The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  The War Cabinet . . . are not disposed to take soothing syrup in these matters. Being persuaded that German money is supporting [pacifist and revolutionary] societies they want to be assured that the police are doing something. I feel certain that there is no German money, their expenditure being covered by the subscriptions they receive from cranks.104

  Thomson’s report contrived to show a prudent awareness of the dangers of German-financed subversion, while none the less arriving at a reassuring conclusion. German money, he informed ministers, had been neither widely nor effectively deployed. Except for the ILP, pacifist organizations had been ‘financially in low water for some time’; the Union of Democratic Control (UDC) was ‘not a revolutionary body’ and had little appeal outside ‘the intellectual classes’; the British Soviets were ‘moribund’; the BSP, though ‘very noisy’, did not ‘carry very much weight’ and had to be bailed out by the ILP; the shop stewards were ‘generally . . . in favour of continuing the war’. Boredom, concluded Thomson, did more than Germany to encourage pacifist propaganda. The working classes (particularly young, unmarried men with money in their pockets) missed ‘the relaxations to which they were accustomed before the war, owing to the curtailment of horseracing, football and other amusements, and to the reduction of hours when public houses are kept open’.105

  News of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, however, revived the War Cabinet’s anxieties. Following the triumph of subversion in Russia, their fears of subversion in Britain scaled new heights. The Foreign Office claimed on 12 November, five days after the Revolution, that Bolshevism had been ‘fastened on and poisoned by the Germans for their own purposes’ to undermine the Russian war effort: ‘It is not yet possible to say which of the Bolshevik leaders have taken German money; some undoubtedly have, while others are honest fanatics.’106 Some ministers inevitably feared that British subversives had taken German money too. The Home Secretary, Sir George Cave, suspected that German-financed subversion had been more widespread than Thomson had suggested, and ordered ‘further investigations’ by a joint committee of MI5 and Special Branch officers, including an examination of the records of pacifist and revolutionary societies seized in police raids to trace the source of their income.107 No evidence of German funding for British pacifists and revolutionaries emerged from investigations by either MI5 or the Special Branch. Thomson’s dismissive comments on the No-Conscription Fellowship, circulated to the War Cabinet on 13 December, were typical of his contemptuous attitude to pacifists in general: ‘The documents disclose no evidence of Enemy influence or financial support. The Fellowship is conducted in an unbusinesslike way by cranks, and its influence outside the circle of Conscientious Objectors seems to be small.’108

  Kell took the threat of Soviet subversion more seriously. The MI5 New Year card for 1918, personally designed by Kell’s deputy Holt-Wilson and drawn in the Pre-Raphaelite manner by the leading illustrator Byam Shaw, shows the loathsome, hirsute figure of Subversion, smoke billowing from its nostrils, crawling on all fours towards a British fighting man, clad in the garb of a Roman soldier and oblivious of the danger to his rear, his eyes fixed firmly on the vision on the horizon of ‘Dieu et Mon Droit’ and victory in 1918. Just in time MI5, depicted as a masked Britannia, impales Subversion with a trident marked with her secret monogram before it can stab the British warrior in the back. In January 1918 Kell began an investigation into possible Soviet subversion in munitions factories, urging that chief constables should:

  report to us any change of attitude on the part of Russians [working] on Munitions, which would be denoted by: pacifist or anti-war propaganda, a disinclination to continue to help in the production of Munitions, or any active tendency towards holding up supplies, either by restriction of out-put, or destruction of out-put or factories.109

  Despite its fears of Soviet subversion, MI5 seems to have made no attempt to assess the broader significance of the Bolshevik Revolution and its likely impact outside Russia.110 The immediate impact of the Revolution on the British labour movement appears, in retrospect, surprisingly slight, arousing much less support than the overthrow of the Tsar eight months before. While the small BSP supported the Bolsheviks, most ILP leaders did not. The leading Labour journalist H. N. Brailsford in the Herald denounced the Revolution as ‘reckless and uncalculating folly’.111

  While interned in Brixton Prison, Georgi Chicherin discovered from the newspapers that Leon Trotsky, the Russian Commissar for Foreign Affairs, had appointed him Soviet representative in London. He telegraphed Trotsky from prison to accept.112 In January 1918 Chicherin and another imprisoned Russian revolutionary were allowed to return to Russia in exchange for the release of Britons detained by the Bolsheviks. A friend who saw Chicherin off on the boat train at Waterloo reported that, ‘as the train steamed out of the station, the “International” was sung in Russian and cheers were given for the Russian Revolution.’113 In February 1918 Chicherin was a member of the Bolshevik delegation that concluded the peace of Brest-Litovsk which conceded to Germany huge territorial gains in the east (all lost later when it was defeated in the west). Lenin insisted that the Bolsheviks had no other option open to them but a humiliating peace: ‘If you are not inclined to crawl on your belly through the mud, then you are not a revolutionary but a chatterbox.’114 Both the peace of Brest-Litovsk and the beginning of the last great German offensive on the Western Front in March undermined British opposition to the war. Brest-Litovsk seemed evidence of the Bolsheviks’ German sympathies, and Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig’s ‘Back to the Wall’ message to his troops on the Western Front, when it looked as if the Germans might achieve a breakthrough, was widely supported on the Home Front. Thomson declared himself taken aback by the strength of the popular reaction against pacifism due chiefly – according to all his informants – to ‘the critical position of the relations of the working class who are fighting in Flanders’.115

  During the final year of the war the main expansion of MI5 activities was the continued growth of the Ports Police (325 strong by the Armistice),116 who were now on the lookout for Bolshevik as well as German sympathizers, the establishment of a Rome station and a substantial increase in its presence in the United States. The opening of MI5’s Rome station, the British Military Mission, on 1 January 1918 was a consequence of the battle of Caporetto two months earlier when Austrian and German forces achieved what threatened to become a major breakthrough on the Italian front, which had to be shored up with six Anglo-French divisions. The head of mission, Sir Samuel Hoare MP, a baronet and future foreign secretary, was the only serving MP ever to become an MI5 officer.117 For most of the past two years Hoare had worked for MI1c, Cumming’s wartime foreign intelligence service, serving before the February Revolution as its head of station in Petrograd, where he had sent back to Cumming the first grisly details to reach the West of the assassination of Rasputin, the charismatic but dissolute monk who had won the confidence of the Tsarina. Hoare had an exaggerated view of the role of pro-German ‘Dark Forces’, including Rasputin, in undermining the Russian war effort,118 and spent much of his time in Rome seeking to identify and counter similar subversion in Italy. He sent Kell a series of reports (at least some of them copied to Cumming) on the divisions within the Vatican between supporters and opponents of the Allies, denouncing the papal nuncio in Munich, Eugenio Pacelli, as ‘a convinced pro-German’; in 1939 Pacelli was to become Pope Pius XII. Hoare’s counter-subversion operations included bribing pro-Allied journalists, among them the former socialist Benito Mussolini, who in 1919 was to found the Fascist movement. Hoare paid Mussolini the then considerable sum of £100 a week.119

  During 1918 thirty MI5 staff, fourteen of them officers, were posted to its Washington and New York stations.120 Liaison in Washington had begun immediately after the United States entered the war in April 1917 when Claude Dansey arrived to give detailed briefings to US military intelligence. Dansey plainly impressed his audience. After one of his lectures, Major General Joseph
Kuhn, president of the US Army War College in Washington, emphasized ‘how excellent the British service is’.121 In August 1917. Dansey left MI5 for SIS, where he spent the rest of his career, rising to become assistant chief. In January 1918 Lieutenant Colonel Hercules Pakenham, late of the Royal Irish Rifles and an experienced foreign liaison officer, became head of MI5’s Washington office.122 An Old Etonian and former ADC to the Governors General of Canada and India,123 Pakenham also had long American family connections; one of his ancestors not only lost the battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812, but managed to do so after the peace treaty ending the war had been signed. The arrival of US forces on the Western Front further increased the importance of American liaison. In August, because of the substantial numbers of US citizens passing through British ports and the large German-American community which had earlier opposed US entry into the war, MI5 opened an ‘American suspect index’, which was shared with the Director of Military Intelligence in Washington and no other ally.124 From August onwards, a surviving MI5 visitors’ book shows a small but steady stream of US intelligence officers calling at its London headquarters.125

  On 1 March 1918 Major Norman Thwaites, previously deputy to Cumming’s US head of station, Sir William Wiseman, became head of the MI5 office in New York.126 Thwaites had been partly educated in Germany and spoke fluent German. While working in pre-war New York as private secretary to the prominent journalist Joseph Pulitzer (later founder of the Pulitzer Prizes), he had become well connected in the German-American community.127 Before the US entry into the war, Thwaites had managed to purloin and copy a photograph of the German ambassador in Washington, Count von Bernstorff, with his arms round two women in bathing suits. Thwaites exposed Bernstorff to public ridicule by using his press contacts to arrange for its publication. The Russian ambassador kept a copy on his mantelpiece.128 Like Hoare, Thwaites remained in touch with MI1c while working for MI5. Both collaborated closely with the New York police, the Bureau of Investigation (later FBI), US Customs, military and naval intelligence. MI1c reported that the refusal of any of the US security and intelligence agencies in New York to employ German-Americans gave Thwaites’s role particular importance: ‘For months Major Thwaites has been the only intelligence officer in New York who was able to read and speak German. He has spent many nights at Police headquarters, etc examining captured enemy documents.’129 Among the US military intelligence officers in New York with whom Thwaites probably dealt (though firm evidence is lacking) was the former British double agent Captain Roslyn Whytock.130 Thwaites’s expanding operations were probably responsible for persuading Wiseman that Kell was planning to take over the New York MI1c station.131

  Within Britain the security problem which most concerned the government during the last summer of the war was a strike by the London police. On 30 August 10,000 of the 19,000 Metropolitan Police officers failed to report for duty, demanding both the recognition of their union and an immediate rise in pay. Lloyd George was so shaken that he later claimed that Britain ‘was nearer to Bolshevism that day than at any other time since’. Kell was on sick leave when the strike occurred, and no record of his assessment of the strike seems to have survived. Thomson, however, took a less alarmist view than Lloyd George. ‘No strike would have taken place,’ he believed, if the pay rise promised as soon as the strike began had been announced beforehand. The pay rise was sufficient to persuade the police to return to work without their union being recognized.132 Though the strike was quickly settled, it left Thomson with a lingering unease about the willingness of the police to deal with Bolshevik-inspired unrest. The Met was to go on strike again in the following year.

  The turning of the tide in favour of the Allies on the Western Front in the summer of 1918 removed the last fears of serious wartime subversion. The British victory at Amiens on 8 August was, said the German commander General Erich von Ludendorff, ‘the blackest day for the German army in the history of the war’. It was the British army, stiffened by strong divisions from Canada and Australia, which bore the brunt of the fighting in the victorious final stages of the war. In the three months between Amiens and the Armistice the British army took 188,700 prisoners of war and captured 2,840 guns – almost as many as the other Allies combined.133 As victory came in sight pacifism disappeared from view. Working-class morale all over the country, wrote Thomson on 21 October, three weeks before the Armistice, was ‘probably at its highest point’ since the war began.134

  Thomson was already canvassing support for a post-war intelligence organization headed by himself to monitor peacetime subversion. He was encouraged in his ambitions by naval intelligence. Both Blinker Hall and his assistant, Claud Serocold, were on friendly terms with Thomson but disliked Kell as ‘short-sighted and timorous’.135 Thomson also enjoyed more powerful support than Kell within the government. His most committed supporter was Walter Long, Secretary of State for the Colonies. On 14 October Long sent Thomson ‘unofficially and as a friend’ an eccentric memorandum ‘on the question of our Secret Service’. ‘There is in this country’, wrote Long, ‘a very strong Bolshevik Agency which succeeds, owing to the want of efficient Secret Service and prompt action, in causing great domestic trouble.’ Long admitted that he might be ‘unduly suspicious’ but argued strongly that the strikes in the police, on the railway and on the Clyde were all due to ‘German intrigue and German money’. During the police strike, wrote Long, ‘I have undoubted information that we escaped really by the skin of our teeth from a disaster of terrible dimensions in London.’ He added: ‘I believe an efficient Secret Service is the only way in which to cope with the Bolshevik, Syndicalist, and the German spy. I am satisfied that these three are still actively pursuing their infernal practices.’136

  Privately Thomson did not take seriously Long’s fears of a vast Germanfinanced subversive conspiracy, but he was anxious not to lose Long’s support. He therefore agreed with Long on the existence of ‘a strong Bolshevik agency in this country, which is growing’ – but added reassuringly that he knew ‘the principal persons concerned in it and to some extent the source of their funds’. Thomson went on to endorse enthusiastically Long’s call for a co-ordinated domestic intelligence system. He predicted that the main opposition would come from MI5, which wished to preserve a peacetime monopoly of counter-espionage – in Thomson’s view ‘a very essential part of Home Intelligence, the experience of the War having shown that Contra-Espionage goes far beyond the business of detecting foreign spies, since their enemy intrigue ramifies in every direction’. With Blinker Hall’s and Serocold’s support Thomson put the case for a civilian head of the entire intelligence community, which he intended to be himself. He supported a scheme proposed by Hall and Serocold to help finance peacetime intelligence through a secret War Loan investment of about a million pounds managed by trustees: ‘It is very doubtful whether parliament will continue to vote an adequate sum for Secret Services after the War, more especially if a Labour Government comes into power . . .’137 Long supported Thomson’s proposal and forwarded it to the Prime Minister.138 Over the next few months he bombarded Lloyd George with messages about the reorganization of intelligence. ‘Unless prompt steps are taken,’ he wrote on 18 November, ‘I am informed we shall find the Secret Service seriously crippled just when we shall need it most.’139

  Kell’s sick leave in the final months of the war and lack of powerful backers in Whitehall left him ill equipped to compete with Thomson for the post-war control of British domestic intelligence. A surviving letter from Kell to his deputy Holt-Wilson sent from Northumberland on 7 September 1918 reveals, despite the hospitality of the Duke of Northumberland, a rather lonely and bored director whose concerns are limited to personal and office matters, with no reference to the dramatic developments on the Western Front, which appeared daily on the front pages of the newspapers, or the debate under way in Whitehall on post-war intelligence reorganization which would have a major effect on the future of MI5:

  I am much fitter a
nd have had a good rest here – But no fishing – low water and fish not taking anyhow. John [Kell’s son] caught a small trout today fooling on a lake . . .

  My wife has become very keen on fishing – although it has been fallow. I wish she could have come up to Morpeth with me as the Duke’s fishing might be good for her.

  . . . My 2 months [leave] are up on 1st Oct, but as I did 5 days work in Dubl[in] and Edinboro, I may, if the weather keeps fairly decent, add those 5 days on and return to London on Friday 4th October and look in on 5th – and start work on Sunday. But if the weather breaks I shall return earlier – and you will see me walk in any day! Looking much the better for wear. If there is any fellow who badly wants a week’s leave send him along here as I am all alone and beastly dull in the evenings. I can offer him a most comfortable hotel and good food and lovely air. I am longing to be back with you.140

  While Kell was recuperating in Northumberland, Thomson was lobbying in London for a post-war intelligence system in which he would have the leading role.

  In January 1919 the War Cabinet set up a Secret Service Committee to review the performance of the intelligence agencies and how best to co-ordinate their work. The chairman was Lord Curzon, who was in charge of the Foreign Office while Balfour was at the Paris peace conference and was to succeed him as foreign secretary in June. As viceroy of India at the beginning of the century Curzon had become involved in the Great Game on the North-Western Frontier, and viewed the Bolsheviks’ designs on India with even greater suspicion than those of their Tsarist forebears. Like Long and Churchill, who also served on the Secret Service Committee, he attached great importance to intelligence reports on the advance of the Red Menace. Curzon described Thomson as ‘an invaluable sleuth hound’. The Secret Service Committee under his chairmanship met intermittently for two years, overseeing the reorganization on a peacetime footing of the greatly expanded intelligence services which emerged from the First World War. The Committee rejected Thomson’s ambitious proposal for a single civilian head of the whole intelligence community. But it did approve an earlier proposal by Long for a ‘Civil Secret Service’ to monitor subversion. Its first report in February 1919 recommended Thomson’s appointment as head of a new Directorate of Intelligence under the Home Office.141 Like Kell, Thomson was knighted later in the year.