by Nick Barratt
By December, with Mally despatching Pieck to London to threaten Oake and Bystrolyotov waiting in the wings should help be required, it became apparent that nothing would persuade Oake to continue – his fear of discovery was too great and the potential use of blackmail was discounted in case it jeopardised the next target, a man called John Herbert King. He had been introduced to Pieck by Oake in October 1934, and was another temporary clerk in the Communications Department. According to a report by Bystrolyotov:
In Geneva, COOPER [Pieck] had become acquainted with a cipher clerk named King. He is about 50 years old, an Irishman who lived in Germany for about ten years and speaks German perfectly. A lively and inquisitive person, not stupid but well-educated. He draws a sharp distinction between himself with his cultured ways and the ‘pompous fools’ of Englishmen. He likes music and is knowledgeable, and is keen on the theatre. He is very eccentric and likes magic.
King is in dire need of money because he has to support himself on a small salary, as well as his grown-up son, a student, and his wife. In spite of his length of service he is not given promotion because of his Irish background and he likes to have a drink at someone else’s expense… He would borrow money and being an Irishman does not like Englishmen and makes friends very easily with foreigners.356
Once again, the classic combination of festering resentment, poor career prospects, a need for money and a liking for alcohol were present; King was given the codename MAG and was cautiously approached by Pieck in early 1935, once it became clear that Oake would not cooperate. Pieck used his growing social network in London and Dutch business credentials to impress King and deployed the same cover story – that he was an intermediary for a large bank that needed regular political information. King duly obliged for a set fee, starting with the weekly Foreign Office summaries, though as with Oake he was reluctant to hand over original material. One factor in his caution was the recent furore surrounding Oldham and the whispered stories that continued to swirl around Whitehall that MI5 and SIS agents were now monitoring activities. Therefore, after his first lunch with Pieck, King decided to seek advice from Harvey, which Bystrolyotov only discovered in July 1935:
MAG said that after his first lunch with COOPER he had returned to CHIEF and had reported that a foreigner had entertained him and that Geneva was full of suspicious characters. He had sought his advice and CHIEF had replied that Pieck was a personal friend and deserved complete trust. This, according to MAG, had enabled him to develop his friendship with COOPER, but when the latter offered him work with the bank he had suspected that he might be CHIEF’s agent.357
This is a revealing insight into the climate of suspicion that had been created amongst Foreign Office junior staff, completely undone by Harvey’s acceptance of Pieck’s status. As a result, King gained the confidence to obtain some crucial intelligence for Pieck’s ‘banker’ – the first delivery contained an account of the Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon’s meeting with Adolf Hitler, including demands made by the German leader to change the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Simon’s impression was that war might be imminent if a unified stand could not be achieved in the face of German aggression.
King was able to provide further information about the innermost workings of the Foreign Office ciphering system, furnishing Bystrolyotov with insight into the way his informers accessed this confidential material and the risks they had to run:
[MAG] first turned his attention to the book in which the most important incoming telegrams were registered after they had been deciphered and after a summary had been prepared for senior Foreign Office personnel. However, what had seemed practical in theory turned out to be impossible to implement. MAG worked in the cipher room with SHELLEY and TED, but on the afternoon shift they operated in pairs, one writing the decrypted text onto a flimsy in pencil while the other read the telegram. The flimsy was then passed on to the next room where the King’s Messengers, who were ranked more senior than the cipher clerks, awaited their assignments. They were responsible for typing the telegrams, destroying the original flimsies, and entering summaries into a log known as the day register. The incoming telegrams were then passed for internal distribution to the office messengers, who were usually retired warrant officers, while the outgoing telegrams were circulated to the senior staff for approval before being sent abroad. MAG handled the day register every day, entering new telegrams, but on the occasion he attempted to read some of the other pages he was noticed by one of the couriers who challenged him. Alarmed by this experience, MAG decided that he could not use the day register and instead concentrated on the Foreign Office daily bulletins, which hitherto had been supplied by ARNO. According to SHELLEY, ARNO and MAG, these files are kept in the couriers’ room and MAG had no official access to them, as he discovered when he tried to look at one, and was spotted by a courier who warned him not to take ‘his book’, indicating that each was the responsibility of an individual courier. They were in constant use by the couriers, who kept them permanently in their sight making access impossible, so MAG opted for old copies of the daily bulletins which were scheduled for destruction.358
This was where Oldham’s status had enabled him to obtain so much material without arousing any suspicion. As staff officer, he was the highest-ranking official beside the head and deputy head, who were involved with other tasks. Oldham would have been justified in keeping an eye on all aspects of the ciphering and despatch operation.
The document shredder, which in ARNO’s time had stood in the basement, is now in a ground floor corridor, not far from MAG’s room. However, when he chose his moment to steal the bulletins from the machine, which was guarded, he was asked why he was in that particular corridor and who he was looking for. MAG had no excuse and therefore had abandoned the attempt. In these circumstances MAG was left with the telegrams which he handled legitimately.359
The descriptions provided by the men – along with eyewitness confirmation from Pieck – shone a light into the heart of the Foreign Office, although it was clear that everyone was more suspicious of unexpected behaviour following the Oldham incident. It also underlined just how important Oldham had become to the Soviets, given the challenges they faced with finding a suitable replacement. Yet King proved adept at finding ways around the inconvenient scrutiny of colleagues and by May 1935 was handing over highly sensitive material that he had often personally deciphered, to prove his use to Pieck’s banker.
Control of King passed from Bystrolyotov to Theodor Mally in September 1935, with Pieck still acting as the main point of contact whilst Mally set up an operational base near the Foreign Office in a flat at Buckingham Gate – this was the location where King would deliver material to be photographed. It was originally intended that Aleksander Orlov (OGPU agent and rezident in London) would be used for the delivery of the films to be taken to London, but he was involved with his colleague Arnold Deutsch (another Soviet agent) on other business; instead, responsibility was granted to Walter Krivitsky (codename GROLL, a Soviet intelligence officer). He was rather a poor choice, since he spoke no English, was inexperienced in photography and was soon withdrawn. By the end of 1935, Pieck was also unable to travel to London due to personal circumstances, so Mally had to run King himself.
During this period it is possible to glean a bit more insight about the way Oldham’s activities had been viewed by his colleagues, as his name cropped up on several occasions. King made the first reference shortly after he started delivering material to Pieck, noting that he now knew Oldham had been providing material to the ‘banker’ before he had, although King thought Old-ham was ‘a fool who took documents openly and ruined himself’.360 Clearly, Oldham’s removal of material had been known about by junior colleagues and it is rather astonishing that no-one higher up had acted to stop him, emphasising once again the naivety and misplaced trust of the time. Equally, King and Oake probably helped mask the real significance of Oldham’s treachery, given their own belief that they were merely helping
a banker rather than passing valuable secrets to the Soviets. A second reference was made in August 1936, when King revealed to Mally the various theories that had circulated amongst the Foreign Office staff to explain Oldham’s death. The most popular was that Oldham had been in the employ of the French and that the story of his suicide masked the fact that British intelligence services had killed him, placing his body in a gas-filled room to make it look like he had taken his own life.361
Overall, King was credited by the Soviets for providing an invaluable insight into British diplomacy in the late 1930s. The information was often used to generate tension and disharmony between Britain and Germany, via leaks to the German embassy in London, to further Soviet interests. Indeed, it is possible that the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact made on the eve of World War II was the culmination of a process that had started with Oldham’s leaks which had enabled the Soviets to manipulate the international political situation to their advantage.
King was only the latest in a line of moles within the Foreign Office that began with Oldham, but 1934 saw another key development in Soviet intelligence operations in England – ideological recruitment from the higher echelons of society, a technique that was adopted in response to some of the challenges that Oldham had posed from 1929 onwards. Operatives like Oldham, Oake and King were important sources of information, but the very factors that made them easy to recruit – financial motivation, disenchantment with their jobs, a weakness for alcohol – equally made them liabilities, as the traumatic experience of handling Oldham had demonstrated.
An alternative, potentially longer-term strategy was adopted in response to the Oldham case, namely to recruit communist sympathisers to the Soviet cause from universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, where graduates were more likely to secure higher positions within the British establishment. Thus the Cambridge spy ring was developed after Oldham’s death by Arnold Deutsch, through his recruitment of Kim Philby, Anthony Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1934, joined by Anthony Blunt and probably John Cairncross (the alleged ‘Fifth Man’).
However, Stalin’s great purge of the Communist Party and Soviet government saw the network of Great Illegals dismantled overnight. Deutsch and Mally – who had been transferred from handling King to the Cambridge ring in 1937 – were suddenly recalled, the latter executed in 1938 while Deutsch appears to have died in the Soviet Union in the early 1940s. Agents such as Ignace Reiss, who had first recruited Pieck, were eliminated abroad and, following the murder of Reiss, Pieck stopped meeting King and quietly dropped out of sight.
The alternative to arrest, show trial and execution or imprisonment in a gulag was defection. Aleksander Orlov, who had returned to Russia in 1935, fled to Canada before he could be arrested in 1938. He was followed the next year by Walter Krivitsky, who ended up in the USA, fearing for his life. In August 1939 he spoke to journalist Isaac Don Levine, who published an article in the Saturday Evening Post that claimed (among other things) that two Soviet agents were working deep within the British government. Levine passed information to the British Ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, that a man named ‘King, in the Foreign Office Communications Department’ was selling state secrets to Moscow. He also mentioned a second source in the Political Committee of the Cabinet Office, unnamed. MI5 was informed and King was placed on three-week long sick leave until he was arrested under the Official Secrets Act and asked to explain various irregularities, including unaccounted bank notes in his safe deposit box. On 25 September, he was interviewed by Vivian, by this date a colonel and Head of counter-espionage in SIS. Guy Liddell in MI5 noted in his diary on 27 September:
The case of King is developing in an interesting way. The notes in his safe deposit have been traced to Pieck, a Dutchman and Soviet agent and also to the Moscow Narodny bank. Another man in the code section of the FO [Foreign Office] is also involved. His name is Major Grange [actually Quarry]. He has been suspended pending interrogation. Another individual named Oake is being interrogated. It seems doubtful that he is very closely involved.362
Although he initially denied the accusations that he had sold secrets to the Soviets, three days later King confessed, giving the motives for his actions:
I am not a permanent civil servant and am not entitled to a pension. I felt that by this means I could obtain some money to provide for when I retired without in any way endangering the security of the state. I handed to Pieck, from time to time, copies of telegrams coming in from embassies – for example, reports of conversations between Hitler and Sir Neville Henderson or between Kemal Ataturk and the ambassador in Turkey or some such persons. There were sometimes eight or nine pages of roneoed matter [duplicated from a stencil] – sometimes three or four – never more than ten. They were never of any great political importance. The telegrams were always decoded copies and never in cipher. They were spare copies that were available in the room.363
King was tried in secret at the Old Bailey on 18 October 1939, found guilty and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, of which he served less than seven years before his release in July 1946. Details of the case were kept from the press at the time and even the MI5 witnesses were driven to court in curtained cars to protect their identity. Shortly afterwards, Vivian provided a summary of the case in a report entitled ‘Leakage from the communications department, Foreign Office’ and came to some startling conclusions and drastic recommendations.
First, Vivian claimed that SIS had been given notice of Pieck’s activities two years previously, through the revelations of an unnamed agent, ‘X’, who had wished to regain the trust and employ of the British government by providing them with information.
The full story was therefore in the possession of the SIS nearly two years ago and, though in no consecutive form, could have been acted upon then had it been credited. It was, however, treated with coldness and even derision, largely as a result of the prejudice against X himself.364
Once again, the chance to swoop on an alleged breach of Foreign Office security had not been acted upon – to great cost. However, one of the reasons that SIS ignored the testimony of X was that Pieck had given the name of his Foreign Office insider as Sir Robert Vansittart, rather than King:
For the purpose undoubtedly of discrediting X’s story in the unlikely event of his passing it to the British authorities… It is a tribute to Pieck’s intelligence that this is precisely the effect it had.365
With King safely in prison, Vivian outlined the actions taken against other officials named during the investigation.
RC Oake of the communications department was interrogated at the Foreign Office before King was examined. He made a fairly good impression, but we were left with a feeling that he was withholding facts regarding monetary relations with Pieck, with whom he had undoubtedly been on terms of close intimacy until 1935. Oake was again interrogated on 26 September when, under pressure, he reluctantly admitted that he had owed Pieck a sum of £60, which debt Pieck had cancelled at the time of his (Oake’s) wedding in 1935.366
Oake was interviewed twice more, and although the conclusion was reached that it was unlikely that he had actually sold Foreign Office secrets:
Oake must have had knowledge or at least definite suspicion of the real nature of Pieck’s activities and we do not doubt that, in receiving monetary and other presents from Pieck, Oake knew that he was receiving payments for services rendered… He was suspended from duty on 25 September and should not, it is considered, be reinstated. There is no question of a prosecution as the evidence is deficient.367
Another official was sacked as a result of the inquiry – Major Francis John Quarry (as opposed to Grange, as per Liddell’s diary entry mentioned above), who had only worked at the Communications Department since January 1938 and made a voluntary statement on 25 September when the affair first came to light. In Vivian’s opinion:
It is considered that Quarry is unlikely to have had any criminal connections with Foreign Office leakages…On the other hand, he is of an unsa
voury type which we consider should not be engaged in a key position, such as that of a cipher officer; he has been closely associated with members of a criminal conspiracy… He has been suspended and we do not feel he should be permitted to return to duty.368
A range of other names associated with Pieck were investigated, later referred to as the ‘cipher boys’.
In the course of inquiries it was ascertained that J Russell, R Kinnaird, Captain HBW Maling and CB Harvey, all of the Communications Department, had known Pieck. They were therefore interrogated in the course of 26 and 27 September.369
Russell was the closest to following Oake and Quarry out of the door and it was left to the discretion of the Under-Secretary of State to determine whether he stayed. However, as Vivian noted at the end of his report, a decision was taken to remove all staff in the Communications Department to other posts, and replace them with new men:
So far as the Communications Department of the Foreign Office is concerned, the Under-Secretary of State’s action in making a clean sweep of the existing staff of this Department will at least have secured that Department from any dangers latent in its personnel of which we have not become aware through this investigation. Our uncertainty as regards other Departments of the Foreign Office and other government offices, owing to the indications we have had of recent leakages, remains unrelieved.370
Agent X’s testimony also enhanced the credibility of Krivitsky’s earlier statement, which until this point had been open to question. There was also the concern that further leaks had occurred since 1937 to the Italians and Germans, as well as the unidentified ‘second source’ higher up in government – ‘an ugly, unsolved puzzle’ in the words of Vivian.371 Inquiries were made to see if more information could be obtained from the former Soviet agent in person.
