch of plods.
…The German officers can be watched, but there are some preliminary difficulties I must talk over with you. We could send down a Met detective because the Met police are under the Home Office. You must first tell us where the [German] officers are and then if a Met officer is not to hand we can discover whether they are in the jurisdiction of the county or borough police. In either event we have no control over the local police and can only ask as a favour that they will watch the Germans. Probably the Watch Committee (or standing joint committee) will want payment, in which case the Treasury will have to find the money.
As to sending a person to discover what can be found out, I think it would require expert knowledge… The Germans of course are military experts.46
It was a bleak conclusion but the matter arose again at the end of the year when one of Melville’s reports made it to the desks of Lord Lansdowne, Mr Chalmers and Sir Edward Henry. Melville had spent several days in the middle of November investigating a German who had been staying at a Suffolk farm, having paid for a three-month course in agriculture. He made his way there – and to one fresh from Victoria Street, the place was in the middle of nowhere – and found that the German (a heavily built six-footer with sabre-cuts from duelling) had left only a week before.
Melville interviewed the farmer, Mr Smith (‘a very intelligent man and by the way an Imperialist’):
Mr Smith noticed that Mr Hederich knew quite as much about farming as he did, and also that he paid little attention to it. Smith said that he had now no doubt that Hederich was a spy… he drove much around the country and always took the German with him. Latter was persistent in asking and learning the names of roads and where they led to, the names of parishes, churches and mansions. They generally went to Ipswich perhaps twice a week and there the German left him and went around the town visiting the park, the docks and the vicinity. At Ipswich Hederich also bought a map of the country and made a trip by steamer from latter town to Clacton and back.
When at home (Hall Farm) he always retired to his bedroom immediately after luncheon and remained there till dinner, but he never made any reference as to how he occupied himself in the interval… He informed the Smiths that he was an officer in the German Army, they thought in the cavalry.47
In view of Hederich’s trips to nearby ports, Melville concluded grimly ‘no doubt he has returned to Germany with a complete map and valuable information of that part of the country and coast and the fortifications at Harwich and in the vicinity’.
To be fair to the police, there was not much they could do about tourists sketching and measuring picturesque features of the shoreline. Without proof of ‘intent to communicate… to a foreign state’,48 which was almost impossible to get, there was nothing illegal in it. But Melville would argue that this wasn’t the point; the idea was to let potential spies know that their curiosity did not go unremarked and that the police were vigilant. It was the prevailing lack of guile, the open-faced innocence of ill intent, which was so English and so irritating.
On 21 November Melville wrote another report. In the course of the Hederich enquiry he had come across two other East Anglian farmers who had played host to young Germans anxious to learn, thereby introducing them in good faith to the local community. It didn’t smell right.
Learning farming is out of the question as the Germans consider they are far ahead of Englishmen in that direction. No doubt they are; one has only to travel in Germany to see this.
While at Woodbridge I also learned that a volunteer Chaplain, the Reverend J. Garforth, had written to the East Anglian Daily Times warning the population of Suffolk as to the espionage being carried out by Germans.
Melville tracked down the Reverend Garforth, a former Army officer of sixty-five, quite quickly, and heard an astonishing story.
A friend of his had last summer been enabled to visit a military college in Germany and found that the thesis a number of students was working out was Having landed an army at Hastings, give a sketch showing the characteristics of the country, the names of the roads, villages and towns to be traversed en route to London.49
That this had been reported by ‘a friend’ does not seem to have rung warning bells. There was a party of extreme paranoia at this time – the Legion of Frontiersmen, who saw Prussians behind every hedge – and this is the sort of story they would have told, but Melville was not sceptical. Instead he put Garforth’s account into his report and suggested that confidential instructions should go from the Home Office to the chief constables of all maritime counties pointing out that there was a problem and their men should maintain a discreet look-out.
Lord Lansdowne of course thought that was perfectly reasonable.50 Mr Chalmers picked up his pen with a sigh. Of course the Home Office could write letters to County policemen, but
They would have to act through the village sergeant or constable I suppose.
There is a further difficulty. All the fortified places on the coast are under borough police who are under the borough (or city) watch committee. The county police cannot of course act in the borough and the borough police are usually not high class. You would probably have some stupid muddle or row arising.
PS Some months ago we wrote to War Office to above effect.51
The Home Office probably assumed that little of importance could be learned by mere casual observation and notation of arrangements which were, after all, open for all to see. Melville would be spy-watching for a good while before action was taken.
Nor had he forgotten the Russians. It was perfectly all right for his former subordinate, ex-Sergeant Thorpe, to work for them against nihilists in London; Thorpe had retired from the Yard in 1900 and worked to the Okhrana agent in London, a Frenchman called Farce. Farce lived in Hammersmith and was married to an Englishwoman. But since the mysterious affair of Mitzakis in 1900, Melville was no longer prepared to believe that all Russian agents were of friendly intent and he put himself out to track their present movements.
In 1902 Rachkovskii had moved from his Paris headquarters at the Russian Embassy, 79 Rue de Grenelle, to Brussels where he appeared to have retired on a pension. Milewskii, who worked for Rataev, had died. Melville had met Rataev before he left Special Branch, when in Paris with the King. In November and December 1904 he made notes on all of them, and in May 1905 he filed notes from memory about the physical appearance of Okhrana agents in Europe including Mitzakis, Harting, Rachkovskii, Golschmann and Rataev.
In February of 1905 the matter of Mitzakis, the mysterious Russian with influential friends, arose yet again, and in that month Melville wrote a full report headed ‘Russian Spies in London’. Mitzakis had long ago in 1899 moved into an apartment at 9 Drayton Gardens, South Kensington, before taking over the whole house and leaving it empty, apparently for occasional use by the embassy as a safe house. He now lived there again.
He has been on the continent for two to three months, being home only about a couple of weeks. He is a director of the Chatma Oilfields Co. Ltd, the office of which is at 1 Charing Cross. This company was formed in November 1902. Its property is at Chatma near Tiflis in Russia, and consists of naphtha springs.
The nominal vendor was a Mr Mathias of 67 Park Place, Cardiff, but Mitzakis was mixed up with the company’s business from its inception and there is little doubt that he was the principal in obtaining the concession from the Russian Government. In June 1903, Mitzakis was appointed a director of the company. Among other directors are Lord Armstrong, Sir A. Noble, Bart., and Colonel W.A. Tufnell.
There is no doubt that Mitzakis was, up to about two years ago, in the employ of the Russian Government as a spy and it may be assumed that he is still, and that when recently on the continent he was so engaged.
Melville’s report has a page missing, but it concludes:
He professes to be an LLD, is keen at business thoroughly unscrupulous [sic], by nationality I believe a Greek and has all the cunning of his race.
It is not unlikely that Mitzakis might have been mixed up with the Hull business as he speaks English fluently.
What ‘the Hull business’ was, we shall never know. Melville’s memoir is silent on the subject.