The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  The most remarkable of MO5(g)’s early wartime recruits was the twenty-year-old William Edward Hinchley Cooke, the bilingual son of a German mother and British father, who had been to school in Dresden before becoming a student at Leipzig University. Early in 1914 he had also begun working as a clerk at the British legation in Dresden and, after being expelled with the rest of the legation at the outbreak of war, was strongly recommended to Kell by the minister, A. C. Grant Duff: ‘He is entirely British in sentiment and the fact that he speaks English with a foreign accent must not be allowed to militate against him.’17 Hinchley Cooke joined MO5(g) on 21 August and went on to become one of the few Security Service officers to serve in both world wars. In an attempt to counter the suspicion provoked by his German accent, Kell felt it necessary to write on Hinchley Cooke’s War Office pass: ‘He is an Englishman.’ Hinchley Cooke’s first assignment was to liaise with Basil Thomson at Scotland Yard, ‘examining and reporting on the papers of enemy subjects, for which’, Kell believed, ‘his unique knowledge of German rendered him specially fitted’. Hinchley Cooke’s skill in interpreting cryptic allusions in the correspondence and papers of espionage suspects, as well as an alertness to the use of secret inks before testing for them became routine, made him, in Kell’s view, ‘largely responsible for the arrest of several German spies’.18

  Another early wartime recruit to MO5(g) was a fifty-two-year-old Cambridge-educated barrister at the Inner Temple, Walter Moresby, son of Admiral John Moresby, who lived near the Kells’ home in Weybridge, Surrey, and joined in October 1914 as the Security Service’s first legal adviser. His appointment reflected Kell’s need for an experienced lawyer to advise on the increasingly complex wartime Defence Regulations as well as the high-profile prosecutions of German spies.19 The unpublished memoirs of Kell’s wife Constance describe the Moresbys as ‘our cousins’: ‘We saw much of them and they became great friends.’20

  On 1 October Kell divided MO5(g) into three branches:

  MO5(g)A: ‘Investigation of espionage and cases of suspected persons’

  MO5(g)B: ‘Co-ordination of general policy of Government Departments in dealing with aliens. Questions arising out of the Defence of the Realm Regulations and the Aliens Restriction Act’

  One of Kell’s first wartime recruits: William Edward Hinchley Cooke, son of a German mother and British father. (i) Hinchley Cooke’s War Office pass, certifying that ‘He is an Englishman’ (despite his German accent). (ii) Bogus Alien Enemy Certificate of Registration card used by Hinchley Cooke when posing as the German Wilhelm Eduard Koch.

  MO5(g)C: ‘Records, personnel, administration and port [immigration] control’21

  As before the war, MO5(g)’s main investigative resources were its Registry and letter checks. Increased wartime responsibilities for ‘suspected persons’, aliens and immigration control at ports led to a steady expansion in its records. By the spring of 1917 MI5’s Central Registry contained 250,000 cards and 27,000 personal files on its chief suspects kept up to date by 130 women clerks. Major (later Colonel Sir) Claude Dansey, then responsible for liaison with the United States, told American military intelligence that the Registry’s filing system was ‘our great standby and cornerstone’: ‘We have brought it to a point where every department in the government comes to us for information.’ So did security services in the Empire and Allied countries.22

  The Central Registry quickly developed standardized classifications for its suspects. First on each card in its index came the ‘civil classification’: BS, AS, NS or ES (British, Allied, Neutral or Enemy Subject). Then followed the ‘general military (special intelligence) classification’ along a mildly comic, but easily memorized, six-point scale:

  AA

  ‘Absolutely Anglicised’ or ‘Absolutely Allied’ – undoubtedly friendly.

  A

  ‘Anglicised’ or ‘Allied’ – friendly.

  AB

  ‘Anglo-Boche’ – doubtful, but probably friendly.

  BA

  ‘Boche-Anglo’ – doubtful, but probably hostile.

  B

  ‘Boche’ – hostile.

  BB

  ‘Bad Boche’ – undoubtedly hostile.23

  Finally came an alphabetical series of ‘Special Intelligence Black List (SI/ BL) subclassifications’, also designed to be committed to memory:

  A

  ‘Antecedents’ in a civil, police, or judicial sense so bad that patriotism may not be the dominant factor, and sympathies not incorruptible.

  B

  ‘Banished’ during the war from, or forbidden to enter, one or more of the Allied States.

  C

  ‘Courier’, letter carrier, intermediary or auxiliary to enemy agents.

  D

  ‘Detained’, interned or prevented from leaving an Allied State for S.I. reasons.

  E

  ‘Espion.’ Enemy spy or agent engaged in active mischief (not necessarily confined to espionage).

  F

  ‘False’ or irregular papers of identity or credential.

  G

  ‘Guarded’, suspected, under special surveillance and not yet otherwise classified.

  H

  ‘Hawker’, hostile by reason of trade or commerce with or for the enemy.

  I

  ‘Instigator’ of hostile, pacifist, seditious or dangerous propaganda.

  J

  ‘Junction’ wanted. The person, or information concerning him, wanted urgently by S.I. or an Allied S.I. Service.

  K

  ‘Kaiser’s’ man. Enemy officer or official or ex-officer or official.24

  On the foundation of the Bureau Central Interallié in Paris in September 1915 to act as an intelligence clearing house for Allied services, Categories A to I were adopted by the Bureau.25

  The officer in charge of the Registry and of administration as a whole was Lieutenant Colonel Maldwyn Makgill Haldane, variously nicknamed ‘Muldoon’ and ‘Marmaduke’, nephew of the former Secretary for War, Viscount Haldane, who in April 1914 became MO5(g)’s first graduate recruit. Before being commissioned as second lieutenant in the Royal Scots in 1899, Haldane had studied at University College London, Jesus College, Cambridge, and the University of Göttingen. Like many of Kell’s officers, he was a good linguist, competent in French, German and Hindustani, and listed an impressive range of outdoor and sporting pursuits: trout fishing, rowing, rugby, walking, poultry farming and gardening. Less typically, he also declared an interest in ‘ethnology, history, palaeontology and biology’.26 A satirical wartime cartoon shows him, dressed in Royal Scots tunic with tartan trews, towering over an appreciative group of Registry staff.

  Because of the expansion of the Registry and its clerical staff, by the end of 1914 a majority of MO5(g) staff were female. According to a post-war ‘Report on Women’s Work’:

  The qualifications which M.I.5 required in its women clerks and secretaries were intelligence, diligence and, above all, reticence. From the earliest days therefore, M.I.5 sought its clerks in the ranks of educated women, who should naturally be supposed to have inherited a code of honour, that is to say the women staff of M.I.5 consisted of gentlewomen who had enjoyed a good school, and in some cases a University education.27

  Though MI5 did not recruit men direct from university until well after the Second World War, it sought female recruits from Oxford and London Universities in the First World War. Initially most women recruits were personally recommended by existing members of staff. When, because of the rapid wartime expansion, this method was unable to generate enough recruits, the Service approached the heads of Cheltenham Ladies College and other leading girls’ public schools, of St Hugh’s and Somerville Colleges at Oxford University, and of Royal Holloway at London.28 MO5(g) thus had a higher proportion of upper-class female recruits than any other wartime British government department or agency. Its women staff also came, on average, from higher up the social scale than the men. Women played a more important role in the Securi
ty Service than in any other wartime government department.

  A probably satirical cartoon by the wartime MI5 officer Joseph Sassoon depicts Lieutenant Colonel Maldwyn Haldane, head of Registry and administration, dressed in Royal Scots tunic with tartan trews, towering over an apparently adoring group of Registry minions.

  From November 1914 the Registry was staffed solely by women and a new ‘lady superintendent’, Lily Steuart, placed at its head.29 During the early months of the war, as a post-war report acknowledged, the Registry was ‘almost overwhelmed’ by ‘the tidal wave of documents’ which descended on it.30 When Hilda Cribb (who in 1920 was to become controller of women staff) began work in the Registry on 2 February 1915 she found unfiled papers stacked on top of the filing cabinets.31 The pressures of wartime work, exacerbated by MO5(g)’s seriously inadequate resources, probably explain why fifteen of the female clerical staff who joined between October 1914 and February 1915 left after periods ranging from a few days to two months. Among them was Miss Steuart.32

  Steuart’s successor as lady superintendent on 20 February, Edith Annie Lomax, proved to be one of the ablest administrators in Service history, later becoming the first female member of staff to be honoured with an MBE (subsequently upgraded to OBE).33 Miss Lomax brought with her as her assistant the also formidable Elsie Lydia Harrison (subsequently Mrs Akehurst), who later succeeded her as controller, and was also awarded an MBE. Hilda Cribb noticed an immediate difference. As well as securing more recruits and accommodation, Lomax made a series of simple improvements to work practices. When she arrived, for example, card cabinets were so close together that only two staff could use them simultaneously. By spacing them out, she enabled more people to work on them. ‘The hubbub’, Cribb recalled, ‘was incessant . . .’34 In 1915 it was decided not to recruit women aged over forty; within a year the limit was lowered to thirty ‘on account of the very considerable strain that was thrown on the brains of the workers’. Some exceptions, however, were made, such as the recruitment of two women with PhDs to write reports (and later in-house histories).35 A sense of humour in Registry recruits was considered ‘essential to enable some of the impossible things demanded to be accepted with equanimity’.36 The anonymous post-war report on ‘Women’s Work’, almost certainly by a female author, concluded that though most women demonstrated the stereotypically female virtues of intuition and attention to detail, a minority ‘displayed the more masculine qualities of power of organization and decision and broad methods of work, and . . . did invaluable service for the Department’.37 The author probably had Miss Lomax chiefly in mind. In 1917, Miss Lomax was promoted to the new post of controller of women’s staff; her former deputy, Miss Harrison, succeeded her as superintendent of the Registry.38

  Secretaries, like Registry staff, were female. The privileged education and upbringing of many of the secretaries made them more likely to stand up for their own points of view than most of those from humbler backgrounds. Among those who took wry amusement in observing some of the bright young secretaries politely outsmart older MO5(g) officers was probably its best-educated male recruit, Percy Marsh, a former scholar of Wadham College, Oxford with first-class honours in classics, who had spent his pre-war career in the Indian Civil Service.39 Marsh also had some talent as an artist. Among his drawings of wartime life in the Service was one entitled ‘Miss Thinks She is Right’, which shows a youthful secretary querying a point with a middle-aged officer of somewhat befuddled appearance.40 There were numerous cases of such secretaries taking over, usually temporarily, the jobs of officers. Miss A. W. Masterton, secretary to the head of C (later H) Branch, Haldane, took over from him, at first temporarily, then permanently, the running of MO5(g)’s accounts, including much financial planning. The ‘Report on Women’s Work’ concluded that this was ‘the only example at this date of a woman managing the finances of a Government office’.41 By the standards of the time, gender relations were sometimes slightly flirtatious. A wartime cartoon by the Old Etonian Cambridge graduate Captain Hugh Gladstone, entitled ‘The Lost File’, shows an attractive young member of the Registry telling a male officer, ‘We’ve looked everywhere, but we can’t find any BAULZ in the Registry.’42 Harmless (not to say feeble) though the joke now appears, at the time it could not have appeared in print or been repeated in polite mixed company.

  (i) ‘Miss Thinks She is Right’ Percy Marsh’s drawing shows a youthful secretary querying a point with a somewhat bemused middle-aged officer. The privileged education and upbringing of many MI5 secretaries made them more likely to stand up for their own points of view than most of those from humbler backgrounds.

  (ii) A cartoon of December 1915 by H. S. Gladstone, illustrating the sometimes flirtatious wartime MI5 gender relations.

  The main basis for MO5(g)’s counter-espionage operations, apart from its much expanded Registry, was greatly extended interception of letters and cables. MO5 had drawn up detailed pre-war plans for cable censorship, earmarking officers and clerks for war service under the chief cable censor, Colonel A. G. Churchill. No such preparations, however, had been made for postal censorship.43 In September 1914 MO5 began to realize the importance of intercepting correspondence to neutral countries as a way of preventing information reaching the enemy. But the handful of MO5 staff sent to the Mount Pleasant sorting offices in Clerkenwell found the sheer volume of mail too much for them. When Colonel G. K. Cockerill visited the sorting offices shortly after taking over as head of MO5 in October, he discovered piles of opened letters awaiting examination and heaps of mailbags which had still to be opened. In November the newly appointed Director of Naval Intelligence, Captain (later Admiral Sir) Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, received alarmist reports that, due to problems at Mount Pleasant, messages to the enemy were getting through the censorship ‘in some abundance’. Hall took the reports at face value, hurried round to MO5 and insisted ‘that all foreign mails are opened and that no secret message gets through’. Cockerill replied that the cabinet was unhappy even with the existing level of censorship but agreed to allow censors chosen by Hall to make their own inspection of the mails for a two-month trial period. Hall persuaded the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, to provide £1,600 to fund his new ‘show’ but was ‘purposely vague’ about what the money was for. His friend Lieutenant Colonel Freddie Browning (later Cumming’s deputy) agreed to run Hall’s ‘little private censorship’ and found him volunteers from the National Service League to act as censors.

  A cartoon of November 1915 by H. S. Gladstone, highlighting the importance of letter interception to MI5’s wartime operations.

  Three weeks later, Browning told Hall that a censorship form had been accidentally left in a letter addressed to an MP whom he considered the ‘ruddiest of rascals’. The outraged MP protested to Reginald McKenna, who summoned Hall and Cockerill to his room at the Home Office. They found the Home Secretary standing sternly in front of the fireplace. Was it true, demanded McKenna, that Hall had dared, without his authority, to tamper with the Royal Mail? ‘Quite true, Mr Home Secretary,’ replied Hall. The penalty for that, said the Home Secretary, was two years in jail. His mood softened as Cockerill argued that, under wartime censorship regulations, he had felt entitled to use what temporary help he could to prevent information reaching the enemy.44 By the end of the year the number of postal censors had grown from the original one to 170. In April 1915 the censors were formally reconstituted as a new department of the War Office, MO9 (later MI9) under a retired diplomat. By the Armistice their numbers had increased to 4,861 (threequarters of them women).45

  As before the war, letter checks were crucial to MO5(g)’s wartime counter-espionage successes. The original mission of the first wartime agent despatched to Britain by the Nachrichten-Abteilung (‘N’), Carl Lody, was to gather intelligence on Royal Navy losses in what the German Admiralty wrongly expected to be an imminent battle between its own High Seas Fleet and the British Grand Fleet.46 Lody was a German naval reserve officer, who
spoke excellent English with an American accent. After the interception of his correspondence to an address in Stockholm which was known to be used by ‘N’, Lody was arrested on 2 October while on his way to Queenstown, the main British naval base in Ireland.47 Kell’s head of counter-espionage, Reginald Drake, asked for Lody’s trial to be held in camera but was overruled, apparently because of the belief in Whitehall that a public court-martial would advertise the success of the authorities in dealing with the threat from German espionage.48 Had Lody been tried in camera, Drake planned to implement ‘an ingenious method for conveying false information to the enemy which depended on their not knowing which of their agents had been caught’.49 As was to happen in the Second World War, the first wartime espionage case might thus have led to the development of a ‘Double-Cross System’ to feed disinformation to the enemy.50 The government’s insistence, against MO5(g)’s wishes, on public trials and courts-martial for captured spies, however, made a First World War Double-Cross System impossible, though, as the war progressed, there were some more limited opportunities for deception.