SIR GEORGE MAKGILL HAD BEEN ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD when he heard that his father had died. The elder son of a Scottish baronet, he had taken himself off to New Zealand several years earlier, and had expected to be there for a long time, when he learned of his father’s death and that he had inherited a title, land, property, money, and a vast portfolio of shares and industrial holdings. Makgill’s understanding of the world began to change. He returned to Britain, where his boyish patriotism hardened into a more prickly nationalism. During the First World War, he campaigned for a boycott of all German goods. He funded the Anti-German Union and lobbied hard for the expulsion from the Privy Council, which advised the monarch, of two of the country’s leading Jewish politicians, Sir Ernest Cassel and Sir Edgar Speyer, arguing that they were not sufficiently British. But it was only toward the end of the war that Sir George Makgill found what he believed to be his calling in life.
“The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution,” warned the prime minister David Lloyd George in 1919. By then, Russia had fallen to Communism. Germany looked set to follow. The Austro-Hungarian empire had collapsed. The Ottoman empire was on the brink, and Bavaria and Hungary had just become Soviet republics. The Communist threat to Britain in the immediate aftermath of the First World War was real and it was different. In 1920, the foreign secretary Lord Curzon complained that the Soviet Union “makes no secret of its intention to overthrow our institutions everywhere and to destroy our prestige and authority.” In the past, Britain’s enemies had endangered particular trade routes or far-flung colonial territories. Yet Communism and the Soviet Union imperiled the British ruling class, capitalism as an economic system, and the entire British Empire. Although the British government tried to suffocate the Bolshevik experiment at birth, supplying arms and assistance to White Russian rebels in the years after the establishment of the new Communist regime in Russia, it failed. The Soviet Union emerged triumphant and was now stronger than ever. Moscow had both the resources and the will to succeed, as well as a recruiting tool of explosive potency. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 demonstrated beyond any argument that a speedy socialist revolution in an aging autocracy, like Britain, was not just fantasy. It was realistic and surprisingly easy to carry out.
Most worrying for a man like Makgill, and so many others within Britain’s social, industrial, and political elite, was the growing sympathy for the Soviet Union among large chunks of the newly enfranchised working class. Between 1914 and 1918, the size of the British electorate had more than doubled. For many of these new voters, the Bolsheviks had all the noble appeal of the underdog. Trade union membership in Britain had rocketed. Unemployment would soon be on the rise, leaving the country hamstrung by industrial action. In 1920 alone, twenty-six million working days were lost to strikes. Even the police had gone on strike. The promise of Communism, or the threat of it, depending on your perspective, was without precedent. Sir George Makgill was one of those who soon became convinced that the British government had not recognized this danger for what it really was. So, the baronet decided to take matters into his own hands.
With the help of fellow industrialists, landowners, and politicians who belonged to the British Empire Union, of which he was honorary secretary, Makgill set up a private intelligence agency. It was run, according to MI5, “somewhat on Masonic lines,” and would be known by various names, including the Industrial Intelligence Bureau and Section D (possibly after “Don,” its chief agent runner). Yet the “Makgill Organisation” is most apt, for, like so many intelligence agencies, its activities came to reflect the fears and private obsessions of those in charge, which in this case meant Makgill himself.
Some of the principal customers for its intelligence product were factory owners and right-wing industrialists from the Coal Owners’ and Ship-Owners’ Associations or the Federation of British Industries. They wanted timely information on forthcoming strikes and the names of prominent Communists and trade unionists. But these were not the only people interested in its intelligence. Makgill planted agents inside the Communist Party and the more militant trade unions as well as pretty much any other group he did not like the sound of or was intrigued by: Anarchists, Irish Home Rulers, women traffickers, Occultists; everything from the Rudolf Steiner Anthroposophical Society to the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Yet there was never any hesitation or doubt in Makgill’s mind that the principal threat came from the Soviet Union.
With so many groups to investigate, Makgill was almost constantly on the lookout for new agents. He used talent-spotters like Baker White to send him potential recruits, which was how he had come to be interviewing Max.
Makgill sought two qualities in his agents. The first was an almost Masonic emphasis on secrecy. “If you talk,” Makgill had told Baker White, “you’re out.” The second was more idiosyncratic. He would only take on agents who shared his political outlook. This was the “unique feature” of the Makgill Organisation that ensured that “every man and woman working in it could be trusted.”
It is hard to say whether Makgill felt that Max lacked one of these qualities, but the first job he gave him was certainly unusual. Max was not asked to join a trade union or become a Communist. Instead, his instructions were to penetrate a political group that posed no apparent threat to the country, to Sir George Makgill, or to any of his cronies. Max’s target was an organization that was conservative, patriotic, and staunchly anti-Communist, the kind of group Makgill himself might have set up.
Max did not mind. The work sounded exciting, demanding, and important, in stark contrast to his life as an impoverished games teacher. He said yes.